This book is more than a personal memoir; it blends biography and history to create an engaging account of how young Americans during 1960s and early 1970s, grew-up in the shadow of the Vietnam War. With televisions in the majority of American homes, the broadcast networks would beam the daily news stories in vivid color into our living and dining rooms showing the human suffering and devastation that war was inflicting on our young soldiers and Vietnamese civilians alike. It was a time of great division within our country's social and political fabric. It was the civil rights era, a time of racial strife and cultural awakening. All these elements reached a boiling point during that explosive time period.
This is a story of a young man born in this age of political tension and ideological conflict. The "cold war," as it was known, was between competing value and belief systems; communism verses a democratic republic form of government, both seeking global domination. A story of young American men and women who were sitting in high school classrooms throughout the nation struggling to make sense of their personal identities and their national identities as they prepared to leave the security of the classroom for the insecurity of a world engulfed in chaos and self-destruction.
This was the generation of Americans who had witnessed the assassination of a young President Kennedy, the launching of the Russian Sputnik satellite, and an escalation in the cold war that divided Europe, east against the west. As young Americans coming of age in the decade of the sixties, my classmates and I had no reason to trust military generals who warned America that national security was at stake, or the politicians who were governing our county in these tumultuous years.
We were the "flower power" children who would leave our radical imprint on America as no generation had done before. Ours was the "make love not war" generation and we came from every race, religion, social background, and cultural heritage and were destined to change the American political establishment forever.
This is my story, and this is our story, and many of us would ultimately grow up in Vietnam. Drafted to fight in the jungles, on the rivers, and in the villages of this Southeast Asian country of which most had never heard. We could not understand why our country would ask us to suffer the scars of war, perhaps even to die in a far off land. But fight and die we did. The Vietnam war was the catalyst that united all Americans against the political decay that possessed Washington.
