Heroes to the End: An Army Correspondent’s Last Days in Vietnam by Jim Smith

by Jim Smith

Jim Smith might be one of the few people that tried extending his tour in Vietnam and was actually forced to leave. As a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, the Defense Department's daily newspaper, he saw every major city in Vietnam from the Delta to the Demilitarized Zone from 1971 to 1972. Drawing on dozens of his stories that were published and dozens that were not, he looks back at the war through the eyes of a 23-year-old who was technically a specialist fourth class in the Army but who acted like a civilian, sporting long hair and wearing safari suits with no rank insignia. He laughed at Bob Hope's jokes, took cover during rocket attacks, pulled guard duty at night in the jungle, got in trouble with the brass, and was caught up in the adrenaline rush of war. Whether it was observing training of South Vietnamese troops by U.S. advisers, watching massive U.S. firepower take out enemy targets or reporting on other efforts to repel the North Vietnamese Easter Offensive, he was there to witness the events. With the keen observations of a young combat reporter, he reveals many acts of bravery and courage in Heroes to the End. Jim Smith, a graduate of Hofstra University, spent 1971-72 in Vietnam as a clerk and Army correspondent for the Stars and Stripes. He was a Newsday reporter and editor from 1966 to 2014, and is a veterans advocate and board member of United Veterans Beacon House. He lives in Williston Park, Long Island.

Paperback

First published August 21, 2015

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Jim Smith, the laziest (yet still professional) teacher in town, is a head of school, education consultant, Independent Thinking Associate, speaker and bestselling author.

Reviews

[Military Writers Society of America (MWSA)]

MWSA Review

In his book Heroes to the End, author Jim Smith provides us an excellent perspective of the waning days of U.S involvement in the Vietnam War. As a young man employed as a Newsday reporter, the author received a very low draft number ensuring he'd be picked up in the next draft, he took the initiative and enlisted for three years.  This kept him from going straight into the infantry and on to Vietnam. At least this was his plan and it did work, somewhat. He enlisted and became an admin clerk, but the army still sent him to Vietnam at the end of July 1971.

Smith provides some insight from his experiences as an admin clerk at Cam Ranh Bay, but the meat of the book comes after the author volunteers for and got accepted into the correspondent's pool with Stars and Stripes. In his position with the press, Smith was allowed to travel throughout Vietnam and conduct a variety of interviews. He captured the essence of these interviews, along with his own observations, in articles he wrote back then and republished in this book.

I found the first hand accounts refreshing as they provide a real time picture of events, individual's thoughts and emotions.  The vast collection of articles give us a much better picture of what was happening in Vietnam from late 1971 to mid 1972, than someone's recollections recorded some forty plus years after the war.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in military history and especially to those with an interest in the Vietnam war.  I found it an interesting read and am certain you will too.

MWSA Review by Bob Doerr (June 2018)