Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir, Revised Edition

Vietnam-Perkasie, W.D. Ehrhart's classic account of his 13 months as a Marine in Vietnam, is the only memoir of the war that is written from the point-of-view of the 18-year-old living the experience rather than the voice of the author recollecting the war later in life. There is no wisdom of hindsight, no looking back after the passage of years or decades, no intellectualizing or sensemaking with the benefit of reflection. This is the voice of a teenager finding himself in the midst of a war that makes less and less sense as his time in Vietnam goes on. Ehrhart delivers the war as he lived it. The reader knows what he knows: no more, no less. This book comes as close as any written account to what that war was like for a young American slogging through the rice fields and villages of an alien land where death was always just a shadow away. This new and revised edition includes a new preface and 32 additional photographs, all but two of which were taken by the author in Vietnam in 1967-68.