"In my year in Vietnam, I walked the booby-trapped rice paddies 
of the Delta, searching for the elusive Viet Cong, and later 
macheted my way through the triple-canopy jungle, fighting the 
North Vietnamese Regulars. . . . I sweated, thirsted, hunted, killed. 
Somewhere in all my experiences, I overlapped the situations of 
nearly every infantryman and many others who served."

    Michael Lee Lanning's journal of his first tour of duty in 
Vietnam provides an unvarnished daily account of life in the 
field—the blood, fear, camaraderie, and tedium of combat and 
maneuver. Fleshed out with narrative and detail years later, the 
pages of this memorable book, first published in 1987, show an 
eager young recruit growing before the reader's eyes into a proud 
but bloodied combat veteran.

    Subsequent volumes in his Vietnam Trilogy will detail Lanning's 
tour as a company commander and his post-war investigation into 
the mind of the enemy. Through his eyes, readers see the reality 
of a war that did not always receive glory but was, in his words, 
"the only war we had."

_________________________________________________________

MICHAEL LEE LANNING, who retired from a career in the U.S. 
Army in 1988, was awarded the bronze star for valor with two 
oak-leaf clusters and numerous other decorations for his service in 
Vietnam. Author of over a dozen books on military history, he lives 
in Phoenix, Arizona.


Number 110: Texas A&M University Military History Series