This is the eighth volume in a planned 10-volume operational and chronological series covering the Marine Corps' participation in the Vietnam War. A separate topical series will complement the operational histories. This particular volume details the gradual withdrawl in 1970-1971 of Marine combat forces from South Vietnam's northernmost corps area, I Corps, as part of an overall American strategy of turning the ground was against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong over to the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam.

This is the eighth volume of a projected nine-volume history of Marine Corps operations in the Vietnam War. A separate functional series complements the operational histories. This volume details the activities of Marine Corps units after the departure from Vietnam in 1971 of III Marine Amphibious Force, through to the 1973 ceasefire, and includes the return of Marine prisoners of war from North Vietnam. Written from diverse views and sources, the common thread in this narrative is the continued resistance of the South Vietnames Armed Forces, in particular the Vietnamese Marine Corps, to Communist aggression. This book is written from the perspective of the American Marines who assisted them in their efforts. Someday the former South Vietnamese Marines will be able to tell their own story.

In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have influenced Americans' understanding of the conflict. Yet few historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has shaped the nation's collective memory of the war and its aftermath. Instead, veterans' accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the race, gender, or class of the narrators. Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood unearths truths embedded in the memoirists' treatments of combat, the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans' postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry's influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as a whole.

Sometimes people do the wrong things for the right reasons. The author admits that to be the "story of his life" and openly shares much of it in this book. Although the book is largely an historically based auto-biography, it is part fact and part fiction. In cases where identities needed to be protected, the "facts" necessary to that end are changed but without altering the accuracy of the description of the event or its historical significance. It is a personal story. It is a cowboy-warrior's story told in a cowboy-warrior's language. It is the story of one man's journey from bondage to freedom and from slavery to liberty. It is the gritty story of this man's life-long education in the school of hard knocks as his journey took him from a sharecropper's shack, through the rodeo arena and the boxing ring, across the football field and the drilling rig floor, into the Marines and two wars and ultimately culminating in the university laboratory and classroom (the most dangerous of all the aforementioned places). Although woven around the experiences and adventures of one man, it is also the story of the people who lived during the period of time in American history that an entire generation was betrayed It is the story of the dramatically changing times in which this personal odyssey took place. It is the story of the betrayal of an entire generation of Americans and particularly the 40% (of the military aged males) of that generation that fought the Vietnam war. The story is told mostly in the form vignettes-short scenes of a particular moment or event. Some are significant. Many are trivial. Some are humorous. Others are heart breaking--even nightmarish. But when sequenced, they tell a story that has a theme. They chronicle an odyssey-an intellectual journey that begins with the author's self-contradictory and delusional rationalizations for some of the horrible things that he did in the name of "mother, God and country" and ends with the realization that they were, indeed, horrible. The conclusions are not mere "visions in the night." They are a result of a very difficult process of shaking a lifetime of authoritarian indoctrination. Some segments of the book will likely be interpreted as "whining" or "self-pity" and they probably are. But it is also a story of love, hate, happiness, sadness, anger, complacency, adventure, excitement, boredom, bravery, fear, duty, tyranny, incompetence, empire building, honor, cowardice, heroism and yes, betrayal. The book is the product of a lifetime of experience and reflection with a little research and a healthy portion of labored discipline added. It was written with the white heat of passion that occurs during the moment when the world comes into focus for the first time. It will bring your world into better focus.

This is the second volume in a series of a nine chronological histories being prepared by Marine Corps History about the U.S. marines operations in Vietnam.