Deros Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle

DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle presents a unique fictional montage of the war and postwar experiences of Vietnam support troops. Structurally based on Ernest Hemingways In Our Time DEROS Vietnam (the acronym stands for Date Eligible for Return from Over Seas) is a riveting collection of 16 short stories and 16 interlinears about the GIs who battled boredom racial tensions the military brass drugs alcohol--and occasionally the enemy. 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 U. S. Army Headquarters near Saigon in 1970-71 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.