ABOUT THE BOOK
About six months earlier, I graduated from Perry High School in Massillon, Ohio. Then I found myself in Vietnam on a troop carrier going back to where soldiers had been killed and wounded. They needed replacements, and I was one of them. When I first flew into Vietnam, I thought for sure I would get shot when I was getting off the plane, but nothing happened and we stepped on Vietnamese ground without any gunfire. The next day, the leaders lined all of us rookies up and told us that we were now infantrymen. We were replacing one third of the Forty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, Ninth Infantry Division.
I had gone through basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where I was trained as a tank driver, so naturally I was ready to receive my keys for the tank I would be driving. The soldier beside me was trained as a clerk and was looking for his typewriter—but things do change in times of war. I thought, Okay, so I won’t be driving a tank. That’s not so bad. How much worse could it be? I knew I wasn’t supposed to think things like that. But I was in for one more surprise—they said I would be carrying the radio. I had no idea how much a radio weighed, but someone told me it was about fifty pounds. Remember, I had just graduated from high school six months earlier and was only seventeen years old. I figured that would be it for the surprising news, but it wasn’t. They told me I would be walking point, which meant I would be about one hundred yards in front of the rest of the guys.
