The Coast Guard at war

by Alex Larzelere

Although many books have been published on the Vietnam War, this is the first to chronicle the significant contributions of America's smallest armed service in that conflict. The U.S. Coast Guard worked and fought alongside its sister services for ten years, conducting a wide range of operations that have remained until now largely unknown to the public. In May 1965 Coast Guard cutters engaged the Viet Cong in the service's first combat since World War II, and it was not until April 1975 that it shut down its last LORAN-C station in Vietnam. Alex Larzelere's vivid, fast-paced depictions of combat operations along Vietnam's coasts and in the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta benefit from his own service in Vietnam as a patrol boat skipper and from his interviews with seventy-five other Coast Guardsmen who were there. These on-the-scene descriptions together with the author's exhaustive research in official and private archives add up to a comprehensive picture of the Coast Guard's w