Vietnam a Memoir

This third volume, Mekong Mud Soldier, begins with bureaucracy: the author's experience as a staff officer, or more irreverently, as a rear echelon flunky. The action heats up after he is sent as an advisor to a Vietnamese unit in the wet Mekong Delta. The advisory business is frustrating and sometimes dangerous. Ideally, it should be limited to volunteers, but in the rush to Vietnamize the war in the late 1960s, many U.S. officers and NCOs unhappily found themselves in duties they were only minimally prepared for.