Night of the Silver Stars: The Battle of Lang Vei Review

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(More customer reviews)"Night of the Silver Stars: The Battle of Lang Vei," by William R. Phillips, is a gripping nonfiction tale of the Vietnam War. The "about the author" section inside the book's back cover notes that Phillips served in the U.S. Marine Corps and is himself a Vietnam veteran. Phillips' sources for this book include interviews with a number of the participants in the battle. Retired general William C. Westmoreland contributed the book's foreword. The book's poetic title is an allusion to one of the United States military's highest decorations for valor in combat.
Lang Vei was a Green Beret outpost that was the object of a major attack in 1968. Phillips strikes a very effective balance of technical details and human elements as he tells the story. The book is full of intense combat scenes. The straightforward, fact-driven style is well matched to the subject matter. Intriguingly, Phillips notes where there are disagreements or ambiguities among his sources, thus reminding us of the difficulty in capturing history on the printed page.
The book is full of revealing details about weapons, vehicles, and tactics. Phillips looks carefully at the complex interlocking aspects of 20th century warfare, including human intelligence, air support, illumination, communications, first aid, and leadership. He vividly captures the "Murphy's Law" aspect of combat, whereby weapons malfunction and other things go unexpectedly wrong. Particularly fascinating is the human complexity of the battlespace in this account; the story involves not only U.S. military from different branches, but also Laotian and ethnic Vietnamese forces, as well as different tribal peoples of Vietnam.
Phillips weaves the personal stories of a number of the battle participants into the overall story. He also goes into detail about the long odyssey faced by the mother of a soldier who was declared MIA in the battle. The text is further enhanced by several pages of photographs and other illustrations, as well as by a bibliography and index. Written with intelligence and compassion, "Night of the Silver Stars" is a fitting tribute to the remarkable heroism shown by the warriors of Lang Vei.

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In Vietnam, 1968, the enemy was planning the kind of overwhelming attack that broke the French at Dien Bien Phu. But while U.S. Marines dug in at Khe Sanh, and recon missions probed the Laotian border, the enemy proved elusive-until it struck full force on an isolated Green Beret outpost. In the early darkness of February 7th, two dozen U.S. Special Forces soldiers and their indigenous fighters were overrun, attacked by waves of ground troops, mortars, flame-throwers, and a weapon they had not prepared for: North Vietnamese tanks. The battle of Lang Vei had begun.In this gripping, keenly told account, author William R. Phillips chronicles a desperate struggle for survival as the Green Berets held out against unrelenting fire from point blank range. Then, as the badly wounded Americans fought their way out of one death trap, they found themselves in another, still besieged with little hope for rescue-until a super secret, quick-reaction strike force launched one of the most daring missions of the war...

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