I joined the U.S. Army after graduation from high school in the summer of 1964. I was sent down south for military training, where I experienced the early years of the Civil Rights Era where segregation was still in effect. My first assignment took me to Fort Belvoir, Va., where I was a helicopter mechanic and a crew chief. By mid-1965, President Johnson deployed the new experimental helicopter air assault division (1st Cavalry Division Airmobile) to South Vietnam to stop the buildup of communist forces from taking over the nation. Within a few months, I was sent to Vietnam and assigned to the 1st as a helicopter door gunner and crew chief with the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, where I took part in "search and destroy" operations where we engaged Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in battles from the Cambodian border to the sands of the South China Sea. While I was in Vietnam, I met a fellow soldier who also was from my hometown of Boston, and we became good friends and fought in the same battles as members of the 1-9 Cavalry.
Many years after the war, I became a freelance writer and began to write a memoir of my service in the war. I interviewed many of my old pilots and crew members, who provided their stories and photographs for my book. I included vivid stories of my Boston buddy, Peter Burbank, who was an Airborne infantryman out on recon patrols in the jungles while I provided suppressive machine gun fire for his infantry platoon. The title of the book is "The Gunner and the Grunt: Two Boston Boys in Vietnam with the First Cavalry Division Airmobile," which tells the story of the early airmobile operations in the Vietnam War.
The book is available on Amazon, Walmart, eBay and bookshops. A Google search will provide information on the book. Thank you very much.

Michael L. Kelley