Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us (A Newsweek book)

There were no homecoming parades for the million men and women who served in the longest war America ever fought...the only war it has ever lost. This is a book about 65 of those nearly forgotten men who soldiered in the late 1960s in a gook-hunting, dirt-eating, dog-soldiering infantry unit called Charlie Company.

They were boys then, 19 or 20 years old on the average. The army snatched them up out of small towns, suited them up as soldiers and sent them off to a place they could not locate on a map to fight a war they did not understand.

CHARLIE COMPANY is not a military history. It is not a record of battles or a moral commentary. It is instead a chess game viewed by the pawns. It is a collective memoir of the war and the homecoming, filtered through time and pain, anger and guilt, bitterness and forgetfulness.