The journey of the book

Writing Where is Crusader Rabbit Now That We Really Need Him? has been a long journey. While taking ROTC in college I was advised to enlist in the Regular Army, for doing so, would guarantee my first assignment and branch choice. Majoring in German, I thought Military Intelligence and a government sponsored trip to Germany would not only be a great way to avoid Vietnam, but would be a good time. I took the advice and was commissioned as a Regular Army second lieutenant with a branch of MI. Then the shoe dropped: Regular Army, non-combat branch officers, had to serve a year in the infantry, but not to worry, I would still go to Germany where my then fluent knowledge of German would be put to good use. I could envision myself gliding up and down the Autobahn in my new Porsche.
On the day of graduation from the Infantry Officer Basic Course, my orders were changed to Ft. Hood, TX. That base, needless to say, had not been on my choice of places to go. From November 1968 to April of 1969 I was a platoon leader in the 1st Armored Division, commanding a platoon of Vietnam returnees, many of whom were suffering PTSD, and many of whom were escaping the crushing boredom and loneliness of the place with drugs.
In April of 1969, I received orders late one Sunday afternoon advising me that I would be going to the Jungle Operations Training Center in the Panama Canal Zone en route to the RVN with a Military Occupational Specialty of 1542, small tactical unit leader. Needless to say the dreams of the Porsche evaporated.
Realizing that, for better or worse, I was about to embark upon something far larger than myself that would appear in history books in the future, I began to keep a journal. The opening paragraph of Where is Crusader, is a verbatim copy of what I wrote shortly after taking off from Oakland, CA. I maintained the journal until the constant soaking from river crossings and monsoon rains destroyed the remaining pages.
In 1973, now out of the Army and teaching school, I began to reconstruct the journal and what I remembered. For four years I typed it all down on the back of scrap paper I rescued from the school’s trash bin. Once it was done, it made several moves and eventually it was dragged out of the attic and put on a computer disk.
My daughter, Heather, decided that I should publish it, and for Christmas 2008, presented me with the first copy.
Everything in this book actually happened. However, I have changed the names, even though in some cases I had permission to use them. In some cases, several people have been morphed into one character, but it’s all true, folks. It is my hope that the good men, and the majority were super, that I served with will see themselves and take pride in what they were able to accomplish and adapt to.