A Would-Be Adventurist's Quest for Combat: Experiences of a US Army Draftee during LBJ's Vietnam Buildup

In September 1966, at the age of twenty-four, Dalton Henson was drafted into the US Army at the height of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam buildup that would increase to five hundred thousand the number of US military personnel in the country. Henson, who had held a draft-exempt status up until then-having been a college student and then a schoolteacher (athletic coach for one year)-took basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, then was stationed at a military reservation in California for nine months and then volunteered to be sent to Vietnam. Being much under the influence of Ernest Hemingway's fiction, he was certain that experiencing combat would be the ultimate adventure, and he continued volunteering to try to place himself in combat situations. This fact-based novel recounts his experiences as he travels around the combat-torn nation at the height of the Tet Offensive.