Baltimore Catechism: Sacrament of Reconciliation

Those who were never in war forgot that war is hell. It is not a euphemism. It is actually hell.

He'd survived elementary school with the nuns. He lived through a year in the southwest, making friends in the barrio. He endured the class warfare of his Massachusetts high school.

So when college did not work out the way he'd thought it would, John did the next best thing: he enlisted.

Nothing could have prepared him for what was about to happen.

In February 1967, I was nineteen years old and had...