Uprootedthenovel

Christmas Eve, 1966. Mitch sits under an upturned boat with two fellow marines. Rain batters the hull over their heads and water creeps into their boots. His gung-ho, “get-some” attitude had drained away. Now the men in his unit are his motivation to fight, not the politics or ideology that had put him there. “[There was] a lot of downtime,” Mitch wrote home, “where you'd be set up in base camp or walking in column formation. You'd often be waiting around in your tent. Then a

On March 8th 1965, the first American combat troops landed on a beach outside of Danang. It was only the most prominent of a thousand tiny steps that had been leading American soldiers closer to full involvement. My first exposure to the Vietnam War was the films that unpicked the American soldiers' experience. The subject became a sub-genre of its own in the 1980's, as a generation of film-makers each released their own depiction. These films were mostly tales of individual