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(Subscribe to Longreads to receive this and other weekly exclusives.) This week, we’re excited to share a Longreads Member Exclusive from Thomas E. Ricks, whose new book is The Generals, published by The Penguin Press. Chapter 21, “The End of a War, the End of an Army,” details how the U.S. military and its leadership faltered in […]

A profile of Rhonda Roby, a forensic scientist who has identified the bodies of victims of 9/11, victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Vietnam and Korean War MIAs, bodies of the Romanov family, victims buried in Chilean mass graves, and more: “Standing there in the middle of the smoking apocalypse of the Twin Towers, […]

An excerpt from Howe’s new book on how internal arguments, drugs, failed feminism, and the exploitation of minority characters in comic books and the freelance writers and artists who drew them, changed Marvel Comics during the late ’60s and early ’70s: “‘I was just as crazy as everybody else post-Watergate, post-Vietnam,’ said Starlin, whose hobbies […]

A look at the work of Craig Venter, one of the first scientists to map the human genome. Venter’s work in synthetic biology could one day change the world by producing clean fuels and biochemicals: “Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond […]

Once an enemy of the U.S., Vietnam is growing as a country and has become a key ally “as a counter to China’s rising power”: “Nothing better illustrates the Vietnamese desire to be a major player in the region than the country’s recent purchase of six state-of-the-art Kilo-class submarines from Russia. A Western defense expert […]

The story of a 21-year-old who was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War. For years the CIA refused to acknowledge that she worked for the agency: “It is Warren who inherited from his dead parents the one thing that most illuminates his sister’s time in Vietnam: a trove of 30 letters […]

Retracing the steps of a Marine who went missing in the Montana wilderness. Family, friends and fellow Iraq veterans struggle to understand what happened to 30-year-old Noah Pippin: “Pierce remembers the stranger as none too friendly. Pippin kept his back turned when Pierce started asking questions and said curtly that he’d hiked in from Hungry […]

As you walk the main hallway, a culture of inclusion unfolds. Hair styles change to reflect the ideal of glamour for a young black woman of a bygone era. In the 1970s, the afro suddenly asserts itself, loud and proud. In 1979, the first Asian face appears: a young émigré of Vietnam. That’s a good […]

(Fiction) I didn’t hear that Duncan Pratt had been killed until I’d been out of the Army for two weeks and had gone four days without a single thought about that final year in Vietnam. If the phone had been disconnected on time, I would never have heard at all. A mutual buddy from military […]

As early as the sixth grade, Norquist, now 47, remembers arguing with classmates over the Vietnam War. “Suzy somebody thought Nixon was a fascist and [Alger] Hiss was a good guy,” he says. Thanks to a fire sale at his local public library in Weston, Massachusetts, he picked up several books by J. Edgar Hoover […]