I graduated the J School in 1969 and was drafted in September. By December I was in Advanced Infantry Training. So the lottery did me no good. But I had a patron and was bought out of the infantry and sent to Ft. Sheridan Chicago 5th Army HQ for my first duty assignment. While there I became a clerk (71H MOS} and worked in the office of Headquarter Commandant as part of the General Headquarters. After 9 months I was levied to Viet Nam. When I got there I became the Classified Records Custodian for the Comptroller of the Army at USARVY, the United States Army Headquarters in Vietnam. Not a bad job- I had an office and checked out classified documents to Finance, Budget, Management, and Personnel in a two-story air conditioned office building. My last 6 months I worked at the Public Information Office as a photographer doing the job of War Correspondent. During that time I was sent to Malaysia to cover Army helicopter flood relief and covered the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos called Lam Som 719 February of 1971. Out of that got a double page picture story in Stars and Stripes by flying in and out of Laos picking up wounded under fire. The story was inspired by Larry Burrows who was shot down and killed over Laos while I was shooting it. The week before that I watched him shoot his last story for Life magazine after the South Vietnamese armored column we were traveling with up to the border was hit by a US Navy Jet in a friendly fire incident. I took the last portrait of him there by the side of Route 9 that has been widely used in all the publications after he died.
