An Anthropologist Goes to the Vietnam War

On 10 May 1968, President Lyndon Johnson activated James Sexton from the U.S. Army Individual Ready Reserve. The machine-signed orders gave him 30 days to withdraw from his second year of graduate school in anthropology at UCLA and report to Ft. Lewis, Washington. Letters and tapes by James and his wife, Marilyn Rex, serve as the basis for their story from 1968 to 1969, focusing on Ft. Lewis, Ft. Belvoir, Cam Ranh Bay, Nha Trang, and the surrounding hamlets and villages during the peak of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.Five out of six of the some 2.5 million military personnel who served in Vietnam were support troops rather than grunts in the field. Because most books on Vietnam are from the perspective of U.S. infantrymen, this book is unique because Part I is from the point of view of a company clerk of Company B, Troop Command, U.S. Army Depot. As a college trained enlisted man, Sexton offers rich insights into the people and culture of Vietnam, as well as many U.S. servicemen, who were sent there to help save them from communism.Parts II and III are from the viewpoint of Marilyn and James' trips to Vietnam in 2004 and 2008, traveling with and interviewing Vietnamese guides in Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Bat Trang, Tam Coc, Hue, Da Nang, Nha Trang, Cam Ranh Bay, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Cu Chi, the Mekong Delta, and Tay Ninh. Maps, photographs, notes, and an appendix enrich the entire story, and an epilogue updates significant events in Vietnam to 2015. Finally, an index enhances searching for key subjects within the text.