Blood Trails: The Combat Diary of a Foot Soldier in Vietnam

Christopher Ronnau

Des 2008 · Dijual oleh Presidio Press

Tentang eBook ini

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

Tentang pengarang

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.