In my eighteenth year, I was shipped to Vietnam, where I performed a variety of duties as a lower-ranking enlisted man from October 18, 1966 through October 25, 1967. My aim in this novel was to convey in a fictional account something of the truncated experiences I, and others like me, endured. Like millions of other young men, I submitted to the draft laws of the day. Like many of these young men, my motivations and attitudes were mixed and reflective of the conflicting cultural crosswinds of the time.
For many of us, there was a lack of that political and psychological clarity reminiscent of past wars such as the American Civil War and World Wars I and II. Many of the younger men, so recently boys, experienced an air of dislocation as well as surreality that sporadically punctuated the dull routines with unexpected events for which one can never quite be prepared.
By design, this fictional account offers no storybook consolation nor reassuring solutions. I tried to convey the attempts by young men from diverse backgrounds to cope and survive in an environment defined not by winning a war of "good versus evil" but by the steady clicking of an alarm clock, which measured each day of a twelve-month tour of duty.
Feeling little organic connection to a war officially described as a conflict, we were united not by any global imagination of East versus West or communism versus democracy but by the humble focus on staying alive until our personal "alarm clock" rang out the end of each soldier's twelve-month sentence. We, like other generations of soldiers, doted on packages and letters from home while imagining a return to a world little changed despite the increasingly ominous snippets in the news to the contrary.
Our dislocation from the familiar begins abruptly when the arriving jetliner plunges through monsoonal clouds above Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Disembarking from the plane and from social upheavals at home, Rob plunges into a world that is foreign to his experience, full of jarring sights, sounds, and smells more akin to the kinds of dreams that awaken us in the night. He already understands that he has made the biggest mistake of his life. More unsure of himself than he has ever been, he must now submit to powers and controls far beyond his abilities to mediate.
