Bargain eBook Hunter traps these BARGAIN eBooks just for you! Get them quick before they get away!
Due to international copyrights not all eBooks will be available or similarly priced outside of the US. – Holly
Tales of Ramasun (US Spies in Thailand During the Vietnam War) by M.H. Burton
Genre(s): History
“Tales of Ramasun” is a different kind of Vietnam War story. The kind of war story you may not have heard before, the story of the secret war, the war behind the curtain, the war whose soldiers were sworn to silence. Now is the time for it to come out, before all of the old spooks and spies who participated in it are gone. It is not a ‘blood and guts’ war story. There were no Rambos at Ramasun. It is a story of brains not brawn. Smart young men…linguists who rode their typewriters into battle, radio men who fought wearing headsets, not steel pots, intelligence anaylsts who teased the secrets our enemies did not wish us to know out of mountains of raw data. Young GIs, most of them dragged unwillingly from civilian jobs, college campuses, or fresh from high school, to fight a strange “Top Secret” shadow war in Thailand, a country most had barely heard of and which was infinitely more remote and exotic then than it is now.
Talk about culture shock! The Thailand of the 1960′s was tourist destination to no more than a handful or well-heeled world travelers and a somewhat larger number of hippie wanderers in search of cheap dope and cheap sex. Few of either ever made it beyond Bangkok. Ramasun was definitely not Bangkok. It was 300 miles northeast of Bangkok but it could just has well have been 3,000, in Isaan (ee-sahn), the poorest, most backward, most remote part of the country…a place no guidebooks mentioned, a place the Thai government in Bangkok did it’s best to ignore…near the tiny village of Non Sung. Home of the 7th Radio Research Field Station. “Radio Research”? A vague euphemism, a ‘cover story’ for spying, espionage, and electronic eavesdropping. On who?, you might ask. On everybody. Our enemies the North Vietnamese, the Soviets, the Red Chinese. Some puzzling neutrals, Prince Sihanouk’s Cambodia and Burma. Our allies, Thailand and Laos. We spied on them all at Ramasun, the air waves were full of their radio communications and we had everything we needed to do the job. Translator/Interpreters, ‘lingies’ in Ramasun jargon…Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Burmese, Chinese, Russian…Radio operators, ‘ditty boppers’ at Ramasun, and ‘TA’s', traffic analysts to keep track of who was sending what to who….not to mention all the techies needed to keep out state of the art equipment running.
So now you have the clinical description of Ramasun. The sort of thing you would put in a military unit history. But what of the people behind those cold facts? They were a wild, wacky, rambunctious crew. Never was a military unit short of the M*A*S*H 4077th less military than the 7th. It was not a ‘by the book’ operation and any officer or NCO who tried to make it one was in for trouble. The ‘chain of command’ was largely irrelevant to the mixture or Army, Airforce, Marine, and even a few civilians, who staffed Ramasun and whose respect for authority was limited to those who could demonstrate that they knew their specific trade regardless or rank. Clueless Colonels were ignored while Spec 5′s who knew their stuff were listened to. All ‘lifers’ started with two strikes against them. By regular Army or Air Force standards the 7th was a nightmare. Sloppy on the parade ground, hopeless in drills, bad in attitude, but when it came to the mission you couldn’t beat the 7th. It got the job done. It may not have looked good while was doing it, but it always got the job done.
A surprising number of men, and even a few women, served at Ramasun during its 10 years of operation between 1966 and 1976. I was one of them from 1968 to 1971. The nine stories in this book are based on my own experiences and on tales told to me by others. I cannot say that they are all strictly true. Fact or fiction I have tried to capture the essence of Ramasun the way it really was, with all the warts on. By the way, Ramasun is the Thai thunder god. It was officially a Thai Base (another ‘cover story’)
KINDLE
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
“Bold, daring, graceful, and engrossing.”
—Bobbie Ann Mason“This book will knock your socks off….A first novel that sings with talent.”
—Clyde EdgertonIn his phenomenal debut novel—a mesmerizing literary thriller about the bond between two brothers and the evil they face in a small North Carolina town—author Wiley Cash displays a remarkable talent for lyrical, powerfully emotional storytelling. A Land More Kind than Home is a modern masterwork of Southern fiction, reminiscent of the writings of John Hart (Down River), Tom Franklin (Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter), Ron Rash (Serena), and Pete Dexter (Paris Trout)—one that is likely to be held in the same enduring esteem as such American classics as To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and A Separate Peace. A brilliant evocation of a place, a heart-rending family story, a gripping and suspenseful mystery—with A Land More Kind than Home, a major American novelist enthusiastically announces his arrival.
KINDLE
Fluke by Christopher Moore
Genre(s): Humor
Just why do humpback whales sing? That’s the question that has marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn and his crew poking, charting, recording, and photographing very big, wet, gray marine mammals. Until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite me.Trouble is, Nate’s beginning to wonder if he hasn’t spent just a little too much time in the sun. ‘Cause no one else on his team saw a thing — not his longtime partner, Clay Demodocus; not their saucy young research assistant; not even the spliff-puffing white-boy Rastaman Kona (né Preston Applebaum). But later, when a roll of film returns from the lab missing the crucial tail shot — and his research facility is trashed — Nate realizes something very fishy indeed is going on.By turns witty, irreverent, fascinating, puzzling, and surprising, Fluke is Christopher Moore at his outrageous best.
KINDLE
Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings
Genre(s): Trivia
It comes as no surprise that, as a kid, Jeopardy! legend Ken Jennings slept with a bulky Hammond world atlas by his pillow every night. Maphead recounts his lifelong love affair with geography and explores why maps have always been so fascinating to him and to fellow enthusiasts everywhere.
Jennings takes readers on a world tour of geogeeks from the London Map Fair to the bowels of the Library of Congress, from the prepubescent geniuses at the National Geographic Bee to the computer programmers at Google Earth. Each chapter delves into a different aspect of map culture: highpointing, geocaching, road atlas rallying, even the “unreal estate” charted on the maps of fiction and fantasy. He also considers the ways in which cartography has shaped our history, suggesting that the impulse to make and read maps is as relevant today as it has ever been.
From the “Here be dragons” parchment maps of the Age of Discovery to the spinning globes of grade school to the postmodern revolution of digital maps and GPS, Maphead is filled with intriguing details, engaging anecdotes, and enlightening analysis. If you’re an inveterate map lover yourself—or even if you’re among the cartographically clueless who can get lost in a supermarket—let Ken Jennings be your guide to the strange world of mapheads.
KINDLE
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
Genre(s): Contemporary Fiction
A “finely wrought, flawlessly written” novel (New York Times Book Review), set on a small island in the Puget Sound, that is “at various moments a courtroom drama, an interracial love story, and a war chronicle” (San Francisco Chronicle). “Guterson has fashioned something haunting and true” (Pico Iyer, Time). Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award. A fall 1999 major motion picture.
KINDLE