The Saigon Guns - by John Thomas Hoffman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Few Americans know the facts about the final year of US combat operations in South Vietnam. As political will to sustain the fight shrank and the US withdrew most of their ground forces, the Soviets and North Vietnamese sought battlefield success to strengthen their negotiating position at the Paris peace talks. In March of 1972, North Vietnam invaded the South with five armored divisions, massive artillery support, and modern Soviet anti-aircraft weapons, intended to sweep any remaining US military aviation support to South Vietnam from the skies. But the Soviets and their North Vietnamese proteges had miscalculated.

The remaining US aviation forces, along with the US Air Force and US Navy and Marine aviation assets, would not be easily removed from the battle. For the US forces still in-country, this is an untold story of heroism, dedication, and refusal to yield the battlefield despite being largely considered by US political leaders as "expendable."

Review Quotes

"Saigon Guns . . . [is] not only the best book I have read on helicopter operations during the '72 Easter Offensive in Vietnam-by far the most intense battles Army helicopter crews have ever experienced[-] . . . but [is also] . . . the best book on how we veterans were abandoned by our government. All Vietnam veterans should read, and more importantly, their children."

-Randall Larsen, Colonel, USAF, Retired; Cobra Pilot, A Bat 4/77 ARA, 101st Airborne Division, Author of Our Own Worst Enemy; Producer/Director Black Hawk Down: The Untold Story

"John's book on his experience in Vietnam is monumental. The level of detail and emotion brought me right back to the right seat of an OH-6a. I can even remember how to do self-defense flying (in case your pilot, usually a nineteen-year-old warrant officer, is hit). Perhaps the most important part of this memoir is the striving for justice for the men of the units then and later as unrecognized veterans. I am certain that any reader will be filled with outrage. I am also confident that John has created a true history and documented a legacy that deserves attention."

-Captain Casmir Garczynski, Artillery Officer, RVN 1971-1972

"It's a bit of a cliché to declare a new book one that readers will not be able to put down. Nonetheless, John Hoffman's Saigon Guns: A True Story of Aerial Combat in the Fall of 1972 is without question that kind of book. With unflinching, eyewitness precision, Hoffman has written an unforgettable, utterly crucial book that collars readers from its very first chiseled sentence to its last. Saigon Guns-at once an autobiography, history, and a treatise on military strategy and unimaginable valor in service to America-is written in prose every bit as imagistic, nuanced, and textured as the most riveting fiction. Indeed, much of it is so mind-blowingly harrowing-so sweepingly adventurous, death defying, and overflowing with bigger-than-life characters-that readers must remind themselves that Hoffman's account all really occurred. It's an extraordinary, breathtaking book."

-Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014); Co-founder of the Charles George VA Medical Center Creative Writing Program (Asheville, NC)