Exit Wounds: A Vietnam Elegy is an intimate, boots-on-the-ground memoir that chronicles one captain’s brutal experience in the Vietnam War.
On October 19, 1965, American Special Forces in Vietnam came under attack at their camp at Plei Me. This marked the first major confrontation between the North Vietnamese and US armies during the war. Throughout six days of constant hostile fire, Captain Lanny Hunter sorted the seriously wounded from the dead and saved those comrades-in-arms he could. For his actions, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
In Exit Wounds, Hunter recalls his tour in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1965/66 at the bloody interface of medicine and combat. Paralleling this story is his return in 1997 to find and help his Montagnard interpreter, Y-Kre Mlo, after ten years in a communist reeducation camp. This pilgrimage takes Hunter back to old haunts and battlegrounds—and to a war now seen through a very different lens.
Peopled with those who were dedicated, courageous, gentle, proud, profane, and a little mad, this book explores what happens when leaders place personal ambition over honor, and America’s “moral high ground” is soaked with the blood of its young men and women. So much more than a memoir, Exit Wounds is a poetic and profound story that reflects on the human condition, duty, honor, faithfulness, and how the scars remain long after the war is over.
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“Exit Wounds is the finest memoir of the Vietnam War that I have read. It is written from the perspective of a citizen-soldier whose personal story placed him in the front ranks of the Vietnam War as a medical officer with the Special Forces. His experiences in-country ranged from combat to the farcical. Hunter returned to Vietnam in 1997 in response to a letter from his Montagnard interpreter requesting help after ten years in a communist reeducation camp. The stories of these two men are related contextually during their travels on Hunter’s return pilgrimage. The narrative is seasoned with the author’s insights on history, politics, medicine, the horror and rapture of war, and the ambiguity of the human condition, citizenship, cultural imperialism, religion, morality, loss, and recovery. Hunter writes with the precision of a surgeon, the arresting images of a poet, and the compassion of both—which he is.”
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Karl Marlantes, USMC, Vietnam, 1968/69, author of What It Is Like to Go to War, Deep River, and the New York Times bestseller Matterhorn