Gregory H. Murry's Blog
June 20, 2019
How I wrote and self-published my memoir of the Vietnam War.
I was with A Company, 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division from September 1966 to September 1967. I was a machine gunner, fire team leader, rifle squad leader, weapons squad leader and field first sergeant. I participated in continuous search and destroy operations in III Corps which included Operations Attleboro, Cedar Falls, Junction City I-II and Billings. Like many others I returned from the war and tried to put it behind me. Eventually, however, I returned to serve in the military.
The changes that had taken place in the army were impressive but the one thing that impressed me most was the whole "After Action Review" and "Lessons Learned" process. This was where the modern military history was supposed to begin. All training and combat operations would be reviewed by the actual participants and measured by the published standards. The actions that went well were reinforced and the deficiencies were noted for further training. Nothing was to be swept under the rug and everyone from the commanding general to the rear rank private was supposed to have input and be held accountable for their part in the success or failure of the endeavor. These things were on my mind when I decided to write my memoir of infantry combat.
I retired from the Texas Army National Guard soon after I returned from Afghanistan in 2004. I had done a lot of writing while serving as the operations sergeant for an ad hoc special operations unit in the war on drugs so I was familiar with word processing and the key board. Since I had been typing with my index fingers for as long as I can remember, what ever writing I was going to do would be painfully slow.
The first thing I did was set up my computer in a building behind the house. That got me in the mode of 'going to work.' I began writing using Microsoft Word in Office 95. I was familiar with the program because I used it in the army. After several false starts I began writing down all the incidents I remembered from 40 years before. I tried to write in chronological order but after a while I just wrote the incidents as I remembered them, hoping to put them in order later. I set my work pace at five pages a day and took off. It took me about a year to get most of the incidents I initially remembered. In the process of writing these stories I remembered more details and subsequent events relating to them.
When I felt that I had gotten down most of the things I remembered I began to assemble them in chronological order but my memory wasn't able to place a lot of the stories on the time line. I found a few books that covered my time with the 1st Infantry Division and that helped but eventually I realized that I would need the after-action reports of my unit.
Since I knew little about how to find them I did some searches on the internet and found several that covered my time with the division. They were called Operational Report-Lessons Learned (OR-LL) and they covered a period of three months. These were helpful but I still needed more detail so I contacted the National Archives and requested the Combat After Action Reports (CAAR) of the 3d Brigade of my division. They sent me photocopies of every one of the operations conducted by the brigade from September 1966 to September 1967. These really helped so now I was ready to assemble my manuscript. It was at this point that that I began to search on the internet for my comrades of so long ago. I managed to find a machine gunner from my squad on our unit page in Military.com
where he was searching for a member of his gun crew. I found one of my company commander's e-mail address on a West Point related website and began corresponding with these men. I asked them to read my manuscript for fact checking and they did.
Since I was going to use footnotes I searched the internet for book-writing programs and decided that Scrivener offered the features I needed. The learning curve was a little trying but eventually I learned to use the features I needed and began copying text from my Word document and pasting it into Scrivener. When the need for chapters became apparent I decided to use each month as a chapter divider. Several month were too large so I broke then in half.
Because I wanted to mention a battle that took place just before I arrived in-country I began to research the battle on the internet and this where my own interest of what really happened in Vietnam was piqued. When I got to my unit the morale was low and people would continually mention the battle of August 25th. My research revealed that four infantry battalions and an armored cavalry troop attempted to surround a VC battalion camp in the jungle near our base camp and suffered heavy casualties before overrunning the camp and only finding a few bodies.
The 1st Brigade commander declared it a victory in the his brigade's "Combat Operations After Action Report" that covered Operation Amarillo. His claim was not substantiated by a book written by one of the survivors and by remarks written by some of the enlisted men on one of unit's WebPage. This led to more internet research and I must have spent a year researching this and other events that took place where the official reports seemed to conflict with certain actions that I had witnessed.
These discoveries I made led me to believe that much of what was put out as official history was designed to hold up the reputations of senior leaders and that of the army. In seeing that I realized that most histories and even memoirs were written to enhance the reputation of the writer. The hardest thing to do in life is to admit one's mistakes.
With this in mind I reviewed my own memories and then wrote a number of additions to the manuscript, attempting to set the record straight. Since I was in the 1st Infantry Division during the time that MG William DePuy was the CG, I dug into his history because he was known as General Westmoreland's principal adviser on the use of 'Search and Destroy' tactics and firepower as the answer to the enemy's tactics. The things I found about DePuy's role in the war were so toxic that the 'historians' didn't want to touch them. When I asked a general about DePuy's confession that he screwed up the Battle of August 25th, a confession made to that general in a U.S. Army Center of Military History published interview, the general said that DePuy didn't mean it.
By adding all the history I had to footnote the sources. Then I had to add an extensive biography, and end notes. All together it took me 10 years to finish the manuscript, proofread it with my wife twice, that was fun, format it to the right size, have my grandson make a cover in Photoshop, and send it to Amazon. At Amazon, they check the manuscript, have you set up a bank transfer system and eventually they place your book on their website with the millions of other books there.
I had been on Facebook since 2010 and I was able to find some knowledgeable Vietnam vets on the Vietnam War History page. It is run by Erik Villard who is the Vietnam War historian for the U.S. Army Center of Military History. I established contact with some of these people and asked them if they would review my book. A number of them did and about half of the reviews on Amazon came from these men. All I asked of them was that they write an honest review. I didn't get any 'bad' reviews but I did get a lot of interesting comments.
Since the first book, I have finished my memoir of Afghanistan and I have a rough draft of my time in the War on Drugs. I will publish them on Amazon soon.
I am an avid reader of military history. One of my favorite books is “Galahad,” a memoir by Colonel Charles Hunter of the WWII Marauders in Burma. He quotes author John Steinbeck who said that the writer “is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”
In the pursuit of my own dark and dangerous dreams, I made a lot of mistakes and at times I was derelict in my duty. Why I came home from Vietnam and why much better men than I didn’t, is for God to explain. For the sake of their memory and my duty as a veteran, I had to write the truth as I saw it.
Gregory H. Murry
MSG, U.S. Army (Retired)
author of:
Content With My Wages
A Sergeant's Story
Book I-Vietnam
Content With My Wages
A Sergeant's Story
Book II-The War on Drugs
Content With My Wages
A Sergeant's Story
Book III-Afghanistan
The changes that had taken place in the army were impressive but the one thing that impressed me most was the whole "After Action Review" and "Lessons Learned" process. This was where the modern military history was supposed to begin. All training and combat operations would be reviewed by the actual participants and measured by the published standards. The actions that went well were reinforced and the deficiencies were noted for further training. Nothing was to be swept under the rug and everyone from the commanding general to the rear rank private was supposed to have input and be held accountable for their part in the success or failure of the endeavor. These things were on my mind when I decided to write my memoir of infantry combat.
I retired from the Texas Army National Guard soon after I returned from Afghanistan in 2004. I had done a lot of writing while serving as the operations sergeant for an ad hoc special operations unit in the war on drugs so I was familiar with word processing and the key board. Since I had been typing with my index fingers for as long as I can remember, what ever writing I was going to do would be painfully slow.
The first thing I did was set up my computer in a building behind the house. That got me in the mode of 'going to work.' I began writing using Microsoft Word in Office 95. I was familiar with the program because I used it in the army. After several false starts I began writing down all the incidents I remembered from 40 years before. I tried to write in chronological order but after a while I just wrote the incidents as I remembered them, hoping to put them in order later. I set my work pace at five pages a day and took off. It took me about a year to get most of the incidents I initially remembered. In the process of writing these stories I remembered more details and subsequent events relating to them.
When I felt that I had gotten down most of the things I remembered I began to assemble them in chronological order but my memory wasn't able to place a lot of the stories on the time line. I found a few books that covered my time with the 1st Infantry Division and that helped but eventually I realized that I would need the after-action reports of my unit.
Since I knew little about how to find them I did some searches on the internet and found several that covered my time with the division. They were called Operational Report-Lessons Learned (OR-LL) and they covered a period of three months. These were helpful but I still needed more detail so I contacted the National Archives and requested the Combat After Action Reports (CAAR) of the 3d Brigade of my division. They sent me photocopies of every one of the operations conducted by the brigade from September 1966 to September 1967. These really helped so now I was ready to assemble my manuscript. It was at this point that that I began to search on the internet for my comrades of so long ago. I managed to find a machine gunner from my squad on our unit page in Military.com
where he was searching for a member of his gun crew. I found one of my company commander's e-mail address on a West Point related website and began corresponding with these men. I asked them to read my manuscript for fact checking and they did.
Since I was going to use footnotes I searched the internet for book-writing programs and decided that Scrivener offered the features I needed. The learning curve was a little trying but eventually I learned to use the features I needed and began copying text from my Word document and pasting it into Scrivener. When the need for chapters became apparent I decided to use each month as a chapter divider. Several month were too large so I broke then in half.
Because I wanted to mention a battle that took place just before I arrived in-country I began to research the battle on the internet and this where my own interest of what really happened in Vietnam was piqued. When I got to my unit the morale was low and people would continually mention the battle of August 25th. My research revealed that four infantry battalions and an armored cavalry troop attempted to surround a VC battalion camp in the jungle near our base camp and suffered heavy casualties before overrunning the camp and only finding a few bodies.
The 1st Brigade commander declared it a victory in the his brigade's "Combat Operations After Action Report" that covered Operation Amarillo. His claim was not substantiated by a book written by one of the survivors and by remarks written by some of the enlisted men on one of unit's WebPage. This led to more internet research and I must have spent a year researching this and other events that took place where the official reports seemed to conflict with certain actions that I had witnessed.
These discoveries I made led me to believe that much of what was put out as official history was designed to hold up the reputations of senior leaders and that of the army. In seeing that I realized that most histories and even memoirs were written to enhance the reputation of the writer. The hardest thing to do in life is to admit one's mistakes.
With this in mind I reviewed my own memories and then wrote a number of additions to the manuscript, attempting to set the record straight. Since I was in the 1st Infantry Division during the time that MG William DePuy was the CG, I dug into his history because he was known as General Westmoreland's principal adviser on the use of 'Search and Destroy' tactics and firepower as the answer to the enemy's tactics. The things I found about DePuy's role in the war were so toxic that the 'historians' didn't want to touch them. When I asked a general about DePuy's confession that he screwed up the Battle of August 25th, a confession made to that general in a U.S. Army Center of Military History published interview, the general said that DePuy didn't mean it.
By adding all the history I had to footnote the sources. Then I had to add an extensive biography, and end notes. All together it took me 10 years to finish the manuscript, proofread it with my wife twice, that was fun, format it to the right size, have my grandson make a cover in Photoshop, and send it to Amazon. At Amazon, they check the manuscript, have you set up a bank transfer system and eventually they place your book on their website with the millions of other books there.
I had been on Facebook since 2010 and I was able to find some knowledgeable Vietnam vets on the Vietnam War History page. It is run by Erik Villard who is the Vietnam War historian for the U.S. Army Center of Military History. I established contact with some of these people and asked them if they would review my book. A number of them did and about half of the reviews on Amazon came from these men. All I asked of them was that they write an honest review. I didn't get any 'bad' reviews but I did get a lot of interesting comments.
Since the first book, I have finished my memoir of Afghanistan and I have a rough draft of my time in the War on Drugs. I will publish them on Amazon soon.
I am an avid reader of military history. One of my favorite books is “Galahad,” a memoir by Colonel Charles Hunter of the WWII Marauders in Burma. He quotes author John Steinbeck who said that the writer “is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”
In the pursuit of my own dark and dangerous dreams, I made a lot of mistakes and at times I was derelict in my duty. Why I came home from Vietnam and why much better men than I didn’t, is for God to explain. For the sake of their memory and my duty as a veteran, I had to write the truth as I saw it.
Gregory H. Murry
MSG, U.S. Army (Retired)
author of:
Content With My Wages
A Sergeant's Story
Book I-Vietnam
Content With My Wages
A Sergeant's Story
Book II-The War on Drugs
Content With My Wages
A Sergeant's Story
Book III-Afghanistan
February 10, 2015
Revisionist history of the Vietnam War.
In writing my memoir, I began to research the history of the Vietnam War. I remembered the low state of morale in the unit I was assigned to because I had transferred from a unit of extremely high morale in Germany and at the time I didn't understand how two units in the same army could be so different. I was most interested in a battle that took place just before I arrived in country, the battle of August 25th at Bong Trang. The company commander of my new unit had been KIA in that battle along with four other men and about half the company had been wounded. The battle involved four of the nine infantry battalions of the 1st Infantry Division in an ill-conceived maneuver orchestrated by MG William DePuy that resulted in disaster. DePuy had a high reputation and was known in the post-war army of the 1980's as the man who rebuilt the army after Vietnam. When I read the official history of the battle in the U.S. Army publication, "Stemming the Tide," by John Cartland I began using Google to search for various documents cited in the footnotes. I followed the trail of footnotes into the cyber jungle and found a very different story. That story I have detailed in Chapter's three and four of my book. The results of my research led me to a much deeper understanding of S.L.A. Marshall's proclamation that the , "The Study of War is the Study of Human Nature."
