The Boys of 67, Andrew Wiest
The Boys of 67, Andrew Wiest
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The Boys of 67
Charlie Companys War in Vietnam

Author: Andrew Wiest

Narrator: William Hughes

Unabridged: 15 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/01/2013


Synopsis

When the 160 men of Charlie Company (4th Battalion/47th Infantry Regiment/9th Infantry Division) were drafted by the US Army in May 1966, they were part of the wave of conscription that would swell the American military to eighty thousand combat troops in Vietnam by the height of the war in 1968. In the spring of 1966 the war was still popular, and the draftees of Charlie Company saw their service as a rite of passage. But by December 1967, when the company returned home, only thirty men were not casualtiesand they were among the first veterans of the war to be spit on and harassed by war protesters as they arrived back home. In The Boys of 67, Andrew Wiest, the award-winning author of Vietnams Forgotten Army and The Vietnam War 1956-1975, examines the experiences of a company from the only division in the Vietnam era to train and deploy together in similar fashion to World War IIs famous 101st Airborne Division. Wiest interviewed more than fifty officers and enlisted men who served with Charlie Company, including the surviving platoon leaders and both of the companys commanders. In addition, he interviewed fifteen family members of Charlie Company veterans, including wives, children, parents, and siblings. Wiest also had access to personal papers, collections of letters, a diary, an abundance of newspaper clippings, training notebooks, field manuals, condolence letters, and photographs from before, during, and after the conflict. As Wiest shows, the fighting that Charlie Company saw in 1967 was nearly as bloody as many of the better publicized battles, including the infamous battles of the Ia Drang Valley and Hamburger Hill. As a result, many of the surviving members of Charlie Company came home with what the military now recognizes as post-traumatic stress disordera diagnosis that was not recognized until the late 1970s and was not widely treated until the 1980s. Only recently, after more than forty years, have many members of Charlie Company achieved any real and sustained relief from their suffering.

About Andrew Wiest

Dr. Andrew Wiest is University Distinguished Professor of History and the founding director of the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. Specializing in the study of World War I and Vietnam, he has served as a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Warfighting Strategy in the United States Air Force Air War College.Wiest’s titles include Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN (New York University), which won the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award, Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land (Osprey), and The Boys of ’67 (Osprey), which was the basis for the Emmy nominated National Geographic Channel documentary Brothers in War. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi with his wife Jill and their three children Abigail, Luke, and Wyatt.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jerry on August 15, 2019

As a former member of the 1st Brigade (2/39th Infantry) of the 9th Infantry Division who completed Basic Training, Advanced Individual Training and Basic Unit Training at Fort Riley Kansas, this book brings back a lot of memories. Some of them good and some bad. If you want to know what it was like......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on February 28, 2020

A group biography is always a difficult book to write well, especially when the group is comprised of over a hundred men that have been combined into a military unit. Following the lives and deaths of individuals can be challenging. Within The Boys of ’67 some of the men merge in identity along the......more

Goodreads review by Larry on December 31, 2016

There are a bunch of books about Vietnam and I have read quite a few of them. But this is the new one published in 2012 and as best I can remember it is a little bit different than most that I have read. This book has a bit of a preamble then it has the war and then it has after the war. It follows a......more

Goodreads review by Fred on October 20, 2016

If you want to honor Veterans' Day this November 11, skip the camouflage jersey and read this book. If you want to know what it was like to be in combat in Vietnam, read this book. If you want to know what it was like to be drafted, taken away from your regular life in 1966 and put into Charlie Comp......more

Goodreads review by Nancy on October 03, 2012

this is the short discussion; if you want a longer one,click on through. I have been forever fascinated with the Vietnam War -- most especially with the politics and behind-the-scene machinations behind America's involvement, but also with the growth and outright explosion of US opposition to the w......more