It's time to be straight with the reader. This is all pure fiction. It is not my intent to insult the true Marines from the 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Division by writing a fictional account. My dad and uncles were World War II vets or Korean War vets. I had friends who were Vietnam War vets. Some of my Army and Marine veteran friends will likely not be happy with this book. They were proud patriots who answered their government's call to duty and felt Vietnam was a noble cause. They felt their government and far-left college students ended a war they truly believed we could win. Other proud veterans, like John Kerry, would disagree with those assessments. My brother-in-law was a Marine at Khe Sanh. Sadly, he struggled with PTSD and alcohol and died in 2011.
I struggled with the concept of my fictional participation at Khe Sanh. I just missed being drafted. Vietnam was such a big part of my youth that I felt compelled to share a story about it. Vietnam, like Korea, has sadly become a forgotten war. All of the characters in my book are loosely based on my high school boyhood friends from Worcester, Massachusetts. I drew on those memories as I sat in my Boston suburb home quarantined from COVID-19 in 2020. I have never lived in Boston. However, my son lived in Boston on Vershire Street in West Roxbury, which is my fictional home in the book. I have never been to Vietnam. I've never fired an M16 rifle. My claim to fame is firing a BB gun in Boy Scouts. As an Assistant DA for nearly forty years, I have passionately hated guns for destroying young lives. I was born in 1955 and was terrified that I would be drafted into the Army and would have to fight in Vietnam. The draft was implemented in December 1, 1969. It was a lottery system based on birthdays for boys ages eighteen through twenty-six. The last drawing of the draft was March 12, 1975. My draft number in 1973 was number 187--a fairly safe number because the US government stopped actively taking boys on December 7, 1972, which interestingly marked the thirty-first anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
I have tremendous respect for veterans. I am very patriotic but not blindly so. As I noted, my dad and uncle were veterans of World War II. My friends' dads were veterans of the Korean War. However, truth be told, I watched the daily broadcasts of the Vietnam War and read my hometown newspaper every night in the hopes I wouldn't be dragged into an unpopular war. There were the Kent State shootings. Massive anti-war protests. Police misconduct at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The assassinations of MLK and RFK. Riots in our cities. Crazy and turbulent times. I prayed that President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would get us out of Vietnam, which they did when the US signed the Paris Peace Accord in 1973.
I have read many Vietnam War books, but six especially moved me: A Rumor of War by Philip J. Caputo, who was a Marine Corps veteran lieutenant at Danang in 1965; Enduring Vietnam by James Wright, a Marine Corps veteran from WWII and Professor Emeritus of History at Dartmouth College; Dispatches by Michael Herr; The Things They Carried by Timothy O'Brien; and SEAL! by retired Lt. Commander Michael Walsh, a Massachusetts and Dorchester, Massachusetts, native. Army veteran Donald Ball of Worcester, Massachusetts, who did two separate tours of duty in Vietnam with the 101st and 83rd Airborne, provided me with sage advice and copies of Vietnam Magazine that greatly assisted my research and understanding of the war.
