ISBN: 978-0-9774013-0-7

...For any reader who has never been in combat, this account is shocking, poignant, and enlightening.

The juxtaposition of the ordinary—receiving mail, getting food rations after two days, being able to bathe in a river after days of sweating on the trails of the jungle—with the deeply horrific is like a jolt of lightning to any complacency.

Within one day’s entry, the writer may describe anything from building a “hooch” out of his poncho to keep out the monsoon rains, to the brutal interrogation of a VC member by a Lieutenant, from a sandbag-making detail to the massacre of villagers in retribution for a mortar attack, atrocities he despises but is powerless to prevent.

Without pretensions to glory or indulgence in self-pity, the young man who wrote this testimonial to the Hell of War, and carried it through jungles and rushing rivers, wrapped in plastic to share it forty years later with the world, speaks not only for the victims and survivors of that nightmare, but reminds those who may have forgotten what "War is good for: Absolutely nothing!"

Eloquently, he testifies to the courage of men who make of survival and duty a record of heroism and endurance, and the frailty of all human beings who are damaged by suffering, but often transcend it to a state of mind not easily attained by those who are not forged in such a searing furnace of fire and ice. This book is recommended reading for men and women in all walks of life, especially those who are leaders of their countries, if they have not had this experience in their own lives of the Valleys of the Shadow of Death in Viet Nam.

—Roberta Tennant
Editor, Falcon Books