The Education of Corporal John Musgrave: Vietnam and Its Aftermath

A Marine's searing and intimate memoir about surviving Vietnam and its aftermath.

John Musgrave had a small-town midwestern childhood that embodied the idealized postwar America. Service, patriotism, faith, and civic pride were the values that guided his family and community, and like nearly all the boys he knew, Musgrave grew up looking forward to the day when he could enlist to serve his country as his father had done.

When the Vietnam War began, he dropped everything to join up, and set off for the Marines and two years that would permanently reshape his life. In this electrifying memoir, he renders his wartime experience with a powerful intimacy and immediacy: from the rude awakening of boot camp to daily life in the Vietnam jungle to a chest injury that very nearly killed him. He vividly renders the difficulty of returning home to a society rife with antiwar sentiment, his own survivor's guilt, and the slow realization that he and his fellow veterans had been betrayed by the nation they served. And he describes how, ultimately, he found peace among his fellow veterans working to end the war. Fiercely perceptive and candid, The Education of Corporal John Musgrave is one of the most powerful memoirs to emerge from the war.