MY PURPLE HEART

A veteran blends history and autobiography in this debut memoir examining his military service during the Vietnam War.

Taylor grew up in Alabama and South Carolina as a “World War II baby,” born in the 1940s during a time when the United States became a central actor on the world stage. Nevertheless, he wasn’t particularly obsessed with geopolitics, and the growing unrest in Vietnam barely registered for him as he went to college; married his high school sweetheart, Linda; and found a rewarding job as a forester for a paper company. But the American involvement in Vietnam certainly grabbed his attention when in 1965, just before his 23rd birthday, he received a notice from the local draft board summoning him for a physical examination to assess his fitness for military service. He couldn’t discover a palatable way to avoid the inevitable draft notice and so decided to volunteer. After some training, he found himself sent to Vietnam as an infantryman; combat was “the only job for which I had been trained.” The author describes, in riveting, unflinching terms, the grim reality of war and a soldier’s confrontation with death. He was wounded by a land mine explosion, an injury that earned him both a Purple Heart and the right to return to the United States. Taylor’s remembrance is linearly organized, and he candidly discusses his childhood and adolescence, including his puberty years marked by a “strong sexual appetite but very little sexual knowledge.” His account also eclectically braids the political and the personal, looking back at his life through the lens of world history—at one point, he compares the “prepubescent periods” he shared with South Vietnam. While he intelligently reflects on the U.S.’s foreign policy failures and its misplaced obsession with the march of Communism, his most trenchant and moving reflections are subjective. At one point, Taylor recounts the impact of hearing a soldier proselytize: “Avoiding the truth that I might die in Vietnam, I always thought I would make it home all in one piece and on this side of the dirt. Our ‘street preacher’ unnerved the troops by reminding them they might not live to see another day.”

A stirringly personal account of the horrors of war.