The Offering

New York: W. Morrow, 1987. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 25 cm. 305, [5] pages. Glossary. Erasure residue on fep. Tom Carhart, Ph.D., graduated from West Point in 1966 and subsequently served as an infantry platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam and as an Advisor to the South Vietnamese forces. He was awarded two Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in combat. After teaching French at West Point, he left the Army and earned a law degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He subsequently served as editor of "European Taxation," a journal published by The International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Upon returning to the United States, Tom studied economics at the Rand Graduate School while working for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, CA. He then returned to Europe as an international corporate lawyer at the Archibald law firm in Brussels representing multinational corporations before the European Economic Community. In later years, Tom again worked for the Army as a civilian policy analyst and historian. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Carhart was fighting in Vietnam tin 1967 and like many servicemen felt it was a duty to risk his life for his country. He discovered not only the horrors of jungle warfare but also the dangers of being given orders by superiors unfamiliar with a situation on the battlefield. He was briefly in Saigon, then was an adviser in the Mekong Delta, where he went on what he terms "search-and-avoid'' missions, allegedly to find Vietcong but actually designed not to encounter the enemy. Carhart's produces a rounded picture of the futility of the struggle. This autobiographical account of a West Point graduate who found himself in a combat zone in Vietnam twenty-four hours after saying farewell to his parents, describes how the young idealist came to grips with the political realities of the Vietnam War. The Offering is a first-hand, narrative account of Tom Carhart's year in Vietnam (December, 1967 through December, 1968). As a young lieutenant fresh out of West Point, Tom joined the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. The Offering takes its reader through Tom's experience as an infantry platoon leader in the jungles of Vietnam, as commander of the Tiger Force — a long range reconnaissance platoon (LRRP) — as a participant in the CIA-backed Phoenix program, as an advisor to South Vietnamese troops, and as an American soldier whose French was good enough for him to gain access to the well-established French community in Saigon.