Vietnam Remembered

What is war really like-and what remains when the fighting is over?

In February 1966, Andrew Johnson enlisted in the U.S. Army searching for an answer. He pursued airborne wings, earned the coveted Green Beret, and entered Vietnam with U.S. Army Special Forces shortly before the Tet Offensive transformed the war.

Vietnam Remembered: A Special Forces Journey is Johnson's deeply personal account of combat, brotherhood, survival, and the memories that followed him home. Serving among the Montagnard people, Johnson experienced a world far removed from conventional military life: isolated villages, monsoon rains, oppressive heat, ambushes, helicopter assaults, constant vigilance, and the ever-present possibility of death. He witnessed courage and brutality, loyalty and hatred, camaraderie and loss-all while confronting the complicated realities of a war that rarely fit neatly into official accounts.

But this is not a conventional military history. It is one soldier's remembrance of what he saw, believed, feared, questioned, and carried with him. Decades later, memories of fallen friends, difficult choices, youthful assumptions, and moments of extraordinary danger remain part of an unfinished reckoning.

Johnson's story extends beyond Vietnam. After returning home, he served in the Peace Corps and spent sixteen years in civilian life before returning to military service at age forty. He subsequently served twenty years in the Army Reserve, with assignments taking him to Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Colombia, and Iraq and Qatar.

Unvarnished and reflective, Vietnam Remembered explores not only what happens to a soldier at war but what happens within him afterward. Beneath the recollections of Special Forces operations and life in Vietnam lies a larger examination of honor, mortality, faith, memory, and accountability.

War eventually becomes history. For those who lived it, however, memory remains-and with memory comes the question of what a life, and the choices made within it, ultimately mean.

This deliberately avoids presenting Johnson's recollections as definitive historical fact, which is especially important given the preface's explicit statement that the book is a remembrance rather than a scholarly or comprehensive military history.