The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam

Andrew Wiest

sept 2012 · Bloomsbury Publishing

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In the spring of 1966, while the war in Vietnam was still popular, the US military decided to reactivate the 9th Infantry Division as part of the military build-up. Across the nation, farm boys from the Midwest, surfers from California and city-slickers from Cleveland opened their mail to find greetings from Uncle Sam. Most American soldiers of the Vietnam era trickled into the war zone as individual replacements for men who had become casualties or had rotated home. Charlie Company was different as part of the only division raised, drafted and trained for service. From draft to the battlefields of South Vietnam, this is the unvarnished truth from the fear of death to the chaos of battle, told almost entirely through the recollections of the men themselves. This is their story, the story of young draftees who had done everything that their nation had asked of them and had received so little in return – lost faces of a distant war.

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Andrew Wiest, Ph.D. is Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi. Also the founding director of the Center for the Study of War and Society, Wiest was born in Chicago, but raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. After attending the University of Southern Mississippi for his undergraduate and Master's degrees, Dr. Wiest went on to receive his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1990. Specializing in the study of World War I and Vietnam, Dr. Wiest has served as a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst in the United Kingdom and as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Warfighting Strategy in the United States Air Force Air War College. Since 1992 Dr. Wiest has been active in international education, leading a study abroad program on World War II to London and Normandy each summer, and developing the award-winning Vietnam Study Abroad Program. Dr. Wiest has published 14 books on various topics in the field of Military History, including Vietnam's Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN (New York University Press), which won the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award; America and the Vietnam War (Routledge Press); Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land (Osprey Press); and Passchendaele and the Royal Navy (Greenwood Press). Additionally Dr. Wiest has appeared in and consulted on several historical documentaries for the History Channel, Granada Television, PBS, the BBC, and for Lucasfilm. Dr. Wiest lives in Hattiesburg with his wife Jill and their three children Abigail, Luke and Wyatt.