Path to a Lonely War: A Naval Hospital Corpsman with the Marines in Vietnam, 1965

by Richard W. Schaefer

Overview

Having just turned eighteen and graduated from high school, and living in small-town Nebraska with nothing much to do, young Dick Schaefer joined the Navy on impulse, hoping that by choosing his branch of the military he would have some measure of control over his future. Not fully aware of the increasing military action in Vietnam, Schaefer found himself on a train bound for boot camp in San Diego in late summer, 1962. Schaefer's account of his time at boot camp is wry and rollicking. Upon graduation, he requested and received orders to report to the US Naval Hospital Corps School in San Diego-and found that his choice of study suited him very well. After completing his studies, again on impulse Schaefer requested assignment to Hawai'i, assuming there must be a large naval hospital at Pearl Harbor. In fact, there was no such hospital-and Schaefer was assigned to the Fleet Marine Force. And thus this young naval medical corpsman became assigned to a Marine Corps unit for three years. "Marines and sailors didn't like each other very much. My new tattoo would go over well!" In Spring of 1965 Schaefer's unit boarded a large troop transport ship bound for a six-week stay in Okinawa. Then it was on to South Vietnam as part of the fi rst contingent of American combat forces. Schaefer recounts the terror of that fi rst beach landing, the hollow ache of homesickness, his professionalism in handling injuries both minor and devastating, the tragedy of friendly fi re, and his involvement in Operation Starlite. He also offers his refl ections on American involvement in the war, the reception of the troops as they returned stateside, and his own reintegration into civilian life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682830024
Publisher:	Texas Tech University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2016
Series:	Modern Southeast Asia Series
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Earley won the David Friedman Memorial Prize, and has been a finalist for the AWP New Journals Award (twice), the 2011 Able Muse Write Prize for Fiction, and the Bakeless Literary Prize for Fiction. She holds a BA in Creative Writing and an MFA in Fiction from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her stories and essays have appeared in many publications including Time Out, The Chicago Reader, Outside Magazine, and Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. A novel excerpt, "Backbone", won an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train March 2013 Fiction Open contest.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Christa Donner launched her first solo exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art in 1999 as the first recipient of the Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artist Award. She has since been actively exhibiting, publishing, teaching and curating, using large-scale drawings and small-press publications to explore issues around the human body and other biological forms. Her process often incorporates public projects and collaborations around personal narratives of bodily experience. Christa's work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Colombia, Cyprus, Sweden, Finland, and throughout the United States. Now based in Chicago, Christa teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and harbors a healthy obsession for independent comics and other small-press publications. In 2013 she founded Cultural ReProducers, an online resource and community-based project for and about active cultural workers raising kids. She continues to experiment with the sculptural and narrative properties of ink and paper, and doesn't plan to stop anytime soon.