Continued

After graduating from LSU, I was ordered to report to Fort Eustis Virginia for Transportation Officers Basic Course (TOBC). My thoughts of war had changed from what I felt as a youngster as being manly , macho events. I only wanted to serve by two year obligation, put it on my resume, and get on with a normal civilian career. After training at Fort Eustis, I was then ordered to Fort Wolters, Texas, which was the Army primary helicopter school. I was a flight scheduling officer, but had many extra duties, often duties such as "Survivor Assistance Officer," brought the war home to me in a distrubing way. Once, when I handed a neatly folded flag to a young widow, the parents snatched it out of her hands and pushed it back to me saying---"It's your war now, son, and we don't want any part of it."

I arrived in Vietnam on 10 March, 1969, not knowing what to expect. There had been no bands playing to cheer us when we took off from Travis Air Force Base in Oakland, California when we took off, and nobody but shouting NCO's to welcome us when we landed at Bien Hoa. I was assigned convoy duty. We worked seven days a week. There were mines and ambushes. Because I could speak basic Vietnamese, I was assigned extra duties such as soladium payment officer, and Local National pay officer. Then, I was put on patrols, because of my Bengal Raider training at LSU. My extra duty assignments gave me a good insight into the war from the Vietnamese people's point of view. They had been struggling for a free country for hundreds of years. I soon learned that my Vietnamese friends always knew more about what we were planning than our own military intelligence. Often, my assignments took me into areas that were considered not safe, so I had to trust what they told me. They seemed to distrust the Saigon government. There was much corruption they implied to me often, and I soon came to believe that the United States was just supporting this activity. The soldiers I worked with did their jobs, but most of us felt it was a lost cause. It was a very political war, and the military was often drowned in red tape.

My book tells of these experiences through the eyes of the men I knew, and also of the Vietnamese on both sides that I grew to respect.