About Vietnam Soldier

Wow! It is February 2017 and after 13 years, vietnamsoldier.com is still alive on the web, Facebook and coming soon to other social media. I started this site in August 2004 with a few of my pictures, and now it has expanded in content variety and includes 16 additional picture galleries. To celebrate, I am installing a new theme that will make it easier to locate content and navigate directly to it. While the current content will stay, I am adding a few new sections.

The first new section covers the arrival in September of the 10-part series covering the Vietnam War by Ken Burns. In the years since I started the site, respect from the public for Vietnam vets has been increasing. I have experienced it and hope others vets have as well. For me, the realization hit when I was waiting in an exam room for a doctor at the VA. In walked a woman who identified herself as my Vietnamese/American doctor for the day. She thanked me and other Vietnam vets for our efforts and said she could never have aspired to medical school or have had the opportunity to enjoy the good life she was living in America. This is one positive result of our war effort, the large number of high-quality citizens America welcomed to its shores. That said, the divide in our generation that was exposed by the war is still wide, deep and unlikely to close given the emotions commonly expressed when discussing that period of our history. My hope is that Ken Burns and his team’s work will refocus the dialogue and make discussions more civil.

The second new section is an online book I am currently writing about my tour of duty. I plan to post as I write and not follow a strict or chronological timeline, so you can watch the book “being born” and experience it growing to maturity through text and photographs. The opinions expressed in them are mine. It is a look at life with A Battery, 7/11 artillery assigned to the 25th Division, from August 1968 to August 1969 in Tay Ninh Province, about 30 miles northwest of Saigon near the Cambodian border. The chapters are about “the other side” of serving in Vietnam — the realities of daily survival not related to direct combat. For me, as a soldier in a fire support base, and for many others in a myriad of other roles and locations in Vietnam, it was about living in a dangerous place with no exit, one that was full of unexpected struggles, contradictions and confusion.

NOTE: The previous guestbook is gone, as it was the entryway for all sorts of malware. Since I have no secure solution to this issue at this time, it has been dropped from active duty. You can contact me by using the “about vietnamsoldier” menu button and selecting “contact.”