The U.S. Marine Corps' Combined Action Program (CAP) in Vietnam was an enlightened gesture of strategic dissent. Recognizing that search-and-destroy operations were immoral and self-defeating and that the best hope for victory was "winning hearts and minds," the Corps stationed squads of Marines, augmented by Navy corpsmen, in the countryside to train and patrol alongside village self-defense units called Popular Forces. Corporal Edward F. Palm became a combined-action Marine in 1967. His memoir recounts his experiences fighting with the South Vietnamese, his readjustment to life after the war, and the circumstances that prompted him to join the Corps in the first place. A one-time aspiring photojournalist, Palm includes photographs he took while serving, along with an epilogue describing what he and his former sergeant found during their 2002 return to Vietnam.

In the wake of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in1954, three Americans came together in a clandestine alliance that would play a major role in establishing Vietnam as an important arena in the Cold-War contest for hearts and minds. The three were Edward Lansdale, the legendary CIA officer who had engineered the defeat of the Communist Huk rebellion in the Philippines; William Lederer, a Navy captain who, along with Eugene Burdick, would go on to coauthor "The Ugly American"; and Thomas Dooley, a Navy doctor who first rose to prominence with a book titled "Deliver Us from Evil" and who would later found Medico. Drawing on primary source material, this monograph establishes the extent of their alliance and their shared commitment to a non-military solution in Vietnam.

This is the mostly true story of my experiences as a 7th and 8th grader in a Catholic school in Northern Delaware in the early sixties, when nuns were still drill instructors of the divine.