Exit Wounds (ePub)

Exit Wounds: A Vietnam Elegy is an intimate, boots-on-the-ground memoir that chronicles one captain's brutal experience in the Vietnam War.

On October 19, 1965, American Special Forces in Vietnam came under attack at their camp at Plei Me. This marked the first major confrontation between the North Vietnamese and US armies during the war. Throughout six days of constant hostile fire, Captain Lanny Hunter sorted the seriously wounded from the dead and saved those comrades-in-arms he could. For his actions, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

In Exit Wounds, Hunter recalls his tour in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1965/66 at the bloody interface of medicine and combat. Paralleling this story is his return in 1997 to find and help his Montagnard interpreter, Y-Kre Mlo, after ten years in a communist reeducation camp. This pilgrimage takes Hunter back to old haunts and battlegrounds-and to a war now seen through a very different lens.

Peopled with those who were dedicated, courageous, gentle, proud, profane, and a little mad, this book explores what happens when leaders place personal ambition over honor, and America's 'moral high ground' is soaked with the blood of its young men and women. So much more than a memoir, Exit Wounds is a poetic and profound story that reflects on the human condition, duty, honor, faithfulness, and how the scars remain long after the war is over.

Lanny Hunter is one of the most highly decorated medical officers of the Vietnam War, having been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Bronze Star-V, the Air Medal, Purple Heart, Combat Medical Badge, and the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with Gold Star. He has lectured in medical, military, educational, civil, and church venues. Hunter has written several works, including Living Dogs and Dead Lions, My Soul to Keep, and Stories of Desire and Narratives of Faith. He lives with his wife, Carolyn, in Denver, Colorado.