Operation Speedy Express
The History and Legacy of One of the Vietnam War’s Most Controversial Campaigns
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Narrated by:
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Jim D. Johnston
About this listen
The Vietnam War could have been called a comedy of errors if the consequences weren’t so deadly and tragic. In 1951, while war was raging in Korea, the United States began signing defense pacts with nations in the Pacific, intending to create alliances that would contain the spread of Communism. As the Korean War was winding down, America joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, pledging to defend several nations in the region from Communist aggression. One of those nations was South Vietnam.
John F. Kennedy’s administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential directive withdrawing 1,000 American personnel, but shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed course, instead opting to expand American assistance to South Vietnam.
The post-analysis of war is a complicated and process that benefits from hindsight, and the involvement of the United States in Vietnam over about a decade was no exception. Never formally declared as a “war,” the Vietnam War was not fought in clean lines or with clear missions. Viewers of the evening news listening to the “box score” of killed and wounded each night had at best a hazy notion of what was happening a world away in Southeast Asia. If anything, their leaders were both attentive to reelection and on a certain level were themselves unsure of what was truly taking place. A military draft that sent over 50,000 American soldiers to their deaths was triggered by a resolution sought by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a decision to contain communism in a distant Asian land.
Over the next few years, the American military commitment to South Vietnam grew dramatically, and the war effort became both deeper and more complex. The strategy included parallel efforts to strengthen the economic and political foundations of the South Vietnamese regime, to root out the Viet Cong (VC) guerrilla insurgency in the south, combat the more conventional North Vietnamese Army (NVA) near the Demilitarized Zone between north and south, and bomb military and industrial targets in North Vietnam itself. In public, American military officials and members of the Johnson administration stressed their tactical successes and offered rosy predictions.
Operation Speedy Express was a highly controversial military operation carried out by the U.S. Army supported by the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN) as well as regional and popular forces during the Vietnam War. It lasted from December 1968 until May 1969 and took place in the Mekong Delta's Kien Hoa and Vinh Binh provinces. The operation was a part of U.S. Army “pacification” efforts toward the Viet Cong, as American forces sought to interdict Viet Cong supply and communication lines from Cambodia and deny them the use of operational bases. Formally, the operation involved 8,000 U.S. soldiers and resulted in 242 American lives lost compared to 10,899 Viet Cong and People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) killed, according to Department of Defense records. Operation Speedy Express was considered successful by U.S. standards, as determined by the primary metric of body counts.
However, while the number of Vietnamese dead, including civilians, is unknown, it is assumed to surpass 5,000, and the high number of casualties was attributed to the indiscriminate use of firepower, which included air and artillery strikes in densely populated areas. The controversy surrounding Operation Speedy Express led to an investigation by the U.S. Army and the House Armed Services Committee. The Army was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing, but resistance to U.S.
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Story
John Keegan, whom the New York Review of Books calls "the best historian of our day", now brings his extraordinary expertise to bear on perhaps the most controversial war of our time. In exclusive interviews with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, John Keegan has gathered information about the war that adds immeasurably to our grasp of its causes, complications, costs, and consequences.
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A Solid, Quick Overview
- By Charles on 12-08-04
By: John Keegan
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America's War for the Greater Middle East
- A Military History
- By: Andrew J. Bacevich
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro, Andrew J. Bacevich
- Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift? Andrew J. Bacevich, one of the country's most respected voices on foreign affairs, offers an incisive critical history of this ongoing military enterprise - now more than 30 years old and with no end in sight.
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A Key to Understanding the US Need for Perp. War
- By Darwin8u on 05-01-16
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Storm Clouds over the Pacific, 1931-1941
- War in the Far East Series, Book 1
- By: Peter Harmsen
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Storm Clouds over the Pacific begins the story long before Pearl Harbor, showing how the war can only be understood if ancient hatreds and long-standing geopolitics are taken into account. Harmsen demonstrates how Japan and China's ancient enmity led to increased tensions in the 1930s, which, in turn, exploded into conflict in 1937.
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Interesting Story
- By Coach Mark on 03-25-23
By: Peter Harmsen
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Tower of Skulls
- A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Vol. 1 (July 1937 - May 1942)
- By: Richard B. Frank
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 26 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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This story casts penetrating light on how struggles in Europe and Asia merged into a tightly entwined global war. It features not just battles, but also the sweeping political, economic, and social effects of the war, and are graced with a rich tapestry of individual characters from top-tier political and military figures down to ordinary servicemen, as well as the accounts of civilians of all races and ages.
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Outstanding
- By Patrick on 03-16-20
By: Richard B. Frank
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The Vietnam War: History in an Hour
- By: Neil Smith
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 1 hr and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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History for busy people. Listen to a concise history of the Vietnam War in just one hour. War, what is it good for? The Vietnam War: History In an Hour gives a gripping account of the most important Cold War-era conflict, fought between the United States and the Viet Cong, the Vietnam People’s Army and their Communist allies. It was one of the most traumatic military conflicts America has ever been involved in – and provoked a backlash of anti-war protests at home.
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Garbage
- By Michael on 08-06-12
By: Neil Smith
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The ISIS Solution
- How Unconventional Thinking and Special Operations Can Eliminate Radical Islam
- By: Jack Murphy, Brandon Webb, Peter Nealen
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The ISIS Solution takes a look at the current geopolitical situation, organizational structure of ISIS, and provides new thinking and strategies for dealing with the Islamic State in the Middle East. Its authors and contributors have over 50 years of combined experience in the intelligence, analyst, and Special Operations communities. Leadership and a new philosophical conversation of action is needed to eliminate violent terrorism. This book starts the conversation.
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Short, to the point, crammend full of information.
- By Joseph on 11-27-14
By: Jack Murphy, and others
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Pearl Harbor
- A Captivating Guide to the Surprise Military Strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service That Caused the United States of America’s Formal Entry into World War II
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Jason Zenobia
- Length: 3 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The attack of the US Pearl Harbor Naval Base changed the entire progress of World War II, and as a result, it was a very formative event both for the United States and Japan. Though the two nations seemed unlikely enemies at the onset of the Second Great War, bloodshed between them would be greater than anyone could have imagined. The future of the world at large was changed on December 7, 1941, when the Empire of Japan chose to make a preemptive strike on its most feared Pacific neighbor, the United States of America.
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Don’t waste your credit
- By Amazon Customer on 05-17-20
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In the Graveyard of Empires
- America’s War in Afghanistan
- By: Seth G. Jones
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Following September 11, the United States successfully overthrew the Taliban regime. It established security throughout the country, and Afghanistan finally began to emerge from more than two decades of conflict. But Jones argues that, as early as 2001, planning for the Iraq War siphoned off resources and talented personnel, undermining the gains that had been made. After eight years, the United States had pushed al-Qaeda’s headquarters about one hundred miles across the border into Pakistan.
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Interesting Book but- Worst Narrator Ever
- By Mark C on 01-08-11
By: Seth G. Jones
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War
- By: Phillip Jennings
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The mainstream media and history books would have you believe that the Vietnam War was tragic and a dismal failure. But Phillip Jennings is here to set the record straight, about one of the bright spots in U.S. military history. In this latest Politically Incorrect Guide, Jennings shatters culturally accepted myths and busts politically incorrect lies that liberal pundits and leftist professors have been telling you for years.
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Politically incorrect is right.
- By Joe Dunckel on 09-29-20
By: Phillip Jennings
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Black Ops
- The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., The S.A.S., and Mossad
- By: Tony Geraghty
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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After eight challenging years in Afghanistan, the new U.S. strategy, aimed at winning hearts and minds rather than search-and-destroy, refocuses the conflict on Special Forces: unorthodox soldiers who work outside of traditional military forces to combine secret military operations with nation building.
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Painful narration
- By JWS on 12-18-20
By: Tony Geraghty
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The Cold War's Killing Fields
- Rethinking the Long Peace
- By: Paul Thomas Chamberlin
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 22 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sweeping, deeply researched book, Paul Thomas Chamberlin boldly argues that the Cold War, long viewed as a mostly peaceful, if tense, diplomatic standoff between democracy and communism, was actually a part of a vast, deadly conflict that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy peace hung over Europe, ferocious proxy wars raged in the Cold War’s killing fields, resulting in more than 14 million dead - victims who remain largely forgotten and all but lost to history.
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Interesting but Biased
- By Jonathan W Schneider on 08-13-18
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The American War in Afghanistan
- A History 1st Edition
- By: Carter Malkasian
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 27 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon - but only after a stay of nearly two decades.
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A superb summary of the Afghan war
- By Charles Olmsted on 06-18-22
By: Carter Malkasian
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Hitler's Europe Ablaze
- Occupation, Resistance, and Rebellion during World War II
- By: Ben H. Shepherd - editor, Phillip Cooke - editor
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Local resistance to German-led Axis occupation occurred throughout the European continent during World War II, taking a wide range of forms - noncooperation and disinformation, sabotage and espionage, and armed opposition and full-scale partisan warfare. It is a key element in the experience and the national memory of those who found themselves under Axis government and control.
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Historically questionable.
- By Nestor Perez on 04-22-21
By: Ben H. Shepherd - editor, and others
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Method and Madness
- The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza
- By: Norman G. Finkelstein
- Narrated by: Gary Dana
- Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In the past five years, Israel has mounted three major assaults on the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped behind its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Taken together, Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), and Operation Protective Edge (2014) have resulted in the deaths of some 3,700 Palestinians. Meanwhile a total of 90 Israelis were killed in the invasions. On the face of it, this succession of vastly disproportionate attacks has often seemed frenzied and pathological.
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Insightful and remarkably unbiased
- By Mudir Soroor on 11-03-18
What listeners say about Operation Speedy Express
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- S. H. Moore
- 07-22-23
Mostly a basic overview of Vietnam
Skip this. Mostly just a basic overview of Vietnam as a whole. About twenty minutes on Speedy Express.
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