Alternatively candid and self-serving, How We Lost the Vietnam War is an autobiography and history by South Vietnam's onetime Prime Minister and Vice President. Ky rose through the ranks as a pilot, missing out on most of the French War while training in Morocco, flying secret CIA transport missions over the north, and then becoming head of the Air Force. Ky ended the post-Diem round of coups, providing a semblance of stable government before elections in 1967. He was politically outmaneuvered by President Thieu, and spent the latter part of the war with little official power, looking on as his country fell apart around him.

A staunch anti-communist, Ky hates the North Vietnamese and their "puppets" in the NLF. He berates the American aid effort for being too heavy, too lavish, training the Vietnamese in compliance to American authority and wealth, rather than scrappy bravery. Special hatred is reserved for Thieu and civilian leaders, who are presented as venal, corrupt, and unable to take any action even with the wolf at their door.

Of course, the key word in the title is "We", and Ky avoids taking personal responsibility for the fall of South Vietnam. The closest he comes is saying that if he had seized power, he'd have fought on and made the Communist pay a higher price. But he doesn't seem to have much grasp of what to do, beyond authoritarianism.

Orde Wingate: A Man of Genius quotes Churchill in the subtitle to guide a biography of an expert in unconventional warfare, cut down before his time in a plane crash in 1944. This book is best when it describes the conformist weirdness of the interwar British Army, and Wingate's quixotic crusade to be an Individual in this environment. His early career, in the regiment, in Sudan, and in Mandatory Palestine, are lovingly detailed. The picture that emerges is of an iconoclastic and deeply moral soldier, who's immense (indeed, maniac) energy drives his men to accomplish great things. This came to a peak in with the campaign to liberate Ethiopia from the Italians with Gideon Force, a small patriotic band that outfought larger Italian units to restore Emperor Haile Selassie to the throne. Next, Wingate was assigned to the Burma theater, but the Chindit deep penetration units have a more mixed record, suffering heavy casualties for unclear results.

Wingate clearly was a man of great vision, but it's unclear if that vision actually matched up to reality. His talent for finding highly placed patrons was undercut by fighting against his immediate superiors, equals, and subordinate officers. His career might be encapsulated in miniature in one incident in Palestine. More or less on his own authority, Wingate had created a group of Jewish Special Night Squads to fight Arab gangs through night ambush. This went great, until a combined operation wound up with Wingate ambushing himself and getting shot five times with a Bren gun.

This is a strong biography, but a weak military history. As an aside, my favorite "wtf moment" was apparently a weekly ritual in British Artillery Officer school was a Friday night dance, where the Seniors wore full dress, the first years wore pajamas, and then the first years were beaten. Did the whole British army run on weird sadomasochism?

Nothing says airpower like the iconic silhouette of the B-52. Since it started operations in 1955, and going forward until at least 2040, the lean fuselage and huge wingspan of the BUFF has represented the ability of the United States to lay down destruction on call.

Bowman has written a bunch of these books, and this is exactly what you'd expect from the cover, a detailed history of the B-52. The book covers the tense alert posture of Strategic Air Command, with a third of the fleet on airborne alert with live nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, with Arc Light strikes and the deadly Linebacker II raids over Hanoi, and the modern use of the B-52 deliver cruise missiles and smart bombs with global reach. There's an exhaustive investigation of the many B-52 variants (A-H), lots of photos and diagrams, and lists of tail numbers and names.

Ian Hogg was an undoubted expert in artillery, finishing a 27 year career as Master Gunner at the Royal Military College of Science. He published this book the year he retired, launching a second career as a military historian. This is a breezy stroll through the history of gunnery. Everything from the 13th century up to the Crimean War gets about a dozen pages, and then Hogg launches into his love of breach mechanisms, recoil control, and some of the art of fire direction. He talks about trends towards light airborne guns and self-propelled cannons. The text is very much in the idiom of the British crank expounding on his collection of butterflies, or sailor's knots, or heavy siege howitzers.

But where this book shines is in the illustrations by John Batchelor, who was knighted for his contribution to technical drawing (no seriously). In oil and ink, Batchelor makes his machine subjects come to life in beautiful detail. The loading mechanism of the M51 is enough to make a grown man weep. Well, that might be an exageration, but I recommend this book as a general guide to gunnery pre-1970.

Bought with Hogg's Artillery as part of a pair, Fortress is a far further ranging book, covering the history of defensible spaces from the Iron Age to the 1970s. Hogg synthesizes for a popular audience a diverse topic. This book is euro centric. The Iron Age is treated stylistically between Celtic earthworks and the Roman limnes. Castles get chapters on Norman, Spanish, German, and Crusader forms. Hogg really leaps into his own with the transistion to gunpowder weapons, and the rise of the European star fort from the trace italienne to Vauban's forts. Hogg has a keen eye for the difference between the idealized perfect geometries of interlocking enfilading fire prescribed by various systems, and the practical matter of sticking some bastions on a hill and calling it good. Post 1850, things get rather interesting with the return of masonry structures of various sorts, which command fire superiority through hardened gun emplacements, culminating in the technological masterpiece of the Maginot line. Of course, most fortifications are field fortifications, from the the trenches of WW1 to the firebases of Vietnam.

The art in this book is a treat, with photos of forts supplemented by drawings. A smidge less good than the other book I read, but still a great general history.

Col. Broughton made some noise when he published Thud Ridge in 1969, a gritty memoir of airstrikes over North Vietnam, and a scathing indictment of Operation Rolling Thunder, the USAF, and the Johnson administration. I haven't found a copy of Thud Ridge, but I hear it's great.

Going Downtown seems very much a companion to Broughton's previous book, and is lesser for it. The first third concerns Broughton in Korea, where he flew the F-84 Thunderjet and tested out the Oerlikon 8 cm Flz.-Rakete rocket. Compared to the US equivalent, the Oerlikon was small, precise, and very deadly. Broughton really enjoys hunting tanks through the Korean mountains. The second third is Vietnam, a collection of anecdotes about the risks and thrills of flying over North Vietnam, the heroism of Broughton's comrades, and the stupidity of the multiple layers of command which tied the hands of American airpower and got pilots killed to no good end. The last third is where the book gets weird. Two pilots under Broughton's command strafed a Soviet freighter in harbor, a miscall in the heat of combat when suppressing nearby flak so they could escape from a bad bomb run. Knowing that this would be the end of the pilots careers, Broughton had their gun camera footage destroyed. The Soviets complained, USAF needed a scapegoat, and Broughton wound up the personal target of future Air Force Chief of Staff General John Dale Ryan. Broughton was interrogated, bounced around the Pacific, imprisoned overnight in a mental hospital in the Philippines, and finally court-martialled and convicted. He spent a year in a dead-end Pentagon office writing Thud Ridge, then retired and eventually got his court-martial reversed on the grounds of "undue command influence", putting him in a very small club of people who fought the system and were vindicated, along with Billy Mitchell.

The Korean War stuff is a lot of fun, along with the general fighter pilot attitude towards risk and danger. The gripes against Rolling Thunder bombing restrictions and Lyndon and Robert (Johnson and McNamara respectively, who Broughton always refers to by first names) have a worn, over-rehearsed quality. He clearly believes airpower could have broken North Vietnamese logistics and morale if used to the fullest extent. The last third is probably the most unique section; how many people have gone through the grinder of a court-martial and survived? But it's also a legal mess.

Regardless, back in the summer of '67, an elite brotherhood of a few hundred pilots based in Thailand and off carriers on Yankee Station were the only ones waging an offensive war in Vietnam, going downtown twice a day against even stiffening defenses and the mismanagement of their own commands.

What kind of person reads an Intro to Sociology textbook? The kind of person who is concerned that they might have to teach SOC 101 without ever having taken it. I strongly believe that textbooks should be as cheap as possible, and it's hard to beat Free and Open Source. So how does it perform?

This book has 21 chapters, covering three major theoretical approaches in sociology: functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interaction; and dozens of topics from family to race and social change. The book is clear and minimizes jargon, choosing broad consensus statements over sharp or controversial points. The chapters do a decent job covering the material and linking back to the theories. Each chapter has useful references, rather mediocre multiple choice questions (are there any other kind?) and some decent short discussion prompts. On areas where I have some graduate training, the medical chapter does a decent job but leans too heavily on Conrad's medicalization hypothesis, and the technology and media chapter is a mess. The book relies heavily on recent American examples, which leaves it feeling oddly dated. 2014 feels like a whole 'nother universe.

That said, Free and Open Source is a moral good for intro textbooks, I didn't find any material errors, and a strong instructor could do a lot with this book. Just don't assign the chapters straight through.

How much do you care about early 80s RAF radio procedure? Defector is an homage to the British Phantom in West Germany, and the men who flew them. It was a joyful time, with the knowledge of looming nuclear war leavened by the fact that you had a high performance fighter jet and a mandate to tear around the sky practicing your tactics. "Flash" and "Razor" are the best in Battle Flight, a quick scramble Phantom squadron that has their routine of exercises, drinking, and sex interrupted by the defection of a Soviet pilot with a prototype Su-27. The Spetznas intervenes to get the Su-27 back, Flash and Razor have to fly into battle, and Soviet and British spymasters engage in a duel of wits over the fate of the plane.

On the plus side, Gledhill definitely knows what he's talking about when he talks Phantoms, and has a scenario that's tense without starting WW3. The minus is uneven pacing, hefty infodumps, and an authorial voice that renders the multiple points of view confusingly flat.

Star Warriors is a detailed look at a very strange group of people in a very strange place. O Group was a small team of about twenty to forty scientists, most in their mid-20s, mostly white, mostly with Caltech and MIT pedigrees, and all male, at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in 1985. Under the direction of Lowell Wood, O Group worked on applications for third generation nuclear weapons, primarily the "Star Wars" missile defense project based around bomb pumped X-ray lasers. The team also dabbled in supercomputer programming, fusion research, and starship design. Broad uses a week of interviews with O Group to provide flesh to what's often an abstract debate about nuclear strategy and technology policy.

The picture that emerges is of an elite scientific team, sharply competitive with each other and hand-picked by Lowell Wood through his control of the Hertz Fellowship (Wood was in line to succeed Edward Teller as director of LLL before a classification scandal broke his career momentum). What drives these people is the desire to be the best, to prove it mathematically, as when the soul of the group, Peter Hagelstein, made the key calculations that proved X-ray lasers were possible. These are no political naifs, but hardened Cold Warriors who see the Soviet Union as fundamentally evil, and their work as a way to gain a strategic edge. Unlike Reagan, who imagined a perfect shield, they know the limits of any system, and believe that the possibility of merely blunting a nuclear strike might prevent escalation to nuclear war, and that forcing the Soviets to compete on defense would further drain their resources. But above all else, it seems to be the coolness of the physics, of the way that the basic laws of reality break down at a thermonuclear shock front, and how that energy can be harnessed to make dreams real.

Over 30 years on, Star Warriors is a historical curiosity. It still stands as a fascinating look at some very interesting scientists, right next to The Soul of a New Machine.