Well, let's see...I don't want to get too serious here and a lot of this stuff has been covered multiple times, I think people rightly are starting to roll their eyes when I talk about Vietnam. I was an indifferent student and after a couple of years underperforming and feeling generally shitty about it, I fell in with a rough crowd and the Marine Corps seemed like a good idea. I went to Vietnam because that's where they sent me. I'll include a slightly rewritten post wherein I describe my service experience, it answers some of your questions. 'Did you like it there?' I don't know how to answer that question. I was an 0844,0846 and finally an 0848 but mostly 0846. Marine forward observers are officers and they have two radio operators and a sergeant (scout observer) and to maximize the coverage the team can give the infantry unit to which they are assigned the team is typically split in half with the lieutenant taking one radio operator and the sergeant taking the other and operating as an 'alpha team' with the same call sign followed by the 'alpha' designation. That is what I did mostly. I know this is more detail than you want and it probably isn't too interesting. Why two tours? Victim of circumstance. Young Marines are never cynics. Early on, I was a motivated, earnest kid who believed only the best for myself and the 'mission'. I was generally pretty good at my job and believed I would be safer if I was making as many decisions as possible. I picked up rank as fast as I could. In the early days it was pretty quiet, there were well under a hundred thousand Americans in Vietnam when I got there (Feb. '66), I didn't hear a gunshot that I took personally for about two months, I didn't see my first dead body for almost three. But it accelerated pretty quickly after that. Sniper took a couple of shots at me and a friend on a lonely stretch of road. We stopped, got out and went after him. hard to believe. Looking back I can't believe we were that dumb. Just a couple of kids. Word was, in my MOS, I could expect to be back within 90 days of my first rotation (which would have been Mar. '67). I could see the situation was getting less and less controllable. I was presently with a unit (5th Marines) that was aggressive, well run and operating in an area we (the unit) knew well. If I went home and rotated back, I would be taking my chances with where and to whom I was assigned. Extend my tour with 5th Marines and stay with friends or go home and roll the dice. I extended for a year. Circumstances. In mid-June ('66) our position is overrun, stroke of midnight, night of the 19th/morning of the 20th. fight lasts four and a half hours, Sergeant Wilder kills a guy with his bare hands, strangles him while yelling for someone to help him, Ed Claybin is wounded and falls near Eddie Vasquez and has to watch him die, it haunts him to this day, a grenade lands near him but he can't call out so he drags himself over on top of it and refuses to be moved when it fails to go off. A corpsman stays right with him trying to stem the bleeding while everybody stays clear trying to decide what to do. The fight continues, a guy, barefoot and still in his underwear climbs up on an amtrak and starts up the fifty caliber machine gun to stop the VC in the wire, he burns up the barrel, I carry another one out to him, I have to cross some open ground, I'm scared shitless, I stay by the amtrak with another guy, Rick LeClair from Reno, we start carrying ammo for the fifty, they decide to roll Ed off the grenade and throw a sandbag on it, it works. Ed is medivac'ed and faces seven back surgeries and four knee surgeries and still has flashbacks. He was awarded the Navy Cross. The kid in his underwear on the amtrak is awarded the Silver Star. By dawn the fight was mostly over. We had 36 bodies in our position and in our wire and 36 more on the trail outside our wire. We had six KIA's and 41 WIA's. By the end of '66 the count was up to 400,000 Americans in-country, we were taking casualties three or four days a week, less sleep, less hot food and more 'entertainment'. Irony strikes. I'm reassigned to another unit anyway. I kept a calendar like most guys. Marked each day off every morning, rain or shine. Got to be a ritual. Spring of the second year I was wounded. Spent some time in the rear while my leg got strong. I picked up Captain Browne when I went back to the field. He was the best. By April we're getting shot at every single day, small arms, mortars, artillery from N.Vietnam, ambushes, automatic weapons, RPG's, in July we run into flamethrowers for the first time, route 561 ambush, they blew fucking bugles for recall. bugles. 85 KIA's in one morning. The casualties are coming fast and furious, started standing-in to morning staff meetings cause we were running out of young lieutenants, I was an E-5, a buck sergeant, and I'm standing in these morning briefings because we don't have enough officers left. An incoming artillery round glances off a tank turret and kills six men running for a slit trench, Captain Browne is one of them. Nobody's sleeping, I'm down to about three hours in twenty four, my body weight's down to 149. I'm 6'1". A laundry list of names goes here. A long list. Late August is quiet. We think we've seen the worst. We hadn't. September is the back breaker. Rain like you can't believe and in-coming every single day, lots of it, hammering us. A thousand rounds a day into Con Thien, a position about the size of a baseball field. A thousand rounds. Lt. Babers and Sgt Ball and six other guys drown trying to withdraw from the Cam Lo bridge in the middle of the night. North face of Con Thien is 'probed' by four hundred North Vietnamese regulars, the fight lasts nine hours, we call for artillery on the wire and in the compound. Lt. Bennett and another guy is killed by the back blast of a 106mm recoilless rifle, three guys are blown up by an RPG attack on the road leading into our position, I see it, I see the NVA, five guys, running for the treeline but they're gone before we can do anything. I keep marking the days off my calendar. We're all focused on getting to the holidays, because that's usually a relatively quiet time. TET is right around the corner. We don't see that coming either. SF's down the road at Lang Vei are overrun by tanks. Tanks and more flamethrowers. I know if I get to the end of this tour, I won't come back. I know what luck is and I know my string is long past due. My position skates TET, most everybody gets hit but we get through with a little half-assed probe. They start scooping up available bodies for Hue, 200 of us fly out of Dong Ha in helicopters in the second week of February, we land in an abandoned soccer stadium, find our way through streets choked with debris and dead livestock and cross the Perfume River in a mike boat full of shrapnel holes, standing in six inches of water. By my count I'm down to 35 days and a wake up. I'm starting to pray. Still marking my calendar. Ten days at the Citadel. At one point the gunfire is so intense ammo resupply is coming in every hour and it isn't enough. 200 guys I came down with took 41 KIAs and maybe a hundred WIAs'. I haven't had my boots off in a week. I'm afraid to look at my feet. We get back to the northern Quang Tri March 1. Young lieutenant comes back from R&R and sees me and holds out his hand and says, 'What are you doing here?' I don't know what he's talking about. I say, 'What?' He says, 'They're looking for you in the rear, you can go home.' My calendar says I've still got five days to go. Life is a stream, it slows down and gets wider as you get old, but it doesn't stop and wait for you. I guess I'm an adult. I couldn't really give you much of an overview of my life except to say I think I'm a better person than I was. Technically, my background isn't in manufaturing per se, but more on the management side (that sounds pretty pretentious, I know). Manufacturing doesn't have much of a future in America, at least not in the near-term. Globalization will allow manufaturers to chase the labor dollar and in our lifetime it won't be back here. I've never seen a Michael Moore film.