Blood Trails The Combat Diary Of A Foot Soldier In Vietnam, De Ronnau, Christopher. Editorial Presidio Press, Tapa Blanda En Inglés, 2006

Descripción

BAPTISM BY FIRE
Chris Ronnau volunteered for the Army and was sent to Vietnam in January 1967, armed with an M-14 rifle and American Express traveler’s checks. But the latter soon proved particularly pointless as the private first class found himself in the thick of two pivotal, fiercely fought Big Red One operations, going head-to-head against crack Viet cong and NVA troops in the notorious Iron Triangle and along the treacherous Cambodian border near Tay Ninh.
Patrols, ambushes, plunging down VC tunnels, search and destroy missions-there were many ways to drive the enemy from his own backyard, as Ronnau quickly discovered. Based on the journal Ronnau kept in Vietnam, Blood Trails captures the hellish jungle war in all its stark life-and-death immediacy. This wrenching chronicle is also stirring testimony to the quiet courage of those unsung American heroes, many not yet twenty-one, who had a job to do and did it without complaint-fighting, sacrificing, and dying for their country. Includes sixteen pages of rare and never-before-seen combat photos

About the Author
After a medical discharge for wounds received in Vietnam and a lengthy recuperation at Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco, Christopher Ronnau returned to Southern California. After college and medical school, he worked as an emergency room physician and director in St. Louis, Missouri, for more than twenty years. In 2002 he returned to Long Beach, where he now lives and writes.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
JANUARY
For me, Vietnam was better than a poke in the face with a sharp stick. I got a lot out of it. I grew there. However, not knowing this ahead of time dampened my enthusiasm so that when it came time to go, I didn't, at least not right away. Earlier there had been more eagerness in my effort. I didn't like the giant global monolith that was communism and, like the hawks in our government, I believed in former president Eisenhower's domino theory. If one small country in Southeast Asia fell to the Red Menace, the others would soon follow suit, falling like a row of dominos and then everyone involved would be miserable.

Wanting to do my share, I volunteered for the army. In what can only be described as a monumental attack of nearly terminal stupidity, I enlisted only after being guaranteed an assignment to an infantry unit. My misguided fear was that the few Cs and Ds that I had managed to earn in classes at Long Beach City College might get me a clerical job or some other behind-the-scenes position. That wouldn't do. I wanted to see some action.

In Gone with the Wind, a bunch of ignorant and naive southern boys rode off from Ashley Wilkes's plantation, Twelve Oaks, to join the Confederate States Army when war is declared between the states. As they ride off they are all hollering rebel yells in excitement and anticipation of the glories of combat that will surely soon follow. Like them, I didn't want to miss the war, to let it pass me by. I had joined the infantry so that I would see combat. Such was the state of my adolescent mind. It was not a well thought-out plan.

After four months of basic training and advanced infantry training, the army was beginning to seem more real. My departure date for assignment to a combat unit interfered with my earlier sophomoric brain patterns and made me slightly less enthusiastic about leaving exactly on time. As it turned out, the impending proceedings were temporarily interrupted by my sister. She had acquired student tickets to the Rose Bowl, which was on my departure date, New Year's Day 1967. There we saw Purdue defeat Southern California.

Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl was worth going AWOL for; that couldn't be missed. My thinking was that the army was so desperate for fresh troops that they wouldn't dare lock me up. The worst they could do was send me to Vietnam and that was already happening. When my bus arrived at the Oakland Alameda Naval Air S