The Boys of '67
Charlie Company's War in Vietnam
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
Following on from the stunning success of the novel Matterhorn as well as Osprey's own Tonight We Die as Men, this book follows the trials and tribulations of a group of Vietnam draftees from basic training to the rice paddies of Vietnam.
In the spring of 1966 the Vietnam War was intensifying, driven by the US military build up, under which the 9th Infantry Division was reactivated. Charlie Company was part of the 9th and representative of the melting pot of America. But, unlike the vast majority of other companies in the US Army, the men of Charlie Company were a close-knit family. They joined up together, trained together, and were deployed together. This is their story.
From the joker who roller-skated into the Company First Sergeant's office wearing a dress, to the nerdy guy with two left feet who would rather be off somewhere inventing computers, and the everyman who just wanted to keep his head down and get through un-noticed and preferably unscathed. Written by leading Vietnam expert Dr Andrew Wiest, The Boys of '67 tells the unvarnished truth about the war in Vietnam, recounting the fear of death and the horrors of battle through the recollections of the young men themselves.
America doesn't know their names or their story, the story of the boys of Charlie, young draftees who had done everything that their nation had asked of them and received so little in return – lost faces and silent voices of a distant war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wiest (coauthor, Vietnam's Forgotten Army), who teaches Vietnam War history at the University of Southern Mississippi, concentrates on the human side of the Vietnam War with an in-depth chronicle of a group of men drafted into the army in 1966 and trained together with the 9th Infantry Division, the only division of draftees that was "raised, drafted, and trained for service in the Vietnam War," Weist notes, and thus developed unusually strong bonds. After training in the States, the men went to Vietnam in January 1967 as a unit on a troop ship. Very few other American fighting units shipped out to Vietnam; the overwhelming majority arrived singly as replacements because of the one-year rotation system. In Vietnam, the men of Charlie Company slogged through the worst the war had to offer. The unit lost half its members to death and injury within two months, and too many of the men suffered anew after returning home, battling posttraumatic stress disorder for decades. Wiest spent three years interviewing 61 officers and men of Charlie Company, 4th Battalion, 47th Infantry. He tells their stories well and empathically, especially those of the dozen or so men whose lives he examines closely before, during, and after their service in the nation's most controversial overseas war. Illus.
