DESCRIPTIONS

<p>Those heady days at the Naval Academy in Annapolis just four years earlier now seem so long ago. Here he is, lying face down in a muddy ditch on some remote and forsaken island in the Cua Dai River in Vietnam in the middle of the night. He has been blown off a boat, and is evading capture. Bullets hitting the river water near him as he desperately sought a bit of land, and now wizzing over his head keep him aware that his location is known to his tormentors. He assumes that he will momentarily be dead. He is exhausted, bleeding from wounds, and the mosquitoes seem plentiful enough to carry him away. He can hear the staccato voices of an enemy search party looking for him. He is nearly in tears, wondering if they will simply shoot him, drive a bayonet through his back, or worse, take him captive with years of torture and agony ahead. Within moments they were directly above him. As he holds his breath tightly, he cannot stop his heart from racing wildly. Can they possibly hear that?? He can now even smell them. This surely could be it. </p><br /> <br /><p>This book recounts that night and the other 365 days that the author spent as a U.S. Navy advisor to the Vietnamese Navy Junk Force. Bob Andretta’s assignment in Vietnam turned out to be as dangerous, or even more so, than he had anticipated. For him, it was the best and the worst of experiences. It thrust him into the role more of a Marine than a naval officer. He had to scramble to try to make up for the fact that he really was not prepared or trained like a Marine, notwithstanding the six months at the advisors’ school. The combat experiences were astonishing. The violence and the danger were disconcerting. Throughout all those experiences, Bob grew to love the Vietnamese people and the activities he was able to undertake to help them. Looking back now, Bob has no idea why he was allowed to survive when so many other Americans did not come home to live out their lives. But he did, and