Snakes, Rain and the Tet Offensive, War Stories with Photos

Snakes, Rain and the Tet Offensive: War Stories With Photos gives the reader a unique, year long look into the Viet Nam war experience. Based off 500 color slides taken by the author, along with 50 letters home, the book is factual, highly detailed, occasionally humorous, and sometimes painful to read and see. All the pain, joy, terror, and comradeship is on display, as told from the perspective of a combat engineer, caught up in deadly events not of his own making.

In December 1967, when the Tet Offensive began, the author was helping build a Special Forces base camp in the path of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The military strategy was to put a plug in the southern end of the trail, preventing the North Vietnamese easy access to Saigon.

The resulting 77-day clash between the Special Forces protecting the combat engineers and the North Vietnamese Army flowing through the jungle around the camp during the Tet Offensive is told here in riveting photographic detail.

The development of frustrated combat engineers attacking their own Army officers, nicknamed “fragging,” and the constant potential of a sudden death from land mines, ambushes, and mortar attacks provide a backdrop for the psychological disintegration of the author as he rides his road grader around the rural countryside surrounding Tay Ninh, repairing the roads and simply trying to stay alive.

Like a TV documentary in book form, 280 large format color photos and 35,000 words describe and display not only the fire fights and ambushes the combat engineers experienced, but the day-to-day operations of repairing roads, storage yards, company areas, and forward fire bases.