Author Description

For thirty years after 1970, I thought little about my experiences in the Army and especially my year in Vietnam. After my father died in 2000, I found all the letters I had written home to my parents from Vietnam in 1969-70. I thought it would be a worthwhile project to transcribe them as a chronicle of one person’s experience in a war that has become a metaphor. This project evolved into a memoir centered around my military experiences that roughly span the years 1962, when I first was required to enroll in ROTC at the University of Arkansas, through the conclusion of a journey across half the world in 1970 that began when I was discharged from the Army in Vietnam. Over the years, I have added appendices that describe the experiences of others who crossed my path and included my journal from a trip Shirley and I took to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand in 2009. Over the years, I have read dozens of books that constitute the memories of Vietnam veterans. Most were written by men who served in combat units and recall endless combat assaults, combat patrols and firebase defense, or by helicopter pilots who largely supported these combat units. I have great respect for these soldiers whose jobs were dirty, dangerous and often deadly. Of the 2.7 million Americans who served in uniform in Vietnam, approximately 40%, or a little over a million, served in combat units, but I was not one of those. My story is not one of heroics. I was one of the other 1.7 million in a support role that not so much has been written about, although I have come across books by nurses, engineers and MPs. I just did the job I was given and did it well. Unlike the common perception that Vietnam was all death and danger, I found my one-year tour to be fascinating and professionally engaging. I did not pick my job; it was simply what I ended up being assigned to do, and I was luckier than many. I never slept on the ground or even in a tent, humped the boo