SOME DETAILS ON MY NEXT BOOK
My Bob Burke action adventure series has become very popular with my readers. Call me stupid, but I’m temporarily setting it aside to finish something that has become a bit more important to me in recent years. I know, I know; you never jump off a winning horse, but sometimes you’ve got to follow your passion.
In my case, that’s the Vietnam War. If your lived in the 1960s and 70s, it was the 800-pound gorilla in the room, one that effected every facet of our 
lives. Over 2.7 million of us served, 304,000 were wounded, 75,000 severely disabled, and over 58,220 of our brothers and sisters died there.
Unfortunately, all that most of our kids and grand kids know about that war is what they see in the Oliver Stone movie, Platoon, or in the handful of better novels, all of which center on an infantry unit in the jungle on the Cambodian border in 1968. That was Oliver’s war. He was there, bless his Hollywood heart, but it wasn’t mine. In fact, there were hundreds of different wars, depending on the year you were there, the service you were in, your branch, location, job, and your rank.
What I’m writing is not a war book; rather, it is a very personal look at the men and women who served there. The title is “Our Vietnam Wars.”Through in-depth interviews with 100 vets, I hope to capture the diversity of their experience “in country,” in photos and 3-5-page vignettes, and touch on what they did before and after the war, and how it effected them. I now have 89 interviews finished and I think they are fascinating stories.
We are all old and gray now, pushing 70, and beset by a myriad of illnesses, but I hope this book will show what we saw and felt there. Part of the urgency to tell our stories is Agent Orange. It’s killing us off in increasing numbers now, and as many now say, “They didn’t get us back then, but they are doing a first-class job of it now.”
I hope to have this book out by year’s end. I’ll keep you posted on my progress and when you should expect to see it. I think it will be a great read.
And if any of you are Vietnam vets, drop me a note at BurkesRevenge468@gmail.com I’m not finished writing, and I could still use a few more good stories.
Bill Brown
