Baltimore Catechism: Sacrament of Reconciliation

Those who were never in war forgot that war is hell. It is not a euphemism. It is actually hell.

He'd survived elementary school with the nuns. He lived through a year in the southwest, making friends in the barrio. He endured the class warfare of his Massachusetts high school.

So when college did not work out the way he'd thought it would, John did the next best thing: he enlisted.

Nothing could have prepared him for what was about to happen.

In February 1967, I was nineteen years old and had just landed in Saigon.

He'd never paid attention to the news, and he'd never heard of the small country called Vietnam. But he quickly learned the language, the customs, and the problems that came with being sent into combat.

It was late January 1968, and all hell was breaking loose in hell.

Our lives went from damn near unbearable to worse.

In this haunting look at an era of American history, readers begin to grasp the moral dilemma of kids sent to fight for something they didn't know and learn about a culture they had to understand in order to survive.