Absolution, Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 22nd Infantry

This is a revised and expanded 2nd edition of Absolution, Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 22nd Infantry. Absolution is a story of horror and of love, based upon the experiences of the author during the Vietnam War. Between 1960 and 1975, hundreds of thousands of young men, most of them barely teenagers, were thrust into the barbarity of an Asian civil war. They were inadequately trained for jungle warfare, and initially armed with a defective weapon, so they acquired their killer skills by instinct and imagination. Transformed by necessity, these genteel sons quickly became the brutal gladiators that their government expected them to be. For the foot soldier in Vietnam, death by any means was the ultimate objective. What s your body count? Commanders asked their soldiers each evening, as if a scorecard named the winner. From that shortsighted viewpoint emerged a legion of men, struggling with an even greater battle, personal and private. It was a moral conflict that only those who have taken another life can comprehend. Then, undermining their gallant service, a powerful and biased news media created a myth that quickly spread across America. They said that the Vietnam-era soldier was a misfit; a perverse example of a military machine gone awry, wreaking havoc upon innocent civilians. Soon after the fighting was done, someone coined a new phrase: The only war we ever lost, they said. They want you to believe that the soldier lost the war, when, in fact, he lost only his youth, his innocence and many of his friends. These Vietnam Veterans were some of the finest soldiers that ever served America.