Other editions of book My Little War

For eight months in 1970, Captain John Martin served his country in the U.S. Army in South Vietnam. On a typical day, his job was to find and kill Vietnamese. The next day he might try to save the same Vietnamese with medicine or with hammers and nails. At night, inside the wire, the enemy had a different face—drunks, drug addicts, assassins and spies.Yet the “little war” John battled for decades at home was even more dangerous, destructive and difficult to understand than the one he'd left behind in Vietnam.Even today, countless lives are lost to wars that many veterans fight alone—little wars that begin when tours of duty end. This is the candid story of John’s two wars and the people who helped him survive.