What It Was Like Fighting in The Vietnam War [10:04-15:06]

That meant he was going to save people, not kill them, and that meant so much to him and to his family. So it was so fun to be able to recreate him and how much everybody loved him and what his life was like. And then the hardest part of all was on the 19th of June when he died. He went to the aid of another man who'd been shot. That other man had been shot, of course, in an open area under fire. Bill Geier put himself between the wounded man and the source of the fire, and he gets killed, as a result, trying to save one of his friends. His friends, his friend does survive, and Bill doesn't. I had to write that, and I had to speak to the gentleman, the two men who held him as he died, hear what his last words were. And then I got a chance to speak to his mother about how she received that news. His younger brother, Bill, was his hero. He looked up to Bill, worshipped him, and when that army car came to the door and the two men came out, both younger brother and mother figured out even before they got to the door what had happened. That was the hardest part about writing the book, and perhaps the most revealing to me, and that's something I wanted to know as both an author and a historian. Bill does work due to the families of the men who don't return, and they're still dealing with it to this day. When I see the guys at a Charlie Company reunion, they're still holding Bill's memory as bright as they can. They love to pass out pictures of him. They love to talk about him and meet his friends. When they meet his friends at a Charlie Company reunion, it's almost like Bill is still there. To me, that was in some way the most interesting part of writing the book was recreating the lives that no longer are, and understanding how those lives affected the lives around them. I think there's a story about a guy named Larry Luke's, Larry on the Battle of 19th June, 1967. Had held one of his best friends in his arms, a guy named Kenny Frakes had been on a boat when he got shot, and he fell out of the boat, and he was floating by in the river, and Larry was able to reach that and grab him, but the enemy fire was so heavy that Kenny said let me go. He let Kenny go, and they didn't find Kenny until the next day, and he lost his life. That horrible event in Larry's life was eclipsed by what he saw when he came home. No matter how bad 19th June heard him, he said that what I saw when I came home, that people not only didn't care about what we'd been through, they actively didn't like us and didn't like what we'd been through, said that hurt me worse than Vietnam, it hurt me. And that was a big eye opener for me. I certainly knew there were protests, and perhaps the war rightfully needed to be protested, but it hurt these young men for a long time, and essentially what it meant was for many of them, that year they spent in combat, and all the friends they'd lost, and the great and bad times they'd had, they'd just close it up, stuck it up in the attic, and we're left alone to deal with that, the good and bad of it, for 20, 30 years until America finally began to care about that war again. One of the questions I really had to learn for myself, and then to ask was to ask these soldiers, because again I knew Vietnam as a political thing, as a thing in a book, as thing that grown up's older to me argued about, sad to ask them what they thought about it, and for them it was something personal, it was something that involved the deepest friendships, their lives, perhaps the worst tragedy of their lives to, and a question that continually asked them was, no one how it went, no one that it didn't turn out all that well for us, no one that when you came home, you weren't going to get welcomed, would you do it all over again, and every one of them said yes, everyone, one guy who's paralyzed said yes, a guy who lost both his legs said yes, he was the most meaningful year in their lives, the most adrenaline, adrenalineized, adrenalized period in their lives, but they also formed the greatest connections of their lives. These guys are still brothers, friends, confidants, they can hardly live without each other nowadays. While we, as non-combatants often focus too much, so much of our attention on the bad side of war, what these guys often remember most is the good side of it. The friendships they had, the friendships they lost sadly, the laughs they shared, the jokes they played on each other, and boy did they play a lot of jokes on each other.