While we were trained to be soldiers and I witnessed acts of bravery every day, we were still part of our generation; and our generation was closing down universities, protesting, and generally fucking up the country. Our country was as divided as it hadn’t been since the Civil War. Us? We as soldiers were conflicted, torn between a culture that included everyone that you ever knew and the brothers that we served with. We grew our hair to the military limit, listened to music, carried on a personal protest about something or the other, and smoked pot.
Racism was part of the inhuman view of our adversaries. Just as our fathers had called their enemies Japs and Krauts, we called ours Gooks. So the influence on eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds was kind of warped, especially if you spent most of your time in the bush. While I plead guilty of all of those things at eighteen, they are not what I became or what my returning brothers and sisters became.
Every soldier has a story to tell, each with differ nuances, but the overall experience and attitudes were about the same. I saw bravery and craziness in every possible way. The bottom line, in my humble opinion, is that truth is stranger than fiction. While this account is fictional, the events are not. In truth, I don’t do justice to what I observed and was a part of.
