Vietnam-Perkasie

This new and revised edition of Vietnam-Perkasie, a detailed account of W.D. Ehrhart's 13 months as a Marine in Vietnam, is the only memoir of the war that is written from the point-of-view of the 18-year-old living the experience rather than the voice of the author recollecting the war later in life. There is no wisdom of hindsight, no looking back after the passage of years or decades, no intellectualizing or sensemaking with the benefit of reflection. This is the voice of a teenager finding himself in the midst of a war that makes less and less sense as his time in Vietnam goes on. Ehrhart manages to give the reader the war as he lived it. You know what Ehrhart knows: no more, no less. This book is as close as you will ever get in literature to what that war was like for a young American slogging through the rice fields and villages of an alien land where death was always just a shadow away.

Memoirist, poet, editor, and Marine veteran, W.D. Ehrhart taught English and history at the Haverford School in Haverford, Pennsylvania. The author of twenty books, his prose and poetry have appeared in hundreds of publications including the Los Angeles Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Utne Reader, Reader's Digest, American Poetry Review and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He was a major presence in the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War.