Corny as it might sound, he also wanted to be the best, a Marine, a feeling we all shared. He could have been playing doctor in New York, but he joined the Corps because he felt that he owed the country a debt for taking him in. Besides being Chinese-American, he had his pre-med degree from the University of Tennessee with a minor in ministry. His father and mother smuggled him out as an infant. We had been together since Parris Island, the Marine Corps boot camp.Ĭhan had been born in Red China. Private First Class Richard Chan was the only one I knew very well. The plane bulged with young Marine Corps faces. The one comforting thought was that I wasn’t alone. WELCOME TO THE FIFTH MARINES AND THE BATTLE FOR TRUOI BRIDGE The book's continuing success is a tribute to the raw courage and sacrifice of the United States Marines. This new edition of Guns Up!, filled with photographs and updated information about those harrowing battles, also contains the real names of these extraordinary warriors and details of their lives after the war. The Marines who fought and bled and died were ordinary men, many still teenagers, but the selfless bravery they showed day after day in a nightmarish jungle war made them true heroes.

Johnnie was only eighteen when he got there, at the height of the bloody Tet Offensive at Hue, and he quickly realized the grim statistic held a chilling truth. Marine Johnnie Clark heard that the life expectancy of a machine gunner in Vietnam was seven to ten seconds after a firefight began. 'Guns up!' was the battle cry that sent machine gunners racing forward with their M60s to mow down the enemy, hoping that this wasn't the day they would meet their deaths. THIS GUT-WRENCHING FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF THE WAR IS A CLASSIC IN THE ANNALS OF VIETNAM LITERATURE.