VIETNAM: THE WAR THAT KILLED PURPOSE

We were not heroes. No bronze statue could capture the look in our eyes as the helicopters lifted, and the jungle closed around us with its wet breath and the smell of death, thick as old blood. We were not extraordinary - just young, thrown into something too vast, too monstrous, to name.

The day simply happened to us. It came like a fever or a fire, and we answered it with muscle and reflex, the things hard training taught. We were not saints, not bringers of peace. We came with the storm, and so did the enemy.

Who was pulling the strings? God? History? Or was it some cruel, blind machine grinding on? I thought of it all—destiny, luck—and found no comfort in either. There were only orders, heat, fire, and the names of brothers you’d never see again.

We held to our mission the way a drowning man grabs a rope—desperate, fierce, hoping the line would hold, the jungle wouldn’t take us, and write our names in blood on its roots.

That was Vietnam. A furnace. A slaughterhouse. Eleven years of American blood. Over fifty-eight thousand dead. A hundred and fifty thousand shattered. And we who came back—did we? Or did some part of us stay behind, buried in the red mud of that cursed place?

I live now with two truths: the count of the dead, impossible to bear—and the betrayal by men in suits who sent us there, who slept in clean sheets while we killed and bled and broke.

For the whole, unvarnished story—"Vietnam Uncensored – 365 Days in a Nightmare,” Amazon Link or go to https://vietnamjerry.com. The first chapter and the NPR feature are free. All profits help veterans via the Kaufman Fund. Read it. Remember us. It matters.