Author Description

Voices from the Rear: Vietnam 1969-1970 This is one soldier's memoir. It is a story packed with anecdotes, incidents, and memorable characters that would be familiar and recognizable to many whom served in the Vietnam War. It is also a story about Vietnam, draftees, and my two years in the U.S. Army. In a larger context, the war tore at the ideological foundations of the silent majority. The U.S. counterculture became more adamant in its belief that the war was a terrible wrong. The Tet offensive in 1968 clearly showed that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong could muster a full-scale attack at any time and any place within Vietnam. At a tremendous cost of lives, the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies eventually drove the Communists from their newly captured areas. However, the Tet offensive successfully dampened U.S. hopes for a swift end to the war. In addition, this battle made young American men and college graduates more reluctant to serve in the military. On a more personal level, this memoir speaks to the inequalities of the draft system and my experience with a local draft board. I describe the difficulties posed by the draft system, and the inconsistencies of the draft laws, which left to the discretion of the local draft boards the policy of deciding who served and who didn't. Moreover, as a doctoral student in history with an M.A. degree in hand and college teaching experience, I was an anomaly in basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and advanced individual training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I had worked in an adult world and had acquired a sense of self-discipline, and was suddenly thrust into the freedomless existence of an army that included seventeen-and-eighteen year olds. I was lost, but worse than that I was caught in a system, that was distinctly American but as alien as the country that I was supposed to unchain from the shackles of communism. On another level, this is a social history of the U.S. Army during two tumultuous y