John McComb

Like many of us who came of age in the late 1960’s, the author was drafted into the U.S. Army. He went through basic training and received additional training at the U.S. Army artillery school at Fort Sill, OK. He shipped out as a Specialist 5 (Spec 5), arrived in Vietnam on 2 November 1970, and was assigned to the 8th Battalion 4th Artillery as the chief computer in the fire direction center.

Someone once said, “Combat is hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of stark terror.” Most books about combat focus on the seconds and give the hours short shrift. This 102 page book acknowledges the seconds when they occur (usually in the form of incoming rockets, mortar fire, or enemy shelling) but spends most of its time describing the hours that were consumed by the daily routines of life that are a necessary part of keeping a firebase in a state of readiness in a theater of combat. The book reads well and the author does an excellent job of conveying to the reader the reality of service on a firebase during war time.… (mehr)