A Note to the User
Writing a Term Paper in Military History
Background: Pre-colonial and Colonial Vietnam5
World War II and the First Indochina War4
Temporary Peace and Renewed War, 1954-196460
The Easter Offensive of 197210
Peace Negotiations and the Paris Agreement26
Linebacker and Linebacker II, 19729
The Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF)1
Technology and Weapons14
Special Forces, Special Operations, and Intelligence36
Communications Intelligence and the National Security Agency15
Marines in Recon and Special Operations1
Special Air Operations: Air Commandos, etc.3
Air America and Civil Air Transport7
SOG4
Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC) and Combined Military Interrogation Center (CMIC)662
Oral Histories and Personal Accounts, American, Especially Soldiers61
Oral Histories and Personal Accounts, Vietnamese and Mixed Vietnamese/American/Other
The Draft, and Personnel Issues67
Propaganda and Psychological Warfare11
Theories of Limited War and Counterinsurgency45
In the Villages: Pacification77
South Vietnam: Economy and Society22
Laos29
Cambodia17
The Central Intelligence Agency11
Vietnamese Communism before 1945
Minorities (Native Americans, Blacks, Chicanos, Japanese-Americans)3
Agent Orange, Other Chemicals, and Ecological Issues35
Collections: Primarily Documents4
Collections: Not Primarily Documents
The Central Intelligence Agency63
The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency5
The National Security Agency15
The Selective Service System17
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) and its regional subordinates80
U.S. Marine Corps Publications22
The Tonkin Gulf Incidents and Resolution8
Intelligence and Special Operations5
Refugees, Civilian War Victims, and Relief Programs15
Corruption, the Black Market, etc.3
Agent Orange and other Chemicals1
1, 2, 3, etc.: Superscript numbers in red, after a section title, indicate the number of items in the section for which direct links are provided to the text of the item, available online to Internet users in general. In the red superscript numbers I do not count items that are available online only to subscribers of a service such as JSTOR, netLibrary, Project Muse, or Questia.
National Archives: Access to Archival Databases (AAD)
The U.S. Army's Military History Institute, in Middlesex, Pennsylvania, has placed some useful material in its Army Heritage Collection Online.
The Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University, has placed online the full texts of a huge quantity of documents and other materials relating to the Vietnam War. This has become a major resource. The online catalog of the Vietnam Project lists both the items that have been placed online, and items that the project has on paper, but has not placed online (usually for copyright reasons). You can get to this catalog through the web site of the Vietnam Project. Once there, you can do a simple keyword search through all the collections there. Or you can choose the "advanced search" option on the search engine there, and click the "Collection Titles" button to choose one particular collection to search. Some of the more interesting collections in which a large proportion of the materials have been placed online, so can click on the links to get the actual texts of materials your search has turned up, are:
Central Intelligence Agency Collection
Contemporary Historical Examination Of Current Operations (CHECO) Reports Of Southeast Asia (1961-1975). CHECO was a U.S. Air Force project that wrote analyses of particular aspects of the Air War in Indochina while it was going on. Most reports were more than 50 pages long, some more than 200. Complete or almost complete texts of more than thirty of the reports have been placed online.
Joint Chiefs Of Staff History Of The Vietnam War, 1965-1967
My Lai Collection
Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 11 - Monographs. Includes some books and pamphlets published in Vietnam, books published by the U.S. Army, transcripts of congressional committee hearings, and other materials.
United States Armed Forces Manuals Collection
Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association: Unit Histories - Air Force
Photos Taken by Robert D. Jester, 5th Special Forces Group, Vietnam, 1964-66
Syllabus for my course "The Vietnam Wars" (History 4360/6360), Clemson University, Fall Term, 2016.
U.S. Army Center of Military History
Air Force Historical Research Agency
CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library
STINET. This is a centralized service by which you can search a large database of papers and reports that were produced within the U.S. government but not published by the Government Printing Office. These include a lot of papers and theses written by officers attending the service schools of the various U.S. Military services. In some cases there is a link to the full text of the item, available online. The rest can be purchased from the National Technical Information Service.
J. Ransom Clark, of Muskingum College, has placed a very extensive bibliography The Literature of Intelligence on the Web. You can go to the home page, or jump directly to the table of contents for the Vietnam section of the bibliography.
Nicholas Sarantakes, of the Department of History, University of Southern Mississippi, has created a quite large and diversified listing of online resources, U.S. Diplomatic History Resources Index.
All opinions expressed in this bibliography are my own. They are not the opinions of Clemson University. So far as I am aware, Clemson University does not have opinions on the subjects in question.
Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, Edwin E. Moise. This document may be reproduced only by permission. Revised June 22, 2023.