Publisher's Synopsis
This book in paperback print is not in the cagegory of Philip Capoto's excellent Rumor of War, and it is not comparable to Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, and his The Things They Carried. The book is not near in the league with great historical writers of the period Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History, Cruel April by Oliver Todd nor Neil Sheen's Bright and Shining Lie or for that matter Frank Snep's superbly told final tragic days of a falling Saigon, Indecent Interval. I have certainly enjoyed reading and learning from these titians. But my tome does however have a small place in the gym lockers and in the beach bags of a few of the curious millions of soldiers and civilians who served in Vietnam while supporting the men who actually shed blood in the jungles for their country. Those that left prior to March 1973 derserve to know how events turned out from someone who was there with his family right up to those few days before the last American plane and helicopter took off. This story is of a family arrived ten years before South Vietnam's final days. It is about how we lived, worked, grew and survived in a country that was headed toward ingnominious defeat. I tell how we got there, the initial laborious effort by well meaning dedicated personnel to save a fledging third world kind of democracy from its suicidal course. The Tet Offensive, mini-Tet, and the collapse of the northern provinces of South Vietnam take up much of the story. I write of the unapararent day-to-day dangers and the corruption faced. I tell of the reluctance of people to get behind a distored and dishonest regime. As for the millions of Vietnamese on both sides who died during the conflict, and sadly 58,000 American military personnel, I can only voice the words of veteran Senator Max Cleveland 'Good Soldier, Bad War." Let us hope and pray the United States has with finality learned from its strategic mistakes that caused so much suffering by those many involved.
