June 19, 2015
Dr. John Deaton served as an Air Force doctor in Vietnam in 1967-68 and witnessed the Tet Offensive. He arrived in country mid-August 1967, addicted to the barbiturate Seconal, seeking redemption. “At the 12th Hospital…
June 18, 2015
Invariably, wars produce battles that become historical benchmarks. Not enough can be written or spoken about those events. Arguably, the Vietnam War's 1965 Battle in the Ia Drang Valley between the Army's newly formed 1st Air…
June 11, 2015
Sgt. Maj. Rudy Cooper earned three Combat Infantryman Badges—in the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam—along with many wounds. None of his wounds was as traumatic as the damage he suffered when his main and…
June 3, 2015
Here's the deal. When you pick up a book, do you expect to read all of it? If not, why not? That is the dilemma posed by Retired Army Col. Tom Davis in The Most…
May 28, 2015
Bill Honaker begins his Vietnam War memoir by telling us what he is not going to tell: "I have deliberately left out some of the events I experienced, " he says, "in part because I…
May 27, 2015
Howard B. Patrick's A Never-Ending Battle: How Vietnam Changed Me Forever (CreateSpace, 208 pp., $10.99, paper) is a classic account of how combat in the Vietnam War resulted in many years of post-traumatic stress disorder…
May 14, 2015
Bruce Wm. Taneski's I Came Home, But It Wasn't Me: The Memoirs of a Vietnam Combat Veteran as a Recon Scout 'LRRP' (CreateSpace, 338 pp., $19.95, paper; $5.99, Kindle) comes full circle when he sits on…
May 12, 2015
No writing is more important to war veterans than books such as Firefights of the Mind: When the Demons of War Follow You Home (CreateSpace, 322 pp., $15, paper; $9.99 Kindle) by Ed Kugler. And here's why.…
May 11, 2015
John Bowen's Eleven Months and Nineteen Days: A Vietnam Illustrator’s Memoir (Middle River Press, 264 pp., $24.95, paper) is a unique book. It documents his experiences as the only U.S. Air Force illustrator assigned to Tan Son…
May 8, 2015
William B. McCormick has put together a rather untypical war story in What Was I Doing There? (Hellgate Press, 132 pp., $13.95, paper). This young soldier began his tour of duty in Southeast Asia on…