Here is an excerpt from a message I received this past week:

Dear Mr. Affield,

[Muddy Jungle Rivers] looks very appropriate for our collection so I’m sending it back to our cataloging section. It will eventually be cataloged and thus appear in our online catalog (see the search button link to our online catalog at http://www.history.navy.mil/library/index.htm) so that researchers can consult the volume.

Glenn E. Helm
Library Director
Navy Department Library
Naval History & Heritage Command
805 Kidder Breese St. SE
Washington Navy Yard DC 20374-5060

Email I recieved from Larry Reid on May 3, 2012 in response to Muddy Jungle Rivers:

You don’t know how much your book meant to me Wendell!
I don’t remember everything that happened that day. At Spec 4 (E-4) I was the ranking man with the most time in combat left in 3rd platoon, Co. D, 4/47th Inf Bn, 2nd Bde, 9th Inf Div. I had 3 others with me. One of them was named Gene Fountaine. I was in touch with him for a while but haven’t heard from him in years now. The 4 of us were assigned to 2nd platoon for the rest of that operation. I was only lightly wounded and finished the operation. Third platoon was wiped out that day.
Another soldier who was in the well deck was Stafford Cowles. He helped to kick some of those burning ammo and grenade cases over the side. I am still in touch with him but he moved to Guatemala last year. He was wounded pretty bad that day and choppered out. The Latino you mentioned using a bunk may have been Hector Lugo-Mojica. He was KIA and here is the link to his name on The Wall: http://vvmf.org/thewall/Wall_Id_No=31542
Be sure to click on the remembrance I left for him at the bottom of the page.
Your book confirmed some things that I remembered but could not confirm. One was that I thought I saw a medevac chopper shot down. Thank you for letting me know that I didn’t imagine that. Another was about the hook not letting the ramp down. I sat at the front of the ATC at one point when we were beached to discourage Charlie from tossing grenades or firing another RPG. It was hell for all of us that day.
I have more details I would like to share and some questions to ask. I was the 3rd platoon RTO and should have known the name of the black sergeant who took over the empty .50 cal turret, but I cannot think of it. I still have my orders awarding me the Purple Heart…maybe his name is on there. I will look for my Vietnam storage box.
I look forward to continuing our conversation. I am very glad you survived that day. The “official” records say that we only lost 4 people, but I doubt their KIA count and would like to find out how many more died of wounds within a few days of 8/18/1968 from that ambush.
It is an honor to be in touch with you.

 I find it incredible how today’s technology is capable of connecting strangers, across time and distance, who shared a common experience four decades in the past. I hope to hear from others.

Muddy Jungle Rivers is available in the Bemidji area at Luekens Village Foods North, Luekens Village Foods South, Book World, Kat’s Book Nook, and TJ Design Studio. Beginning May 1, 2012, Muddy Jungle Rivers is available for sale on Kindle or in Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Muddy Jungle Rivers, my Vietnam memoir, is at the publisher. I expect to receive the first print proofs for review the first week of March. TJ Design Studio, Bemidji, Minnesota has developed the electronic book formats for submission to Kindle, Nook, and Apple iStore, which will be ported by the end of March. Reach TJ Studio at: http://www.tjdesignstudio.com/
The print edition of Muddy Jungle Rivers should be available locally and through on-line bookstores by mid May.
I recently had lunch with a local author who has almost a dozen books published by traditional publishers. He was very frustrated by the state of the publishing industry and was exploring the possibility of self-publishing his next book. One his biggest complaints was that his publisher expected him to do most of the marketing—very time-consuming—yet receive a small fraction of his book’s sale price as a royalty. He refers to the new publishing world—the world of electronic books and self-publishing as, “Today’s Wild West where anything goes,” and feels that author retention of all intellectual rights is very important because of evolving technology and the fluid environment of cyber publishing platforms. He continued on with a litany of issues, commenting that even best selling authors like Barry Eisler are self publishing. I went home, Goggled Eisler, and discovered this site with a very strong argument for the self-publisher. http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20110321/00183913568/best-selling-author-turns-down-half-million-dollar-publishing-contract-to-self-publish.shtml
The Barry Eisler interview and my luncheon conversation with the Bemidji area author have reinforced my decision to self-publish. Several local writers are excited about Whispering Petals Press, LLC as a local resource to publish under.

Muddy Jungle Rivers, a Vietnam War memoir, thrusts the reader into life in the Brown Water Navy onboard an armor troop carrier with the Mobile Riverine Force. Like Karl Marlantes, author of the novel Matterhorn, and the nonfiction What It Is Like To Go To War, I lived with this story for over thirty years before I started putting it on paper twelve years ago.
Today, a few Vietnam veteran friends and I meet occasionally for breakfast. The last time we were together, Mike said, “When I think of myself, I’m still that twenty-year-old Ranger. I look in the mirror, shocked at the old man staring back.”
I believe that’s true for many of us. Our psyche froze in a dimension we shy away from, deny, yet unconsciously embrace; a dimension of youth that forged our identity. Several years ago in a post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) vet’s counseling group, the psychiatrist said that our last conscious thought as we die—a peaceful old age—will be back to our time in Vietnam: it will be a coming home.
The men in Muddy Jungle Rivers necessarily froze, also. The voice and tone and those intangible nuances that are singular to an individual are in the minds-eye, but not the exact words. Dialogue flowed as memories resurfaced; dialogue is, of course, reconstructed.
Over decades of sleepless nights, operations blended, at times became composites, details blurring, like shifting sandbars beneath silty currents.
As a twenty-year-old cox’n—river assault boat driver—I was not privy to operational details. My world was limited to the view through one inch slits in the armor surrounding the cox’n flat. To jungle-covered riverbanks and the next curve in the river. Others who were there might say, “That’s not how I remember.” But Muddy Jungle Rivers is not a historical document. It is a memory journey from a twenty-year-year-old cox’n’s point of view about life on the boats—about the fallibility of people; their successes and failures.

Muddy Jungle Rivers will be available in print through Hawthorn Petal Press info@hawthornpetalpress and Amazon Kindle in May 2012.

Snowshoes whisper through reed canary grass, and wolves howl on the far side of the meadow on this northern Minnesota night. The full moon–some say it’s a blue moon–illuminates the snowscape. Bare oak branch shadows seem to dance as trees crack in protest to the 30 below temps. The new year starts with such promise.

Eight years now I’ve been retired. For thirty years, while working, stories from my youth haunted me—everybody who’s been to war has stories, I’ve listened to thousands from the old men who fought in the Good War—and I came to realize that I had to tell mine before I joined those old men. Dawn walks across dew-covered meadows watching days awaken—seasons change, blending with treelines, silently, as deer and geese, squirrels and spiders accepted my presence—awakened urgency to tell those stories.

I began taking writing classes at our local university. As semesters passed, essays accumulated. About the third year, I discovered poetry and a new world—a world of condensed images, actions, senses—a world that explores the moment. Walking my meadows, sitting silently in the treeline notebook in hand, images and long-buried memories pour onto the page. Universal symbols of changing seasons, storms, drought, nature’s design (or lack of it) in watching the food chain at work—deer/wolves, foxes/rabbits, owls/mice, swallows/flies, spiders/moths, and crows and ravens; always the raucous caws of those scavengers—open doors for me.

This past spring the “Healing Wall” came to Bemidji, Minnesota. While it was here some friends and I went to see it, then went to breakfast. Mike said he wished it hadn’t come—it opened old wounds. Jim and Lyle agreed and we talked about who it was healing. I was surprised at their sentiments—I felt the same way but didn’t want to admit it, like a betrayal to those on the Wall. Anyway, I went home and wrote this poem.

After the Funeral

It’s called “The Wall That Heals.” But Robert Frost’s words gnaw:
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Taps and 21 Gun Salutes

echo through wind-blown purple petals from wilted bouquets.
At the service I listen to elegies, worn clichés, old war stories

and know nothing has been learned except we jump higher at the rifle fire.
To the uninitiated, tanks and APC’s are symbols of omnipotence;

today as offered penitence, I’d rather see white doves set free.

Sharing a friend’s anguish, I wonder again how Walls heal as

we turn our backs to black granite. My arm shelters quaking shoulders

as he whispers a prayerful curse — his loss fresh again—

all that’s missing is a hearse. Recalling my nocturnal visit…

I came in dark of night, roles reversed. Stars whispered through powdery mist
and again I saw six river sailors disappear in dawn’s water-sprinkled burst—

others; sniped, accidents, ambushed—fingers gently brushed etched names;

not unlike baby granddaughter’s tears when big sissy’s crushed her heart.

This morning I go home, change clothes, pet the dog,

wander my meadow aimlessly, clean bluebird houses (spring is here),

and remember scattered purple petals blown into the Wall.