A collection of poems by Vietnam War veterans.

The first book of its kind, Hearts and Minds is a scathing response to the grand narrative of U.S. counterinsurgency, in which warfare is defined not by military might alone but by winning the "hearts and minds" of civilians. Dormant as a tactic since the days of the Vietnam War, in 2006 the U.S. Army drafted a new field manual heralding the resurrection of counterinsurgency as a primary military engagement strategy; counterinsurgency campaigns followed in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that counterinsurgency had utterly failed to account for the actual lived experiences of the people whose hearts and minds America had sought to win. Drawing on leading thinkers in the field and using key examples from Malaya, the Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Hearts and Minds brings a long-overdue focus on the many civilians caught up in these conflicts. Both urgent and timely, this important book challenges the idea of a neat divide between insurgents and the populations from which they emerge—and should be required reading for anyone engaged in the most important contemporary debates over U.S. military policy.

This book explores the effectiveness of the Chinese government’s recent public diplomacy efforts aimed at building its national image, and how these efforts may influence foreign public's view of China. Based on in-depth interviews, media-content analysis and public opinion-poll data, the book discusses Chinese leaders’ foreign visits, Chinese media’s overseas expansion, Confucius institutes, global mega events, and Chinese government’s new policies to attract foreign students, providing not only background information, but also insights from scholars and experts. Although intended mainly for students majoring in communications, Chinese studies, public relations and international relations, it is also of interest to anyone studying China or public diplomacy.

"Most important, there is no evidence that the good will built by U.S. doctors transferred to the South Vietnamese forces, and in fact the opposite may have been true: American programs may have emphasized the inability of the South Vietnamese government to provide basic health care to its own people. Furthermore, the programs may have demonstrated to Vietnamese civilians that foreign soldiers cared more for them than their own troops did. If that is the case, the programs actually did more harm than good in the attempt to win hearts and minds."--BOOK JACKET.

During the Vietnam War, the United States embarked on an unusual crusade on behalf of the government of South Vietnam. Known as the pacification program, it sought to help South Vietnam's government take root and survive as an independent, legitimate entity by defeating communist insurgents and promoting economic development and political reforms. In this book, Richard Hunt provides the first comprehensive history of America's "battle for hearts and minds," the distinctive blending of military and political approaches that took aim at the essence of the struggle between North and South Vietnam.Hunt concentrates on the American role, setting pacification in the larger political context of nation building. He describes the search for the best combination of military and political action, incorporating analysis of the controversial Phoenix program, and illuminates the difficulties the Americans encountered with their sometimes reluctant ally. The author explains how hard it was to get the U.S. Army involved in pacification and shows the struggle to yoke divergent organizations (military, civilian, and intelligence agencies) to serve one common goal. The greatest challenge of all was to persuade a surrogate--the Saigon government--to carry out programs and to make reforms conceived of by American officials.The book concludes with a careful assessment of pacification's successes and failures. Would the Saigon government have flourished if there had been more time to consolidate the gains of pacification? Or was the regime so fundamentally flawed that its demise was preordained by its internal contradictions? This pathbreaking book offers startling and provocative answers to these and other important questions about our Vietnam experience.

The antiDVietnam War movement marked the first time in American history that record numbers marched and protested to an antiwar tune_on college campuses, in neighborhoods, and in Washington. Although it did not create enough pressure on decision-makers to end U.S. involvement in the war, the movement's impact was monumental. It served as a major constraint on the government's ability to escalate, played a significant role in President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision in 1968 not to seek another term, and was a factor in the Watergate affair that brought down President Richard Nixon. At last, the story of the entire antiwar movement from its advent to its dissolution is available in Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America's Hearts and Minds . Author Melvin Small describes not only the origins and trajectory of the antiDVietnam War movement in America, but also focuses on the way it affected policy and public opinion and the way it in turn was affected by the government and the media, and, consequently, events in Southeast Asia. Leading this crusade were outspoken cultural rebels including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, as passionate about the cause as the music that epitomizes the period. But in addition to radical protestors whose actions fueled intense media coverage, Small reveals that the anti-war movement included a diverse cast of ordinary citizens turned war dissenter: housewives, politicians, suburbanites, clergy members, and the elderly. The antiwar movement comes to life in this compelling new book that is sure to fascinate all those interested in the Vietnam War and the turbulent, tumultuous 1960s.

Matthew K. Shannon provides readers with a reminder of a brief and congenial phase of the relationship between the United States and Iran. In Losing Hearts and Minds, Shannon tells the story of an influx of Iranian students to American college campuses between 1950 and 1979 that globalized U.S. institutions of higher education and produced alliances between Iranian youths and progressive Americans. Losing Hearts and Minds is a narrative rife with historical ironies. Because of its superpower competition with the USSR, the U.S. government worked with nongovernmental organizations to create the means for Iranians to train and study in the United States. The stated goal of this initiative was to establish a cultural foundation for the official relationship and to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with educated elites to administer an ambitious program of socioeconomic development. Despite these goals, Shannon locates the incubation of at least one possible version of the Iranian Revolution on American college campuses, which provided a space for a large and vocal community of dissident Iranian students to organize against the Pahlavi regime and earn the support of empathetic Americans. Together they rejected the Shah’s authoritarian model of development and called for civil and political rights in Iran, giving unwitting support to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.