Lost Behind Enemy Lines: A Vietnam Veteran's True Story of Survival and the Revelation of Physical and Spiritual Warfare

CHAPTER 1

A RANGER IN VIETNAM

BY THE END of 1967, the United States had been sup porting an escalating war in South Vietnam for four years with little progress of winning or ending the war. Thousands of United States soldiers had been killed, and hundreds of thousands more had been wounded supporting South Vietnam’s civil war for independence against North Vietnam’s invading Regular Army and rebels from South Vietnam, called Viet Cong. North Vietnam was heavily supported by two Communist countries, China and Russia.

In 1967 and 1968, many citizens in the United States were protesting against the war in Vietnam. They wanted the government to withdraw and get out. Other citizens supported the war, wanting our government to stay and defeat communism from expanding in Southeast Asia by supporting and establishing a democratic government in South Vietnam.

This disagreement peaked and erupted into emotional and occasionally violent protest on hundreds of college campuses and in cities throughout the United States.

This was a serious and life-changing event for veterans who had spent a year away from family and loved ones and survived the horrors of Vietnam—only to return home and, instead of being welcomed and appreciated when they arrived, were spit on, ridiculed, and called names by some who opposed the war.

On January 31, 1968, an estimated 100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched the Tet Offensive, a coordinated series of vicious attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. During this Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year holiday called Tet), the United States Embassy in South Vietnam’s capital city of Saigon was overrun by a platoon of Viet Cong enemy soldiers. This attack stunned U.S. and international observers, who saw images of the carnage broadcast on television as it occurred.

North Vietnam achieved a strategic victory with the 1968 Tet Offensive, as the attacks marked a turning point in the Vietnam War and the beginning of the slow, painful American withdrawal from Southeast