What's Past is Prologue: America's Vietnam Legacy

comes full circle in a page-turning memoir.

A story of passion, betrayal, and survival, Kevin Deckel's Vietnam memoir far exceeds

the usual parameters of the genre. With scathing insights, wry, deep humor, and

heartbreaking observations, this classic work would convert seamlessly to film. Chock

full of detailed, often hair-raising accounts with the USArmy's First Cavalry/Airmobile

Division (they weren't on the front lines, they were the front lines.) it offers up drama,

adrenaline, and a kaleidoscope of contradictions come to light.

With fluid writing and vivid dialogue that crackles with the sounds and expressions of its

time, Misadventure offers up the best and worst of human character pushed to its

limits. Deckel unfurls a war drama of the highest order; its stars however are not

destruction and derring-do (though there's plenty) but the human spirit's capacity to see

clearly, to choose rightly, and to endure.

All that we learn changes us in some way. Oftentimes knowledge and experience

gained over time enriches and enlarges our ability to be productive and fulfilled;

sometimes though, it transforms us directly, overnight, changing what we believe and

how we treat fellow human beings.

Misadventure opens a window on the Vietnam experience like no other. The author

stored up the mesmerizing textured details "down to the penny," of his tour, then

researched, with devastating precision, Washington's version-largely (some might say

deliberately) hidden from public view-of just how the U.S. war in Vietnam was being run.