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Ordinary Lives: Platoon 1005 and the Vietnam War
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Ordinary Lives: Platoon 1005 and the Vietnam War Hardcover - 1999

by W.D. Ehrhart

  • Used
  • Good
  • Hardcover

Description

Used hardcover in Good condition. Interior pages are clean and unmarked. Some edge wear to the dust jacket, including a few small nicks and creases. Overall in fine reading condition, and very good if not for the wear to the dust jacket.Good
Used - Good
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Details

  • Title Ordinary Lives: Platoon 1005 and the Vietnam War
  • Author W.D. Ehrhart
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition (1st Edition)
  • Condition Used - Good
  • Pages 334
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Temple University Press, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
  • Date 1999-04
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Features Illustrated
  • Bookseller's Inventory # BX327-RRNO-OO-1.77
  • ISBN 9781566396745 / 1566396743
  • Weight 1.3 lbs (0.59 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.23 x 6.27 x 1.04 in (23.44 x 15.93 x 2.64 cm)
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 1960's
    • Chronological Period: 1970's
    • Chronological Period: 1950-1999
    • Cultural Region: Southeast Asian
  • Library of Congress subjects Marines - United States, Vietnam War, 1961-1975 - Veterans - United
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 98-39963
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

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From the jacket flap

In the summer of 1966, in the middle of the Vietnam War, eighty young volunteers arrived at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot on Parris Island, South Carolina, from all over the eastern United States. For the next eight weeks, as Platoon 1005, they endured one of the most intense basic training programs ever devised. Parris Island was not a place for idle conversation or social gatherings, and these men remained from start to finish almost complete strangers. W. D. Ehrhart did get to know one Marine, his bunkmate John Harris, who quietly shared his sweetheart's letters. He was a friend who, Ehrhart learned almost thirty years later, died in Vietnam in 1967.

In 1993, Ehrhart began what became a five-year search for the men of his platoon. Who were these men alongside whom he trained? Why had they joined the Marines at a time when being sent to war was almost a certainty? What do they think of the war and of the country that sent them to fight it? What does the Corps mean to them? What Ehrhart learned offers an extraordinary window into the complexities of the Vietnam Generation and the United States of America then and now.

Drawing from military records and family accounts as well as interviews -- some of which Ehrhart held in such active secondary roles as dairy farmhand, fishing companion, and impromptu guest at a family wedding -- this book records the more than thirty-year journey that each man took after boot-camp graduation on August 12, 1966. Photos of the men, both then and now, accompany the profiles. Their stories are diverse, but as Ehrhart says, "It was, in short, history, and each of these men was and is a part of that history.... There are, no doubt, scoundrels and liarsand losers among them, but as a group they have mostly impressed me with their decency and their loyalty and their hard work and their perseverance in the face of hardships and hurdles, the everyday obstacles that make ordinary lives extraordinary".

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Citations

  • Library Journal, 06/01/1999, Page 134

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