NOTEWORTHY

March 2022: The United States Naval Institute awards me the title Naval History Author of the Year 2021, with the certificate to be presented at the Institute’s annual meeting on May 11, 2022.

November/December 2021: Naval History magazine publishes my article “Pearl Harbor at 80,” which discusses the current state of historical debates that continue to swirl around the attack of December 7, 1941.

October 2021: The VVA Veteran publishes my article “Fighting Words: When to Fold ‘Em and Walk Away,” on U.S. intelligence knowledge of the Vietnamese adversary before the February 1971 invasion of Laos.

October 2021: The diplomatic historians’ platform H-DIPLO publishes my “how to” article on historical research and the role of declassified documents called “Panning for Gold.”

June 2021: Naval History magazine publishes my article “Intel Assignment: Tokyo,” exploring the experiences of American naval attaches in Japan before World War II.

November 2020: The VVA Veteran publishes my article “The Most Amazing Battle: The Secret Lao Army and the CIA Defeat the NVA on the Plain of Jars.”

March 2020: The VVA Veteran publishes my article “Fighting Words : So What Do We Do Now?” about comprehensive U.S. military strategy for the Vietnam war.

November 2019: The VVA Veteran publishes my article “Sniff Them Out, Bite Them Hard: Project Tiger Hound,” about the origins of forward air controllers attacking the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Vietnam War.

June-July 2019: The magazine History of War publishes my two-part article “The OSS and the Normandy Invasion.”

April 2019: Publisher Amberley Press releases a British edition of my book Normandy Crucible for the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

March 2019: The publisher Editions Perrin releases the French translation of my book The Ghosts of Langley, titled Histoire du CIA: Les Fantomes de Langley.

December 2018: The United States Naval Institute publishes my article “Raid on Choiseul” in its magazine Naval History, including John F. Kennedy’s last combat action as a sailor in the South Pacific during World War II.

November 2018: The VVA Veteran magazine (November/December 2018, v. 38, no. 6) publishes my article, “The Absolute Weapon and the Unwinnable War,” about schemes considering nuclear weapons in the Vietnam war.

November 2018: H-Diplo publishes its Roundtable Review (v. xx, no. 13, 2018) of the Gregory Daddis book Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam, which I edited, and where I summarize the positions of the various reviewers.

November 2018: The Pritzker Military Museum and Library has me to Chicago to speak alongside Gerhard Weinberg on Intelligence in World War II, as part of their conference honoring Dennis Showalter for his contributions to the literature.

September 2018: London publisher Amberley Press releases a British edition of my book The Ghosts of Langley.

June 2018: ProQuest Publishers releases Set III of the National Security Archive’s document collection on CIA covert operations. This set covers presidents from John F. Kennedy to Richard M. Nixon.

March 2018: The American Legion publishes my article “Ride to the Rescue: Operation Pegasus,” in the American Legion magazine

February 2018: The Vietnam Veterans of America publishes my article “VVA’s Mike Rose: A Long Road to the Highest Award,” in its magazine The VVA Veteran. 

December 2017: The Harry Howe Ransom Center of the University of Texas publishes my paper “The Anglo-American Special Relationship in Intelligence” in the book Effervescent Adventures with Britannia, edited by William Roger Louis (I.B. Taurus Press, 2017).

August 2017: The New Press nominates The Ghosts of Langley: Into the CIA’s Heart of Darkness for the Pulitzer Prize.

July 2017: Having completed a study of the Chicago Tribune grand jury proceedings and associated documents, the best have been selected for the Midway secrecy electronic briefing book (EBB) mentioned last month. The EBB has been posted at the National Security Archive website.

June 2017: DK/PenguinRandomHouse publishes the lavishly illustrated book Smithsonian’s The Vietnam War: The Definitive Illustrated History, to which I contributed a chapter.

June 2017: I get the opportunity to review the Midway Grand Jury proceedings in preparation for compiling an electronic briefing book on the Midway secrecy issue that I will post at the National Security Archive website.

December 2016: In a judicial victory for openness, the United States Appeals Court for the 7th Circuit, having given the U.S. Government 90 days to respond to its decision in the case Carlson et. al. v U.S., and seeing no response from the Department of Justice, opens the 1942 Tribune Grand Jury Proceedings. (See the discussion of this under menu item “The Real Story.”

August 2016: Naval Order of the United States selects my book Storm Over Leyte for consideration for the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature.

July 2016: The Washington Independent Review of Books carries an interview with me, mostly focused on my new book Storm Over Leyte.

July 2016: Newsweek  publishes my article “Does the Wave of ISIS Suicide Bombs Mean They’re Losing?”

May 2016: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press publishes the book Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, edited by Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Among its many interesting pieces is my reflection on my game Third Reich and the Roberto Bolanos novel The Third Reich, in which he uses my game as his central plot theme– building the action around events that happen to a fellow who goes on holiday with the idea of devising a perfect strategy to play Third Reich at an upcoming game tournament. I used the Bolanos novel as an artifact to speculate that perhaps boardgames have “arrived” in our culture.

November 2015: The magazine The VVA Veteran publishes my article “Lam Son 719: They Started the Whole Damn War Over Again” in its November-December 2015 issue.

June 2015: Nowandthenreader.com releases my longform ebook written for the 50th Anniversary of the U.S. escalation of the war in Vietnam. This study, titled A Streetcar Named Pleiku, deals with the inception of the bombing of North Vietnam called “Rolling Thunder,” the escalation, and the question of whether Hanoi attempt a “Tet Offensive” in 1965, while playing on a classic quote from Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy (“Pleikus are like streetcars”), that refers to a National Liberation Front commando attack on a U.S. air base in South Vietnam.

June 2015: Oxford University Press releases my book The US Special Forces: What Everyone Needs to Know. This is a very accessible primer on Special Operations Forces which adopts a Q & A format and covers U.S. forces in summary form.

June 2015: Against the Odds Annual Edition contains my articles on the Resistance Movement against the Nazi Occupation of France and the Low Countries plus my card-driven boardgame on the same subject, called Set Europe Ablaze.

May 2015: ProQuest Publishers release Part II of our major document collection  on CIA operations, with this segment focused on 1975, the so-called “Year of Intelligence,” when the Church and Pike Committees and the Rockefeller Commission all investigated the U.S. intelligence agencies.

March 2015: My article “The Marines’ Vietnam Commitment” appears in the April 2015 issue of Naval History magazine.

February 2015: My article on the U.S. Navy in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam war, “SEALORDS: Brown Water Breakthrough,” appears in the February-March 2015 issue of The VVA Veteran magazine.

February 2015: My Roman-era battle game, set in the ancient German forests and called The Victory of Arminius, which treats the massive ambush of the Legions of Varus in the Teutoburgerwald in 9 A.D. appears from Turning Point Simulations.

October 2014: An initiative I have been working on for six years in concert with the Cold War International History Project of the Wilson Center resulted in a workshop at the Center in September 2013 at which a panel of scholars assessed the recently published semi-official history of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam through the French and American wars. The last of the written versions of comments arrive, finally enabling us to post the results, with an introduction that I drafted.

July 2014: The VVA Veteran Magazine publishes my article “Gulf of Tonkin: Ambiguous Push to War” in its July/August 2014 issue. The piece shines fresh light on the intelligence mess up that created this excuse to push toward war.

June 2014: Vietnam Magazine publishes my article “The Vinh Window and the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” the story of an amazing break into North Vietnamese encrypted communications that became an intelligence bonanza for U.S. forces fighting the Vietnam war. The piece describes the penetration, what the Americans did to intercept the traffic, and what the U.S. learned from Hanoi’s messages.

May 2014: In Berlin to participate in the workshop “1983– The Most Dangerous Year of the Cold War?” sponsored by the Berliner Colloquien zur Zeitgeschichte and the Einstein Institute.

January 2014: I’ve completed my initial effort at a straight-to-ebook format publication. This is my book Operation Vulture: America’s Dien Bien Phu, long out of print but now completely fresh. This is not a mere reprint. The text is completely rewritten, and new material has been added on Americans caught up in the French war, on the CIA and French intelligence, on the Vietnamese side of Dien Bien Phu, on overland relief efforts to save the French garrison, additional analysis of the roles of key characters in Washington, and more. The maps originally prepared for this book, which for various reasons did not appear, are added here also. The artwork is very nice.

January 2014: The Japanese publisher Six Angles releases a refashioned edition of my boardgame Panzerkrieg (see “Games”).

December 2013: The Family Jewels is excerpted in The Utne Reader.

November 8, 2013: Posted in the section “Upcoming Events”: a link to view the C-SPAN 3 televised record of the debate on “Vietnam 1963” which took place at the New York Military Affairs Symposium on that date.

October 2013: Battleship Yamato at the Battle of Leyte Gulf! The November/December 2013 issue of World War II magazine contains my article “Goliath Unleashed!” which looks at this key battle from the decks of the Japanese battleship.

September 2013: The American Legion Magazine publishes my article, “The Siege at Khe Sanh.”

September 2013: The University of Texas Press publishes my book The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power in a hardcover edition.

August 2013: The publisher Penguin Press/NAL/Caliber releases a paperback edition of my book Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun.

August 2013: My article “The French: An Orphaned Army” becomes a co-winner of the 2013 APEX Award for Publication Excellence in the category “Series Feature Writing” which is awarded to The VVA Veteran magazine for the feature set “Dien Bien Phu from all Sides” that appeared in a 2012 issue.

August 2013: The University Press of Kansas Press releases a paperback edition of my book Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975, winner of the Henry Adams Prize in American History.

August 2013: The United States Naval Institute Proceedings publishes my article “Neglected Intelligence: The Japanese in the Solomons Campaign.”

August 2013: My boardgame Beyond Waterloo (Against the Odds/LPS Games) has won the Charles S. Roberts Award in the category of “Best Magazine Wargame.” The award, administered by a board of interested gamers, and determined by nomination followed by public voting, honors the man who created some of the earliest modern wargames and established the first large game company to produce them. I was a friend of Charlie Roberts and am proud to win an award named for him. The game Beyond Waterloo takes the history of Napoleon’s return from Elba in that year, and his attempt to re-establish his power in France, and makes that a two-player strategic competition. Unlike other games on these events, which focus on the battle by that name, Beyond Waterloo permits the players to deal with the full panoply of factors that shaped with the events of 1815.

February 2013: The American Legion Magazine publishes my article, “The Gulf of Tonkin: Fifty Years After.”

February 2013: My paper, “Cold War Intelligence History,” appears in Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War. London: Oxford University Press, 2013.

January 2013: My essay, “Phoenix and the Drones,” appears in Passport, the news magazine of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations.

January 2013: The magazine World War II publishes my article, “Sundown at Torpedo Junction.”

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