Bandit Mentality

Download or read book Bandit Mentality written by Lindsay O'Brien and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bandit Mentality captures Lindsay 'Kiwi' O'Brien's Bush War service from 1976-1980 at the coalface of the Rhodesian conflict. Starting in the BSA Police Support Unit, the police professional anti-terrorist battalion, he served across the country as a section leader and a troop commander before joining the UANC political armies as trainer and advisor. Much has been written about the Army's elite units, but Support Unit's war record was mainly unknown during the conflict, and has faded into obscurity afterwards. Support Unit started poorly supplied and equipped, but the caliber of the men, mostly African, was second-to-none. Support Unit specialized in the "grunt" work inside Rhodesia with none of the flamboyant helicopter or cross-border raids carried out by the army. O'Brien's war was primarily within selected tribal lands, seeking out and destroying terrorist units in brisk close range battles with little to no support. O'Brien moved from the police to working with the initial UANC deployment in the Zambezi Valley where the poorly trained recruits were delivered into the terrorist lair. They had to learn fast or die. O'Brien's account is a foreign-born perspective from a junior commander uninterested in promotion and the wrangling of upper command. He was decorated and wounded three times.

Download or read book Texas Bandits written by Mona D. Sizer and published by Taylor Trade Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citing the adage that "those who do not study history are condemned to get it from Hollywood," popular historian Mona Sizer profiles a dozen notorious Texas outlaws and how they have been portrayed on the Silver Screen. From Pancho Villa - who was paid $25,000 by the Mutual Film Company to portray himself - to Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (portrayed by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty), Sizer separates fact from fancy in a fun, rollicking look at the bad guys of Texas Westerns. Sidebars ("How to Rob a Train," "How to Hold Up a Stagecoach," and "The Hollywood Posse") round out this delightful homage to actual and movie bandits alike.

Download or read book Eunuch Commands written by Rang Yue and published by Funstory. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xie E, a A Peerless Genius born in a family of tomb robbers, died in an air disaster and entered the Underworld's reincarnation cycle Dao. He was reincarnated as a "quasi eunuch" in the Northern Song Dynasty's last palace.

Download or read book The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture written by Jeannie L. Johnson and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The US Marine Corps has traditionally been one of the most innovative branches of the US military, but even it has struggled to learn and retain lessons from past counterinsurgency wars. Jeannie L. Johnson looks at the clash between strategic culture and organizational learning through the US Marine Corps's long experience with counterinsurgency. She first undertakes a fascinating examination of what makes the Marines distinct: their identity, norms, values, and perceptual lens. To do this, Johnson uses an innovative framework for analyzing strategic culture. Next, she traces the history of the Marines' counterinsurgency experience from the expeditionary missions of the early twentieth century, through the Vietnam War, and finally to the Iraq War. She shows that even a service as self-aware and dedicated to innovation as the US Marine Corps is significantly constrained in the lessons-learned process by its own internal predispositions. Even when internal preferences can be changed, ingrained biases endemic to the broader US military culture and American public culture create barriers to learning.

Download or read book Cries For Democracy written by Minzhu Han and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Han Minzhu" and her assistant editor, "Hua Sheng," both writing under pseudonyms to protect their identities, present a rich collection of translations of original writings and speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement--flyers, "big-character" posters, "small-character" posters, handbills, poems, articles from nonofficial newspapers and journals, government statements, and transcriptions of tapes. Linked by a commentary setting the documents in the context of the movement's history and of Chinese social and political life, these expressions--indeed, cries--of the participants in the passionate demonstrations in Beijing and other Chinese cities powerfully convey the atmosphere of this extraordinary protest. In the face of the ensuing campaign of intimidation and repression in China, this book enables Western readers to see through the eyes of Chinese students, intellectuals, workers, and other citizens the realities behind the reports and visual images that flooded the media during the spring of 1989. The editors believe that the underlying motivations, emotions, and aspirations of the prodemocracy demonstrators can best be communicated to those outside China by translations that aim as much as possible to capture the original words, tones, and rhythms of the Chinese people. This book is a unique collection of political and personal documents, and it is also a dramatic presentation of the movement. The lucid commentary, the arrangement of selections in approximate chronological order, and the use of photographs combine to create a vivid and flowing narrative. Beginning with the student discontent and restlessness that pervaded Chinese campuses in the winter of 1989, and continuing through to the violent suppression of the Democracy Movement in June with the bloody army takeover of Tiananmen Square and sweeping arrests of activists, the story shows how moderate demands on the part of students grew into a mass antigovernment protest and resistance to martial law in Beijing. Highlighting the demands and goals of the protesters and the attitude of the students toward the Chinese Communist Party, the work movingly evokes the determination, idealism, courage, and flashes of humor that were the essence of this unforgettable spring.

Download or read book Revolution in the Highlands written by Stephen C. Averill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extensively researched and elegantly written study offers a fine-grained analysis of the origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution in the countryside. Building on decades of research in newly available sources and multiple trips to Jiangxi, Stephen Averill provides a definitive local perspective on the rise of a revolution that reshaped China and the world. A rich work of social history, it goes beyond recently popular organizational approaches to explore the ways in which the party and social networks interpenetrated and interacted in the early stages of revolutionary base-building. The Jinggangshan highlands provided the base for Mao Zedong's first efforts at rural revolution. Chinese histories and most Western accounts have focused on the heroic exploits of Mao and his Communist Party comrades, battling the natural elements, hostile military forces, and skeptical authorities in the urban-based Communist Central Committee. This long-awaited work penetrates the hagiographic haze of Mao-centered analysis to provide a close narrative and rich social history of the Jinggangshan base. The author explores the historical patterns of local strongman rule, clientelist politics, lineage conflict, and ethnic struggle within which the party competed for power. Through this multifaceted lens, the revolutionary experience in Jinggangshan is equally dramatic but considerably more sobering than the conventional story. Among Western studies of the Chinese revolution, this work stands out as the definitive account of the critical moment in the 1920s when the physical and ideological center of the Communist movement shifted from the cities to the countryside. This was a process of elite-mediated political osmosis and adaptive compromises with local traditions. The party was not simply an outside force manipulating social tensions for its own political ends. There was, instead, an intricate interweaving of local networks and social cleavages in the highlands with the political structures and policy divisions of t

Download or read book Mao written by Philip Short and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-02 with total page 826 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short's masterful assessment--informed by secret documents recently found in China--provides an up-close look at Mao Tse-tung, the colossal figure whose shadow will dominate into the 21st century. of photos. 4 maps.