. >> design began researching a the warda the real reason i decided is that the head of veterans were used as

part of the of morality play they had gotten to tell their story the trauma as great victories and then what happened to them the reason i chose the years 67 but the years before that were ramping up that was of big your but in some ways to the quintessential of that war with their lives in open dreams were city slickers from cleveland and migrant farm workers and young

african americans then sharecroppers from the south in his remarks angeles with a hodgepodge of one end to be at the time. >> that military units were all drafted, the same day in march finding of a movie shown men were in the infantry platoon and i was able to get the company very well. to understand who they were of people so charlie company

in the the bigger than that you don't have a representative sample of what was to be a soldier in vietnam 1967 yet most of these soldiers had ever been in battle before trading in the middle of kansas there is no all over the ground but of course, in vietnam it is over 100 degrees that is a jarring circumstance then they go were practicing to be in the military smack dab in the middle of a difficult or just north of saigon and

as it turns out that was just for acclamation and. so with a couple months of acclamation. and with the river south of saigon with a rice paddy after rice paddy after rice paddy. they are densely populated. and they have to be controlled . .

every river was lined by a dense jungle foliage that you couldn't see through. so every 50 yards could be another ambush and every 50 yards after that could be another. another. plus it's likely the next 50 yards you would be shot at, probably not but you have to be ready. if you were not ready that's

probably when they were there. so when they were in operations they could then switch it off the whole time. they were on their very first operation and one of the sergeants went around the trained them they were very fearful of this guy and he's the one that made them do push-ups before. all that is during training. the one that yelled at them and smack them on the head during training, they just probably marched 20 miles and at night they are supposed to maintain sleeping discipline. only 50% are supposed to be asleep at any one time and goes from one foxhole to another. he had once been a soldier

himself and he comes to the first foxhole and everyone is awake. but he also noticed there were attempts. everybody was awake and everything was good was still a little tense. they said if you fall asleep a grenade is going to go off and you are the world that they stae the first night in vietnam so this close to the nature of the war took a toll on them and as much or even more than when it got really bad.

while the action was going on, those in charlie company were almost uniformly excited when this happened. they would have to mourn that night, not yours and it took them until maybe the next day for them to kind of understand that they just don't get to anothedeath toanother human. when the adrenaline is on, i heard two or three of them tell me i've never fit. coke also more alive than when death was nearby. it keys off every action you take is meaningful. it's the next day that everything turns down you begin to have to wrestle with the decisions that are made the day

before. so it was a cat and mouse for. if the enemy was there and you were in the wrong place, your life was worth it. and so, for them it was a draining war. i like to call it the drumbeat of the war. charlie company went over with 160 young men. 25 died while they were in vietnam and 105 of them were wounded. and as a part of the process and providing the book, i wanted to come to know the young man who didn't return from vietnam, all 25 of them. and in almost every occasion, i was able to do that by interviewing family members, others, brothers, cousins and nephews and nieces. one of the most exciting parts of writing the book was bringing these young men back to life. i used that as an example a young man from chicago moved out

to the suburbs before he was drafted a big cubs fan to tell his this life i got to research what the cubs were doing about his favorite team and the blackhawks, i got to put myself into what it meant to be a chicago kid in 1965 so it was fun to read his life. all his friends loved him so much. he was 19 but slipped to 13. he was a tiny kid, all a smile on his face and so happy when he was chosen to be a medic, not a soldier, while he was a soldier of course but not a combat soldier. that meant he was going to save people and not kill them and that meant so much to him and his family. it was fun to create how much everybody loved him and what his life was like and then the hardest part of all this on the 19th of june when he died he went to the aid of another man

who'd been shot, the other man had been shot in an open area under fire and bill put himself between the wounded man and the source of the fire and he gets killed as a result of trying to save one of his friends. his friend does survive. dell doesn't. i had to write that and speak to the gentleman, the two men that held him as he died come here, e his last words were independent i got a chance to speak to his mother about how she received that news. his younger brother bill was his hero, he looked up to bill, worshiped him and when the army car came to the door and the two men came out both the younger brother and mother figured out even before they got the door would have happened. that was the hardest part about writing the book and the most revealing to me and that's something i wanted to know both as an author and historian what

this does to the families of the men that don't return. they are still dealing with it to this day, they are still holding his memory as bright as they can. they love to pass out pictures of him and they love to talk about him and meet his friends. when they meet his friends at the reunion it's almost like he's still there. so to me in some ways that was the most interesting part of writing the book is re-creating the lives that no longer are. there'there is a story about a y named larry 19th of june 67 he held one of his best friends in his arms to defend and about when he got shot and he fell out of the boat and was floating by in the river and a layer he was able to reach down and grab him

but it was so heavy he said let me go so she let him go and they didn't find him until the next day. he lost his life. that horrible event in his life was eclipsed by what he saw when he came home. no matter how bad that might hurt him he said what i saw when i came home his people not only didn't care about what we had been through, they actively didn't like us and like what we had been through so that hurt me worse than vietnam had hurt me. and that was a big eye opener for me. i knew that there were protests and perhaps the war needed to be protested that either heard from these men for a long time and essentially what it meant was for the lot of them the year they spent in combat in all the friends they lost into the great and the bad times they had, they just closed it up, stuck it up

in the attic and were left alone to deal with death because for 20 or 30 years until america finally begin to care about the war again. one of the questions i had to learn for myself and to ask was to ask these soldiers because again i knew vietnam was a political thing in the book and that grown-ups older than me argued about and said what they thought about it and for them it was something personal that involved the deepest friendships of their lives, perhaps the worst tragedies of their lives, too and a question that i continually asked was knowing how it went and knowing it didn't turn out all that well for us, just knowing when you came home that you were not going to get welcomed, would you do it all over again and every one of them said yes. one that is paralyzed said yes, one that lost both his kissling

said yes. iwas the most meaningful year in their lives, the most adrenalized period but they also formed the greatest connections of their lives. they are still brothers, friends, confidantes. they can hardly live without each other nowadays. while we as noncombatants often focus too much, sometimes all of our attention on the bad side of the war, what thes but these gun remember most is the good side, the friendships they had come at the friendships they lost, the laughter they shared, the jokes they played on each other, and they played a lot of jokes on each other. the good times for some of them, for most of them out of outnumbered the bad times. these were men with dreams and hopes like everyone else that when the country said to do something they went and did it and that was really difficult.

they are 70-years-old now and the difficult thing they did, maybe the most important thing they did was one year out of their lives. they are now grandparents, great grandparents, leaders of businesses, retired folks, preachers and churches, dreamers, you name it. our vietnam veterans are worried something more complicated and more meaningful than that. they are americans. and the full meaning of that word as any other american. >> during the recent visit we spoke with heather marie the author of beyond contacts about the shift in gender roles in american and vietnamese cultures following the vietnam war. >> the name of my book is beyond combat, women and gender in the vietnam era. i wanted to write this boo