What It Was Like Fighting in The Vietnam War [0:00-5:03]

As I began researching the war, it dawned on me that the real story of the Vietnam veteran had not been told. The name of the book is The Boys of 67, Charlie Company's War in Vietnam, and the real reason I decided to write it was that Vietnam veterans had been used as political footballs. They'd been used as part of a morality play. They'd been used as many things, but hardly anybody had gotten to tell their story. Who they were as young men before they went. The trauma of war that they went through, both its great victories, its funny times, its horrible times, and then what happened to the MSN since they've been home. The reason I chose the year 67, that was in many ways the high combat year of the war in Vietnam, but the years before that were ramping up. The year after that, TET-68 was a big year all of its own, and then we get the ramp down. The 67 in some ways appeared to be, at least to me, the kind of quintessential year of that war, and the book begins with who these young men were before they left. What their lives were, what their hopes were, what their dreams were, and as it turns out, this unit of young men is representative of the entire country. There's city slickers from Cleveland, there's migrant farm workers from Texas, that there is a young African American sharecropper from the South. There's a whole bunch of kids from Los Angeles, you name it, it's a real hodgepodge of what it meant to be American at the time. The military unit, these men are part of, is the Ninth Infantry Division, and they're all drafted essentially on the same day in March of 1966. I wanted to get that feel, I wanted to figure out who these young men were, and Infantry Division's 15,000 men, that's too big. An infantry platoon is 40 men, that's too small, Charlie Company seemed to be just about right, that's 160 men, and I was able to get to know the company very well, I interviewed more than 80 of them, which is a really good sample of the unit, interviewed about 30 family members too, especially of the Charlie Company members who died in Vietnam, I had to understand who they were as people. So I interviewed their brothers, their mothers, their sisters, their wives, so Charlie Company was just about the right size to write a book about. Anything bigger than that, and you begin to forget who people are. Anything smaller than that, you don't have a representative sample of what it was to be a soldier in Vietnam in 1967. Many units and individuals distinguish themselves by their coolness and professional behavior under attack. Yet most of these soldiers have never been in battle before. So they were trained in the middle of Kansas, training the dead of winter, when they leave for Vietnam, they're snow all over the ground, they all get on a train, and train out to California, and then go on a troop ship, and ship over to Vietnam, and of course over in Vietnam, it's over 100 degrees, so it's a little bit of a jarring circumstance for these guys. They're being civilians, and then they go into being, guys who are practicing to be in the military, and then suddenly they're throwing right smack dab into the middle of a very difficult war in 1967, originally their station just north of Saigon, and a rather dry area of Vietnam. And as it turns out, that was just for acclimation. That was to get these soldiers ready for how hot it was, what jungle was like, what maybe a small enemy attack was like, what maybe a few Vietcong BB traps were like, so a couple months of acclimation, and then they sent them down to where their real business was going to happen. The Mekong River Delta south of Saigon, and the landscape down there is quite different. It's rice paddies, endless rice paddies, rice paddies after rice paddies after rice paddies, village after village after village, very densely populated. So it was not an area in which the US could indiscriminately use firepower. These guys had to be very controlled in when they fired and what they fired at. So what they got was a flat, very wet war, and what they got was a war in which the enemy, the Vietcong, had lived there for 10, 20 years. They knew the terrain, and they knew the battle sites. They'd prepared the terrain in battle sites, and so our men were fighting in a foreign country about as foreign as you can get. The Vietcong were fighting on their home turf. So these guys were in a watery, unforgiving environment, and the important thing to remember about it on top of that is since the enemy had been here, five years, 10 years, 20 years, depending on the area that you're in, every rice paddy diek, rice paddies could be 50 feet on one side, a hundred foot on the other. These are pretty small agricultural fields. Every rice paddy diek could have an enemy bunker system in it. The side of every river could have an enemy bunker system in it because every river was