In February 1967, Martin Rudow arrived in Vietnam's Mekong Delta as an infantry medic with the Riverine Force—a reluctant draftee, a race-walking academic, and a man who was already skeptical about what his country was doing there. Over the next five months, he patched up wounded GIs and innocent civilians alike, survived harrowing combat and the grinding absurdity of military bureaucracy, and wrote it all down in letters home that would sit unread in a box for nearly sixty years.

This memoir is built around those letters, giving an immediacy that reconstructed memory alone cannot provide—the unfiltered voice of a young man in the middle of something he didn't choose and couldn't quite believe. The result is funny, dark, and at times shocking: Catch-22's absurdist eye applied to events that were entirely real. So real that they ended with serious wounds in an unforgettably tragic sequence in a nameless Vietnam village.

First-person accounts of the Riverine Force are rare. First-person accounts with a documentary record like this one are rarer still. For readers of Tim O'Brien and Karl Marlantes, and for anyone who wants to understand what the Vietnam War felt like from the inside—not from command, not from politics, but from the mud—this delivers something close to the real thing itself.