Shrapnel Wounds: An Infantry Lieutenant’s Vietnam War Memoir

Shrapnel Wounds is the combat memoir of Lieutenant Tom Crowley, an enthusiastic and highly trained U.S. Army enlistee and Officer Candidate School grad who enters combat in Vietnam in mid-1966.

Highly regarded by his infantry platoon and strongly encouraged by his superiors to become a professional soldier, Crowley almost inadvertently examines the system by which career officers are shepherded through to higher and higher rank—and increasingly rejects that system over the course of his one-year combat tour.