Hand Grenades to Hemorrhoids
New Book Depicts the Real Vietnam War
There are no Hollywood-style heroes in Jack Stoddard's book, What Are They Going To Do, Send Me To VIETNAM? What readers will find, however, is a collection of vividly true accounts of a bunch of scared young men thrown into one of this country's most ill-conceived military campaigns on the other side of the globe.
Stoddard arrived in Vietnam in 1968 a green, 22-year-old buck sergeant and after almost three full tours of combat duty, he left a battle-hardened veteran. Now, more than a quarter-century later, his sons want to know what it was like. Their natural curiosity caused him to travel once again into the unbearably hot and humid jungles of southeast Asia of the late 1960s and dredge up long-buried memories. He decided to organize these stories into a book so that others could also learn the truth.
As Retired Brigadier General Tom White says in his foreword, "This book is not about colonels, generals, or politicians. It is about what it was really like to soldier in Vietnam. ...we see the entire Vietnam experiencedays of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror, miserable weather, lonesomenesseverything from hand grenades to hemorrhoids." Stoddard describes what it was like to drive his 50-ton tank, nicknamed the Double Deuce, into war-torn Khe Sanh. He shares the lighter side that even wars can have when tells of the new second lieutenant commanding his tank right into the mud where it slowly disappeared from sight.
Through it all comes an understanding of the love and respect that bound these men together, that created the type of selflessness demonstrated by the young medic who stood up in a blaze of Viet Cong bullets so he could point out the machine gun nest knowing this act of saving his fellow soldiers would be the last thing he would ever do.
Jack Stoddard's father was a career man in the Army and as a result, Jack traveled from base to base, never staying at one place for very long and visiting places like Guam and Italy all before the age of sixteen. Inspired by the military life, he left home at the age of seventeen and joined the Army where he spent the next twenty-two years.
In addition to Vietnam, he was stationed in Korea, Germany, and several different posts in the U.S. He retired at Ft. Hood, Texas, in 1985 with the rank of a Chief Warrant Officer Two, Armorment Tech.
He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, with his second wife, Sue, and their two boys, Christopher and William (Billy), both of whom have a degenerative and terminal disorder called Leigh's Disease which prevents their bodies from producing sufficient energy to run all their organs, including their brains. Jack says his life has come full circle and that he is now engaged in a new kind of war fighting for the rights of the handicapped just as hard as he fought in Vietnam. He's quick to point out, however, that this war is a lot harder because these kids can't fight for themselves
