My War in the Jungle
The Long-Delayed Memoir of a Marine Lieutenant in Vietnam 1968–69
by
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Preface This book began as ten or so typewritten pages many years ago. I wrote those pages trying to face a time I would sooner leave behind—to try to lay quiet the terrors of the past. A couple of old Marines I knew looked it over and told me to keep going. I have done so, in fits and starts, over the last fifteen years. It hasn’t been easy. Vietnam veterans who read it now may also find it not easy. Still, writing about what happened fifty years ago has been cleansing to some degree. Here I attempt to describe the action and the stillness, the aloneness and the camaraderie, the monotony and the excitement, the fear and the elation, the love and the hatred, and the overall misery involved in close combat. It was a time of life and death. I have never thought that this story has been told—not my story necessarily, but the account of what it was like fighting toe-to-toe against a well-trained, well-supplied and well-motivated force in a jungle of almost impenetrable darkness. Hollywood and other authors of fiction and nonfiction have visited and revisited Vietnam over and over, but I don’t think I have seen the war I fought either on the screen or in print. I believe the story, as I and the brave men who served with me experienced it, is worth telling. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen. —Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried And while this is a memoir, it depends on the memory of things long past. If you see something you think is not factual, it is history to me. Personal war stories are invariably untrue, because the rush of adrenalin followed by the cleansing passage of time rewrites our own histories. Memories have no meaning. Who can say what really happened on any given day in close combat fifty years ago? The names here are made up, but if you see yourself, I mean for it reflect positively, except for one person, about whom I simply present facts. Opinions are reserved for politicians.
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About the Book
This memoir tells the story of a Marine rifle platoon commander’s time in the mountainous jungle of the northernmost province of the then Republic of Vietnam. While tasked with fighting the enemy, G.M. Davis made some great friends … but saw too much death. The author tracks his tour of duty in the jungle, leading Marines not against the Viet Cong but against the North Vietnamese Army, a well-trained and well-supplied professional army dedicated to unifying the two Vietnams. The heat, the worry, the responsibility and the daily grind took a toll amid firefights, battles, victory, and loss. Contact with the enemy was frequent, and the chaos of even a small fight was daunting. Davis also examines the political reality of the time, arguing that the war was lost before it began, but that the nation kept fighting and losing soldiers so politicians could look strong and keep their jobs. Looking back at the war, he concludes it was a waste of lives and treasure.
About the Author
G. M. Davis was commissioned a second lieutenant of Marines on Nov. 9, 1967. Less than a year later, he arrived in Vietnam to lead a rifle platoon against the North Vietnamese Army. Upon returning home, he graduated from the University of Florida College of Law, and practiced law in Pensacola, Florida, where he settled in 1973. He was appointed to the federal bench as a United States Magistrate Judge in 1996 and, although now retired, still serves on recall when requested by the court. He is still a Marine.