U.S. Armed Forces - Biography, Vietnam War/French Indo-Chinese War, United States Armed Forces
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Overview
In the summer of 1966, in the middle of the Vietnam War, eighty young volunteers arrived at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot on Parris Island, South Carolina, from all over the eastern United States. For the next eight weeks, as Platoon 1005, they endured one of the most intense basic training programs ever devised. Parris Island was not a place for idle conversation or social gatherings, and these men remained from start to finish almost complete strangers. W. D. Ehrhart did get to know one Marine, his bunkmate John Harris, who quietly shared his sweetheart's letters. He was a friend who, Ehrhart learned almost thirty years later, died in Vietnam in 1967. In 1993, Ehrhart began what became a five-year search for the men of his platoon. Who were these men alongside whom he trained? Why had they joined the Marines at a time when being sent to war was almost a certainty? What do they think of the war and of the country that sent them to fight it? What does the Corps mean to them? What Ehrhart learned offers an extraordinary window into the complexities of the Vietnam Generation and the United States of America then and now.Editorials
Library Journal
The Vietnam War continues to generate a wide variety of memoirs by the soldiers, sailors, and Marines who served as enlisted men and an equally large number of small unit histories that rely on the experiences of these men to outline one unit's service in a particular battle or period. Ehrhart (Busted: A Vietnam Veteran in Nixon's America, Univ. of Massachusetts, 1995), a Vietnam combat Marine, presents an interesting twist on this formula by following the Marines in his training unit through their wartime service and into middle age, interviewing them in the 1990s. While the work lacks the emotional impact a reader expects from personal accounts, it does provide a glimpse into the lives, motivations, and attitudes of the volunteers of 1966 while simultaneously contrasting this world view with that of the middle-aged civilians assessing their roles some 30 years later. Recommended for comprehensive Vietnam War collections.--John R. Vallely, Siena Coll. Lib., Loudonville, NY Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Book Details
Published
May 1, 1999
Publisher
Temple University Press,U.S.
Pages
334
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781566396745