Xin Loi, Viet Nam - Thirty-one Months of War: a Soldier's Memoir

Zusatztext “A grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War by a good soldier.” –DAVID HACKWORTH “ Xin Loi! Viet Nam lays it all on the line. . . . A story that every reader who wants to feel part of the battles he fought should know.” –WILLIAM R. PHILLIPS! author of Night of the Silver Stars: The Battle of Lang Vei Informationen zum Autor Al Sever Klappentext All the hell! horror! and heroism of helicopter gunship combat above the jungles of Vietnam is captured in this gritty! gut-wrenching! firsthand account by a veteran of nearly all the war's major campaigns. Anthracite coal country, hard coal and hard times, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, is where I'm from. Not a prosperous place during my youth, it still isn't. Energy competition from fuel oil and natural gas had made most coal mines in the county uneconomical after World War II and Schuylkill County, instead of joining the country's postwar boom, slipped back toward the Depression. Growing up, it was rare to see neighbors buy new cars, eat in restaurants or take a vacation. Our families seemed to just barely get by. But, since everyone was in the same economic boat, we young people felt the situation was probably the same everywhere. While television and movies indicated there was a prosperous life out there, we tended to regard such indications as fairy tales.   Our small town was a typical mining community, probably extinct in America today. It was a town of four thousand people with two movie theaters, two supermarkets, thirty-five bars and twenty-seven churches. Like other nearby mining towns, ours had a lot of bars because they were the social meeting places for neighborhoods. There were a lot of churches because no one would ever think of going to church with people of a different nationality. We might work together, go to school together and drink together, but, whether Catholic or Protestant, church was for those of your own ethnic group from the old country. We grew up hearing a dozen foreign languages spoken on our block, and being American kids, we learned none of them.   We didn't have many diversions growing up and were left to find our own amusements. Society catered to adults then, not children. Like all teenagers we talked about what we were going to do and where we would go, and we were all sure that we would never stay in Saint Clair. Judging from our environment, life was going to be a struggle to get by, but we realized the struggle probably would be easier somewhere else. There were quite a few boys in my high school class who looked to the military as a way of escaping the reality of closed coal mines.   The older males we knew were strictly blue-collar workers whose biggest adventure in life was to have served in the Big War, WWII. We grew up hearing stories of our relatives and neighbors conquering the Japanese and Germans. They had marched through Burma; sailed the Pacific and North Atlantic; parachuted into France; blown up a bank and filled knapsacks with jewels in Belgium; lost their booty in German counterattacks; were the Bulge at Bastogne; drove the first tank into Manila.   After WWII stories, it seemed that every adult's second favorite conversation was to complain about every level of government. Yet it was somehow understood that everyone was expected to back the government and its policies, no matter what their personal feelings might be about those policies. During the Viet Nam War years, adult discussions always generalized the conflict as a waste of time, money and lives, but there was never what would be called an anti-war mentality. Instead, conversations were slanted toward the stupidity of those in charge. It made no sense to our citizens that the government would expend such energy and funds on an unknown third world country like Viet Nam. Who cared if it went Communist? To those who had fought for continents, wasting...

Product details

• Authors: Al Sever
• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 01.03.2005
• EAN: 9780891418566
• ISBN: 978-0-89141-856-6
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 106 mm x 174 mm x 18 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies