West Dickens Avenue: A Marine at Khe Sanh Mass market paperbound - 2004

First line

I left school during my first year of college.

From the jacket flap

In January 1968, John Corbett and his fellow leathernecks of the 26th Marine Regiment fortified a remote outpost at a place in South Vietnam called Khe Sanh. Within days of their arrival, twenty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers surrounded the base. What followed over the next seventy-seven days became one of the deadliest fights of the Vietnam War--and one of the greatest battles in military history.
Private First Class Corbett made do with little or no sleep for days on end. The enemy bombarded the base incessantly. Extremes of heat, cold, and fog added to the misery, as did all manner of wounds and injuries too minor to justify evacuation from frontline positions. The emotional toll was tremendous as the Marines saw their friends suffer and die every day of the siege. Corbett relates these experiences through the eyes of a twenty-year-old but with the mind and maturity of a man now in his fifties. His story of life, death, and growing up on the front lines at Khe Sanh speaks for all of the Marines caught up in "the epic siege of the Vietnam War.

Media reviews

“REMARKABLE . . . This story, made even more poignant by today’s headlines, can stand shoulder to shoulder with the handful of classic accounts of Marines under fire.”
—Flint Journal

“In this short, readable account, Corbett describes his days at Khe Sanh in almost dispassionate prose and in great detail. . . . effectively convey[ing] the siege from a Marine grunt’s point of view.”
—Publishers Weekly