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Book Review: The Good Captain: A Personal Memoir Of America At War, Joseph J. Collins

Parameters Bookshelf – Online Book Reviews

Author: R. D. Hooker Jr.

Reviewed by Joseph J. Collins, PhD, retired US Army colonel

Retired Army colonel Rich Hooker’s The Good Captain is a memoir spanning the Cold War through the Global War on Terror. Hooker’s deployments take up the bulk of the book and include Grenada with the 82nd Airborne Division, Somalia to work with legendary Ambassador Bob Oakley, Zaire to coordinate humanitarian operations in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo as a parachute infantry battalion commander, the Sinai Peninsula for peacekeeping operations, command of the Dragon Brigade in Iraq and, in his last year of service, Afghanistan with the …

American Military Strategy In The Vietnam War, 1965– 1973, Gregory A. Daddis

History Faculty Books and Book Chapters

For nearly a decade, American combat soldiers fought in South Vietnam to help sustain an independent, noncommunist nation in Southeast Asia. After U.S. troops departed in 1973, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 prompted a lasting search to explain the United States’ first lost war. Historians of the conflict and participants alike have since critiqued the ways in which civilian policymakers and uniformed leaders applied—some argued misapplied—military power that led to such an undesirable political outcome. While some claimed U.S. politicians failed to commit their nation’s full military might to a limited war, others contended that most officers fundamentally …

The Cold War's Last Battlefield: Reagan, The Soviets And Central America, Edward A. Lynch

Books by Hollins Faculty and Staff

"Central America was the final place where U.S. and Soviet proxy forces faced off against one another in armed conflict. In The Cold War's Last Battlefield, Edward A. Lynch blends his own first-hand experiences as a member of the Reagan Central America policy team with interviews of policy makers and exhaustive study of primary source materials, including once-secret government documents, in order to recount these largely forgotten events and how they fit within Reagan's broader foreign policy goals. Lynch's compelling narrative reveals a president who was willing to risk both influence and image to aggressively confront Soviet expansion in …