Lieutenant Dangerous: A Vietnam War Memoir

Lieutenant Dangerous is a late cycle Vietnam memoir. Being late to the game gives the author the advantage of greater retrospection from a distance. He begins with some of the absurdities. Some people could get drafter, while others had exemptions. Local draft boards had a huge say, and were biased towards local kids. The government would be provided equipment on "cost plus profit" basis. Troops were trained in the snow for deployment to the rainforest.

He was drafted after he was married. His primary goal was to avoid harm. Having experience with languages, he sought out an intelligence position that would require language training. He found this full of more absurdities. His training in romance languages helped him pass the test (even though Vietnamese was totally different.) The coursework was mostly rote memorization without real focus on understanding. The location ended up being in El Paso instead of Monterrey. 

He sought to further delay deployment by becoming an officer. Alas, he was first told he was too valuable with his language training. He went another route and was accepted - but ended up becoming an ordinance officer instead. Meanwhile, he also went to Columbia University to talk about enrolling there. He showed up at the peak of protests wearing complete military uniform. That did not go over well. While deployed to Vietnam, he wrote his Senator to complain he was not using his language skills. This eventually got him to more intelligence related operations.

The overall feeling and experience in Vietnam was similar to what we have heard elsewhere. The objective and actions were not clear. The military did not know how to fight in the jungle. He had speciaal criticism for the Air Force. Bombing didn't help the cause. It just made people mad at America. Communism ended up being defeated by communism, not by war.