No Wider War: A History of the Vietnam War, Volume 2, 1965-75

No Wider War: A History of the Vietnam War, Volume 2, 1965-75 by Sergio Miller

On March 8, 1965, 3/9 Battalion Landing Team of the U.S. Marine Corps came ashore on a South Vietnamese beach at Da Nang to "conduct security missions, reconnaissance operations, and offensive/defensive operations as directed." This was the first deployment of American ground combat forces and, although there were already 23,000 Americans serving under the auspices of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), it was a pivotal moment in the escalation of the conflict. A decade on, at 7:35AM on the morning of April 30, 1975, it was a marine who became the last American to leave South Vietnam, when Master Sergeant Juan Valdez carried the neatly folded Stars and Stripes into the final helicopter to lift off from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Six hours later the capital of the Republic of South Vietnam fell to the invading forces of the North Vietnamese Army.

This marked the end of an American commitment to Vietnam that had, at its high point in April 1969, seen over 543,000 personnel in-country, of which some 440,000 were soldiers and marines serving in 110 combat battalions. Over the course of the war, the U.S. casualties amounted to 58,000 dead and 300,000 wounded, a figure dwarfed by the casualties suffered by South Vietnamese forces, the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong, and the long-suffering population of Vietnam. In all, as many as three million people may have died in the conflicts that raged throughout Vietnam from 1955 to 1975.

In No Wider War, the second of his two-volume history of the Vietnam War, Sergio Miller analyzes how the U.S. became both ever more committed to and trapped by the ground war in Vietnam, and the devastating consequences that this led to, both for the soldiers who fought in the war and for the civilian population of Vietnam.

Osprey, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2021