Introduction



     Vietnam was different from all the other wars I had studied in school. The Revolutionary War was fought to gain our independence, the Civil War to save the union. Most people agree that the Spanish-American War was fought because Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hertz were fighting their own war and needed a place wage it—a place like Cuba.

World War I was fought to end all wars. A measure of its success is that an even bigger war, World War II, had to be fought just 20 years later. And then there was the Korean War, which was really more like an alumni reunion for some of the participants of WW II.

 

  All these wars had reasons for being fought, albeit some were better than others. And then came Vietnam—never an iron clad reason for being there and never a clear cut objective that would get us out of there. It seemed to go on for eternity by the nation watching it unfold each night on the evening news. Vietnam was the war everyone wanted to go away but wouldn’t.

 

 What made Vietnam different from a soldier’s point of view was that his participation in it was being timed as if he were riding a steer or bucking bronco in a rodeo. To win, he only had to ride till the buzzer sounded—and the buzzer would go off in exactly one year.
 

 

NOTE: These stories are a look back at my year in Vietnam, the events leading up to it and my time in San Pedro when I returned home. These stories should not be read as chapters in a novel. Better to think of them as a journal. Some of the stories might not seem like much and many of them probably aren’t much. But they all served a purpose—to fill in a year that had a lot of down time.

 

I welcome comments on these stories as well as any of your own stories. But remember this is not a collection of war stories. There are enough of them going around. These are simply accounts of what I did to kill time when I had a lot of time to kill.