Xin Loi, Viet Nam: Thirty-One Months of War: A Soldier's Memoir Mass market paperbound - 2005

First line

Anthracite coal country, hard coal and hard times, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, is where I'm from.

From the jacket flap

No one in Vietnam had to tell door gunner and gunship crew chief Al Sever that the odds didn't look good. He volunteered for the job well aware that hanging out of slow-moving choppers over hot LZs blazing with enemy fire was not conducive to a long life. But that wasn't going to stop Specialist Sever.
From Da Nang to Cu Chi and the Mekong Delta, Sever spent thirty-one months in Vietnam, fighting in eleven of the war's sixteen campaigns. Every morning when his gunship lifted off, often to the clacking and muzzle flashes of AK-47s hidden in the dawn fog, Sever knew he might not return. This raw, gritty, gut-wrenching firsthand account of American boys fighting and dying in Vietnam captures all the hell, horror, and heroism of that tragic war.

Media reviews

“A grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War by a good soldier.”
–DAVID HACKWORTH

“Xin Loi, Viet Nam lays it all on the line. . . . A story that every reader who wants to feel part of the battles he fought should know.”
–WILLIAM R. PHILLIPS, author of Night of the Silver Stars: The Battle of Lang Vei

Citations

• Ingram Paperback Advance, 03/01/2005, Page 63