DEROS Vietnam

By: Doug Bradley

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Synopsis: DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle presents a unique, fictional montage of the wartime and postwar experiences of Vietnam support troops. Structurally based on Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, this riveting collection of sixteen short stories and sixteen interlinears portrays the GIs who battled boredom, racial tensions, the military brass, drugs, alcohol--and occasionally the enemy. (The acronym DEROS stands for Date Eligible for Return from Over Seas.) From cooks and correspondents to clerks and comptrollers, DEROS Vietnam distills the essence of life for soldiers in the rear during the war and, later, back home in a divided America. Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley, a former army journalist who served in the air-conditioned jungle at US Army Headquarters near Saigon from 1970 to 1971, tells these compelling stories with wit, intensity, and empathy. In doing so, he provides a gateway to a Vietnam experience that has been largely ignored and whose reverberations still echo across America.