A Rogers State University instructor will discuss several books on the Vietnam War during a Sept. 28 event at RSU’s Stratton Taylor Library.
Phil Sample, an instructor with the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, will present the books “The Advisor: The Phoenix Program in Vietnam” by John L. Cook and “Silence Was a Weapon: The Vietnam War in the Villages” by Stuart A. Herrington.
The event will begin at 3:30 p.m. in the Stratton Taylor Library, Room 207. The presentation is free and open to the public as part of the university’s Library Literary Review series.
“The Advisor” is Cook’s first hand account of his service as an advisor to the district of Di An and his role in the Phoenix Program, which was intended to destroy the political organization of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. In “Silence Was a Weapon,” Herrington writes about his 1971-72 tour as an Army intelligence officer in Hau Nghia Province and especially about the life-threatening pressures faced by South Vietnamese villagers from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army, as well as from their own military and government.
Sample received a master’s degree from Northeastern (Okla.) State University and a bachelor’s degree from Wichita State University. He is a former Army officer, with service as an infantry and counterintelligence advisor in Vietnam, and as a counterintelligence operative and member of the General Staff of the U.S. Army South in Latin America. He is also a Civil War re-enactor and serves as faculty advisor of the Civil War/Mexican War re-enactment unit on RSU’s Claremore campus.
For more information, call the RSU Stratton Taylor Library at (918) 343-7716.