Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us

New York: Ballantine Books - A Newsweek Book, 1984. Mass Market Paperback. Good. 322 Pages Indexed. The Newsweek authors wrote this book with Richard Manning, Stryker McGuire, Wally McNamee, and Vern E. Smith. First Ballantine Books Edition May 1984. Tight straight book with minor cover edge and corner wear. Store stamp inside back cover. A thirty-three page black and white photographic center illustration section. They went to Vietnam, after eight short weeks of training, to fight professional soldiers who'd been waging the war for decades. They were 18, 19, and 20 years old, innocent kids from down the block. They were members of a dirt-eating combat unit called Charlie Company. They came home to a kind of embarrassed silence, as if, one of them thought, everybody was ashamed of us. They felt ignored and forgotten until 1981, when a team of Newsweek correspondents came to talk to them for a major cover story and came away with enough material to fill this book --- an extraordinary memoir of the war and the homecoming. Contents in Three Parts: Memories of Vietnam, The War Comes Home, and The Boys of Charlie Company.