The War of the Innocents

Very Interesting Book, about the war in Vietnam. The Author, Visited and Traveled with My Combat Infantry Company, and was Visiting, The day, the N.V.A. tryed to over run us. talking to The Author, at Reunions, we decided that he , and I , were yards apart, during the Battle he describes in One chapter. Charles Bracelen Flood, tried to learn the truth , by living it, and almost got his A-- shot of doing it!

I was with C Co 3rd Battalion 8th Infantry all of '67 and the first quarter of '68. Mr. Flood captured, in word pictures, the lives of the lowly infantry soldier. His accounts cover my time as an Infantry Lieutenant from Tuy Hoa to the battles in the Central Highlands. His precise details have brought back some unwanted memories, but they are detailed and accurate. Ivan N. Pierce, Author An Infantry Lieutenant's Vietnam

[this is from the inside dust cover of the first edition, 1970] --------------------------------------------------------------- The War of the Innocents is a classic of all warfare, written as a panoramic narrative of one man's military adventure. Charles Bracelen Flood entered the Vietnam War not as a correspondent, but as an attached member of a dive-bomber unit which was dropping napalm in the single most unpopular activity of the war. He remained in Vietnam for a year, stationed far from Saigon. Flood spent a total of three months in the jungles of the Cambodian border with an American infantry battalion, and another four months with American civilian and military advisors working with the Vietnamese in the province in which his Air Force unit was stationed. His experience was so unique and deep that at the end of his year in Vietnam he was asked to brief incoming officers on the conditions to expect in the province where he had lived. From this emerges a reportage infused with the grace and force of an accomplished novelist. Flood's involvement was exactly that of the men doing the fighting, and he brings to his narrative the gifts that produced such books as Love Is a Bridge and More Lives than One. Battle scenes alternate with quiet days spent talking with nuns at orphanages. There are conversations with Vietnamese businessmen who are profiting from the war, lunches with famous correspondents in Saigon, and a chilling description of how it was to be in a schoolyard on election day whe the Viet Cong set off a bomb in a crowd of farmers waiting to vote. Flood puts the reader at the elbow of the visiting United States Senator, and the rice farmer just digging out of the ruins of his house. The author had lived three years in the Far East as a university lecturer and journalist before this year in Vietnam, and his knowledge of Asia and feeling for Asians parallels his compassion for the young American draftees. His description of both enemy and Allied civilian and military programs and tactics in on the level of sourcebook material.Flood mixes hard information with a sense of humor, and has the honesty to demonstrate that many a man, on both sides, throughly enjoys warfare. His narrative force and quick-moving scenes, ranging from thrilling descriptions of aerial and ground combat to an account of a Vietnamese bar girl hurling a bottle of beer at an American, are the essence of an experience that has burned itself into the national consciousness. Even years from now, when politcal passions have cooled, readers will turn to The War of the Innocents to discover what this war was, and what wars really are. ------------------------------------------------------------ [I was at the Battle of Threes Trees with Charlie and he captured what I also experienced back then better than any other author I've read so far. Thanks Brother, for the dedication to my buddy John Collins, KIA Nov 11, 1967, Dak To... J Bury]

My husband says this is an excellent book about life in an infantry unit. He was in the 3rd platoon from C company that was over run with 16 KIA'S.

I've read the book and would like to get another copy if the cost is not to high. Charlie Flood tells of his experiences and how the Air Force and the Army carried out their assignments in South Vietnam in 1966-67 time frame. The author tells things as they were (very honestly) and put himself in harms way, on many occasions, just so he could write the true story as accurately as possible. I know -- I was there with him.