More than two score years have passed since I left Vietnam, yet the
images and events linger, embossed on my memory. A glimpse, a sudden
sound, a dream at night, and the full power of some event long past surges
through my being. Through the years these images have taken a form
of their own as I've told and retold the stories, eliminating the common and
routine, the day-to-day events, until they've become what we used to call "war
stories". Each captures in compact form the excitement and adventure,
the unusual and the tragic, taken from a year of many such events.
My experiences in Vietnam came in bits and pieces, not in a regular or
orderly manner. One minute we'd be walking quietly along and the
next something sudden and unusual would occur - completely unexpected and out
of context. My life was made up of many such fragments, each woven
around the common fabric of the Vietnamese landscape, my participation in a
wartime military exercise, and of moving from one fire support base to another
in our Division area of operations. There was no grand design, no
beginning or end. We just lived the story from moment to moment.
Our year of duty became a collage of vignettes, of happenings. So,
just as each day brought its own adventure, these stories have been selected
to represent the various parts of my total experience, as best I can remember
them.
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