Frederick T. Wilson was an engineer who carried the rank of first-class petty officer and served on one of the Navy's first modern battleships, the USS Oregon, at the turn of the twentieth century. Wilson offers a rare uncensored picture of enlisted life, with descriptions of bar girls and waterfront establishments that catered to the needs of American bluejackets, as well as observations on world events during imperialism. Wilson also discusses one of the great yet largely ignored issues of the turn-of-the-century U.S. Navy--the failure of naval officers to provide the quality leadership...

When Gerald Hickey went to Vietnam in 1956 to complete his Ph.D. in anthropology, he didn t realize he would be there for most of the next eighteen years through the entire Vietnam War. After working with the country folk of the Mekong Delta for several years, in 1963 Hickey was recruited by the Rand Corporation, which was contracted by the U.S. government to study and report on the highland tribes.From the buildup to war, when mountain tribespeople still lived in longhouses and cut and burned brush to clear fields for nice, to near the end of the conflict, when he sailed away from Vietnam on...

Very little has been written about the U.S. Navy in Vietnam in the immediate post-Korean War era, nor has the magnitude of American participation in the resettlement of Vietnam refugees following the 1954 Geneva Conference been explored. Beginning in the fall of 1954, U.S. Navy ships, as a part of Task Force 90, helped to relocate thousands of displaced North Vietnamese to South Vietnam following the separation of the nation at the seventeenth parallel. What those sailors accomplished during the three hundred days of Operation Passage to Freedom forever changed the lives of over 310,000...