Life And Death In The Central Highlands

"Jim Gillam experienced real combat in his Vietnam tour. His stunning accounts of killing and avoiding being killed ring true. Although wounded several times, Jim did not leave the field for treatment in a field hospital, so he never generated the paperwork for a Purple Heart or two or three. Although he would be appalled at the thought, his attention to duty was `lifer' behavior, a concern for the well-being of his squad that represents the best of NCO leadership in any army."---Allan R. Millett, author of Semper Fidelis and coauthor of A War to Be Won "[Gillam] looks back on his experiences of Vietnam not solely as a participant in the war, but also with the critical eye of a trained historian... [He] uses an impressive array of after action reports, duty officer logs, battlefield reports, and other primary source material, to back up and reinforce his recollections."---Journal of Military History review by James H. Willbanks, author of The Offensive "Gillam, a `shake and bake' sergeant, presents a good account of small unit infantry action during the war. He is very good at explaining the weaponry, tactics, and living conditions in the field."---James E. Westheider, author of The African-American Experience in Vietnam In 1968 James T. Gillam was a poorly focused college student at Ohio University who was dismissed and then drafted into the Army. Unlike most African Americans who entered the Army then, he became a sergeant and an instructor at the Fort McClellan Alabama School of Infantry. In September 1968 he joined the First Battalion, 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Within a month he transformed from an uncertain sergeant---who tried to avoid combat---to an aggressive soldier, killing his first enemy and planning and executing successful ambushes in the jungle. Gillam was a regular point man and occasional tunnel rat who fought below ground, an arena that few people knew about until after the war ended. By January 1970 he had earned a Combat Infantry Badge and been promoted to staff sergeant. Then Washington's politics and military strategy took his battalion to the border of Cambodia. Search-and-destroy missions became longer and deadlier. From January to May his unit hunted and killed the enemy in a series of intense firefights, some of them in close combat. In those months Gillam was shot twice and struck by shrapnel twice. He became a savage, strangling a soldier in hand-to-hand combat inside a lightless tunnel. As his mid-summer date to return home approached, Gillam became fiercely determined to come home alive. The ultimate test of that determination came during the Cambodian invasion. On his last night in Cambodia, the enemy got inside the wire of the firebase, and the killing became close range and brutal. Gillam left the Army in June 1970, and within two weeks of his last encounter with death, he was once again a college student and destined to become a university professor. The nightmares and guilt about killing are gone, and so is the callous on his soul. Life and Death in the Central Highlands is a gripping, personal account of one soldier's war in the Vietnam War

It is a classical anthropological paradox that symbols of rebirth and fertility are frequently found in funerary rituals throughout the world. The original essays collected here re-examine this phenomenon through insights from China, India, New Guinea, Latin America, and Africa. The contributors, each a specialist in one of these areas, have worked in close collaboration to produce a genuinely innovative theoretical approach to the study of the symbolism surrounding death, an outline of which is provided in an important introduction by the editors. The major concern of the volume is the way in which funerary rituals dramatically transform the image of life as a dialectic flux involving exchange and transaction, marriage and procreation, into an image of a still, transcendental order in which oppositions such as those between self and other, wife-giver and wife-taker, Brahmin and untouchable, birth and therefore death have been abolished. This transformation often involves a general devaluation of biology, and, particularly, of sexuality, which is contrasted with a more spiritual and controlled source of life. The role of women, who are frequently associated with biological processes, mourning and death pollution, is often predominant in funerary rituals, and in examining this book makes a further contribution to the understanding of the symbolism of gender. The death rituals and the symbolism of rebirth are also analysed in the context of the political processes of the different societies considered, and it is argued that social order and political organisation may be legitimated through an exploitation of the emotions and biology.

THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS--WHERE DANGER REIGNED SUPREME AND DEATH WAS A CONSTANT COMPANION The fighting was fierce in the Central Highlands where Green Beret George Dooley served with elite Special Forces A-teams, training the rugged Montagnards in guerrilla warfare and accompanying them on patrols. The Viet Cong and NVA were entrenched in the sparsely populated Highlands, where towering mountains gave them the ruthless upper hand. The missions Dooley led, often in enemy territory, provided a steady diet of sniping, ambushes, booby traps, and mines. As the war escalated, Dooley commanded his own A-team, and the battles against the large numbers of crack NVA troops became even more desperate and deadly. By then military command routinely assigned anything-but-routine missions to Special Forces and expected them to meet their objectives. BATTLE FOR THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS details the unbelievable valor of these legendary American warriors. . . .

Living with the Dead in the Andes provides new data and insights informed by general anthropological theory; the extensive bibliography alone is an important contribution. Scholars working with Andean mortuary practices (and prehistory generally) will be citing these chapters for years.

"Containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the President", 1956-1992.

Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States