Authors blog

  The V.C. for Lunch Bunch is a published Vietnam War memoir that does something increasingly rare in modern war literature: it preserves the small, ordinary truths that time usually erases. Rather than compressing service into highlight moments or dramatic conclusions, the book records the texture of a year lived inside Vietnam day by day, task by task, thought by thought. This is not a memoir built around a single defining incident. It is built around accumulation. From the first pages, the reader is placed inside transition rather than action. The journey to Vietnam unfolds slowly, moving across the Pacific through unfamiliar places and long hours of reflection. The author captures the mental state of leaving one life without yet arriving in another a liminal space marked by fatigue, resignation, and quiet awareness that nothing will feel normal for a long time. When the narrative reaches Vietnam, it does not rush toward combat. Instead, it settles into place. Assigned to ...

  One of the most striking things about The V.C. for Lunch Bunch is how quietly it dismantles our assumptions about what a Vietnam memoir should look like. There is no rush toward spectacle, no attempt to compress a year into a handful of defining moments. Instead, the book unfolds through labor, through the ordinary, repetitive, often overlooked work that sustained the war long after the speeches were made and the strategies debated. This memoir is built from place. Cam Ranh Bay is not a backdrop; it is an environment that presses itself into every page. The harbor, the piers, the aging ships still pressed into service decades after World War II, the motor pools, the dusty roads, and the isolated guard posts all shape the rhythm of the narrative. The war is not abstract here. It has weight, heat, noise, and smell. It is something you move through physically and mentally every day. What emerges is a portrait of Vietnam rarely captured in popular memory: a war maintained by s...