I remember seeing men wearing military uniforms standing on the street corner at The University of Tennessee. I was little then, maybe five or six. Daddy said it was because of Hitler and the Nazis. I didn’t know what that meant, except by the look on my father’s face I knew it must be bad. He told me those men and women were serving their country. I wanted to be like them.

I enlisted when I was eighteen, becoming a proud member of the United States Marine Corps. Boot camp was hard, worse than clearing trees for my father’s real estate business. The heat at Parris Island was pretty bad that summer. We spent long hours out in the sun, close order drill, jogging, marching with our field packs, and learning to fire our M-1 rifles.

I learned it well, but something else happened during those memorable days of my eighteenth orbit around the sun. Those young men from my platoon and I became brothers. Not brothers in the usual sense of the word, but blood brothers. We knew in our hearts that we were bonded together for life. The day we graduated from PI an old general stood on a wooden podium in front of the parade grounds and told us, “You are now United States Marines.”

We were green as gourds, but it made us proud. After I returned home from active duty, I continued to follow the troops overseas. It wasn’t long before we were involved in Vietnam. As the years rolled by, I began to realize that something was wrong. I knew how our military was trained, and how they maneuvered. We were bred to fight and defeat the enemy, any enemy. I couldn’t understand why the war was going badly, or why our men continued coming home in steel boxes if they came home at all. So I began to dig into the politics of Washington, DC, and the Vietnam War. What I discovered set me on a course to tell the story of the American soldier.