50 Years After Vietnam: Lessons and Letters from the War I Hated Fighting

by Bill Lord

Bill Lord’s new book 50 Years After Vietnam is the irreverent but poignant memoir of a young draftee. Lord and his fellow soldiers were 19 and 20 year-olds fighting on the front lines in 1968. The country that sent them there had erupted in violence after the Tet Offensive and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. As casualties mounted in Vietnam and the anti-war movement grew back home, Americans increasingly directed their anger at the very soldiers who were fighting the war.

“We were orphans out there on the battlefield,” Lord writes. “No one could tell us what we were fighting for and many of our fellow Americans had begun to hate us.”

50 Years After Vietnam features excerpts from the letters Lord wrote home from the war, which became increasingly cynical and fearful as his time in Vietnam continued. The book provides a brutally honest assessment of what these young soldiers, who were little more than children at the time, did to survive.

224 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 10, 2018

Reviews

[Michael Angelo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bill Lord admits when he was called upon to help save other American soldiers lives (your 16,17,18 year old sons and brothers) who were under attack and badly needed help to survive from being killed by the enemy, Bill Coward Lord used his position to by his own words to tell soldiers he controlled to fire their guns in the air to fake that they were under attack and tell commanding officers that they couldn't go help his fellow Americans soldiers who were under fire and needed help to be saved. He admitted he lied about being under fire so he and his soldiers wouldn't have to go and help save other American lives when he could have.
He said he hoped that statue of limitations had ran out for what he did so he couldn't be Prosecuted for the deaths of other American soldiers who obviously died due to his lies and cowardness. Plausible deniability he used. The same as Hunter Biden said he uses to keep from getting arrested for breaking laws in the Ukraine.
Bill Lord is a Coward that needs to be Prosecuted for the deaths of American soldiers.

[Lhernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tells Bill Lord's story from the perspectives of being there as a not-old-enough-to-drink young man via his letters home, and looking back 50 years later, having retired from a successful career, having raised a wonderful family. He is able to capture all that was wrong with insight and compassion, so though the subject matter is hard, the book was not. I was engrossed throughout, and am happy to have learned more about the conflict, and about the author.