Swift Boat Skipper: Stories from the Vietnam War

This book is a memoir, based on the hundreds of pages of letters I wrote my parents during my years in the Navy as well as the diary that I kept in Vietnam.I started writing it in 1979 to counter the despicable depiction of the actions of sailors on Swift Boats and River Patrol Boats in the movie, Apocalypse Now. It was my attempt to tell about the Vietnam War that I knew while serving in Da Nang in 1969–1970.The book is really a coming-of-age story of a callow college graduate whose service, first as an officer on the USS Savage (DER-386), and then as skipper of a Swift Boat turned a boy into a man.Coastal Division 12 Swift Boats patrolled mostly along the coast, but one of our key missions in 1969 was the perilous patrols in the Cua Dai River Basin. Many men were wounded there in the firefights; one of our officers died.The book recounts the great professionalism and courage of Swift Boat sailors but also the gradual disillusionment that many of us felt, as training Vietnamese Navy sailors to take over our Swift Boats supplanted our original mission of winning the War. Read more