Portraits of Life

GREEN ON GREEN

Trilogy of Novels

Available on Amazon and Kindle

The Green on Green Trilogy was a on-off developing project, over about 20 years..

The core of the story is built on my being drafted and sent, unwillingly, to the Vietnam War. After coming back, I spent 4 months in Ft. Hood, Texas, waiting to get out of the Army, to go straight back to UCLA for the fall quarter of 1968. All told my military "career" was about 22 months. Already, I'd been to UCLA 3 years, but as a physics major. On return all things changed towards being a writer, primarily aimed at novels. The Vietnam subject was certainly on my list, but I figured I'd wait a few years to let a broader perspective set in.

Consider that the war as well as the anti-war movement were at a peak about that time. For all that has been said and written about the treatment of veterans of Vietnam, nothing along the line of negative treatment ever happened to me, even though I was right back into a world where the vast majority of people I dealt with were well over onto the anti-war side. In fact, I found this group far more emphatic towards what a veteran had gone through than the pro-war folks, especially when care for the vets was an issue. For awhile I thought this was ironic, but soon realized it wasn't an irony at all.

Part 1 DEPARTURE

(see Departure page for more detailed description).

The story begins with the protagonist, Michael Landers, due to report to Oakland Repo Depot to be shipped over to Vietnam. He hated everything about the process. Although very much against the war, he'd managed to get drafted and couldn't justify as being to special for the process, so went with it though declaring from day 1 that he'd go to prison before he'd go to Vietnam, which he considered an unjust, unconstitutional and against what he thought the United States stood for.

He'd already been through basic training and jungle warfare school so he was infantry. Spending a few days saying goodbye to family and friends, mostly surfers, he arrives in Oakland, In a stalling move he shows up as assigned but on LSD. This enters him into a several months Odyssey into the Army bureaucracy, as well as interacting with soldiers in similar dilemmas. Along the way take side trips through all the drama of the Bay Area right then: the San Francisco Summer of Love, the frenetic anti-war demonstrations at Berkeley University. His best friend from early years, Katrin. though a model student and innocnent ends up a fugitive from the FBI.