Dan, I was glad to see the address by Alan Farrell. I remember him well from the Viet Nam Generation days. There was one line in a poem of his that particularly struck me as brilliant: “Never play Scrabble with a montagnard.” Ah, words to live by, for sure, and I never have.

http://tinyurl.com/7jm5k7g

Peter Brush
peter.brush@vanderbilt.edu
http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/central/Brush/brush.htm

Yes–we could go on and on. After I sent the post, I also remembered one of the best books on A Patch of Ground: Khe Sanh Remembered by Michael Archer–a person and book I mention in chapter two of WS. Mike (who was there) has investigated the number of American casualties at the Khe Sanh seige and puts it at about 1000 KIA–much higher than the official count. His friend, Robert (Doc) Topmiller, was a Navy corpsman with the marines at Khe Sanh; he became a Buddhist, a professor at University of Kentucky, and wrote a book about the Buddhist peace movement in Vietnam, as well as a book about Khe Sanh (Red Clay on My Boots), which dealt also with his journeys back to Vietnam. In his conclusion, he wrote: “After eleven trips to Vietnam, I still found it impossible to come to terms with a conflict that caused such long term damage to Americans and Vietnamese.” Last year he killed himself.

In remembrance of Lieutenant Colonel Pham Van Hoa, VNAF, and Colonel John Braddon, USMC, who served together in a place called Do Xa, II Corps, April 27, 1964.