Southlands Snuffys

If looking for a grand history of the Vietnam War written in flowing prose then best to keep on looking for that's not what this is. "Southlands Snuffys" is about truth as lived, mud, sweat, bad rations, busted radios and busted morals, and the strange brotherhood that grows out of wars confusing mess. It's about South Vietnam's Delta region from '66 to '68, and the pages are snapshots from that time: the good, the bad, and the plain weird. No heroics, no big speeches, no blind patriotism, just about ordinary guys trying to do a job, day in and day out, and always just trying to stay alive.

You'll meet the real characters that served: the jokers, the screw-ups, the lifers, the burnouts, the good, the bad, and the downright nasty, each with their own way of coping with boredom and fear. You'll read how they made sense of the chaos, how they found humor in the worst places, and how the Delta itself could go from beautiful to deadly in a heartbeat. There is no sugarcoating anything including language for war is ugly, but it's also absurd, and sometimes there was just laughter to keep a dude from losing his mind.

There's no tidy beginning or end here for real life isn't a novel, it's a mass of untidy events and so war life in the Southland of Vietnam also worked that way. Therefore, every chapter is a piece of life's puzzle, one more short story about what it was really like to be a small cog in a big, grinding machine. Some folks call it "filling a gap in the literature." but it is just to tell it straight so that the next guy who wonders what it was like gets the honest answer. That's all.