Journey Back from Vietnam

When Wayne Purinton was nineteen, feeling it was his patriotic duty, he decided to volunteer for service to his country. Soon after, Wayne-a gentle, innocent farm boy from Kansas who had never shot at anything bigger than a pheasant-was flung into the jungles of Vietnam and told to track down and kill the enemies of his country. The horrors he experienced-shooting Viet Cong until it became a dehumanizing, almost casual affair, watching his peers gunned down around him-pervaded, and after his return, he didn’t speak of Vietnam again even to those closest to him.

After a thirty year silence on the entire subject, Wayne Purinton rediscovered a lost chapter of his life in the form of letters he had written to his parents and brothers during his time spent overseas.