Book Information:

For many, many years, so many people who know my entire life story and have seen the youtube video “The Face of War: Vietnam, 1969-1970” have told me I cannot leave without putting that story down in a book.  That youtube video has now been seen by 345,000 people.

It was not until the summer of 2023 that I met a guy with my same last name—an unusual French-Arcadian name—who worked at Amazon, and knew how to do it, that I have recently accomplished this.  It is a story about a very painful childhood with a major facial birth defect having me get deeply involved with religion thinking i was going to become a priest, doing very poorly in school, turning the corner at the end of high school and getting admitted into one of the finest institutions of higher public education to be admitted after only three years in undergrad to one of the top medical schools in the country…only to fall in love with a classmate, discarding all religion, and get kicked out of medical school at the end of the two first years of that medical school for wearing blue jeans when everyone else was in a suit coat.   

I was drafted the next day in a pre- planned move by the faculty, then winning a green beret, written up in an article in the June 1970 readers digest entitled “Beyond The  Call of Duty in Vietnam” four and a half four years later only to be readmitted for his heroism 8 days out of a hospital, south Vietnam, and the US army right here at Fort Lewis, Washington, to return to that same medical school in a suit coat to start off from the beginning on day one.   Everyone else was wearing blue jeans.

Repeating the first 2 really hard years of medical school.  The dean who had kicked me out had retired and was replaced with a new Dean who gave us the welcoming address on how we had to take care of everybody regardless of race, color, or creed.  After his short welcoming address during the initial 10 minute break before medical school began someone walked up to the stage and took the vacated microphone and stated “i have a telegram to mail off to the Pentagon” and it read that they the class of 1974 of the university of Michigan Medical School, “would never serve in Vietnam.”  Then I watched almost everyone in the room get up and sign it. 

That was my home coming. I never saw anything to make me believe in that war.  The worst mistake in American foreign policy in the history of this country.  Only the kid next to me, usually without all their wealth and privileges just as I once had had, condemned to go there in which 58000 of us  died in a futile civil war for a government who could not get its own young men to die along with us condemned to serve in it.  The tittle of the book, coming out on Amazon sometime in the early fall of 2025 is “A Terrible Beauty: The Nineteen Sixties And The Vietnam War As Seen From Both Sides.”