On 10 May 1968, President Lyndon Johnson activated James Sexton from the U.S. Army Individual Ready Reserve. The machine-signed orders gave him 30 days to withdraw from his second year of graduate school in anthropology at UCLA and report to Ft. Lewis, Washington. Letters and tapes by James and his wife, Marilyn Rex, serve as the basis for their story from 1968 to 1969, focusing on Ft. Lewis, Ft. Belvoir, Cam Ranh Bay, Nha Trang, and the surrounding hamlets and villages during the peak of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.Five out of six of the some 2.5 million military personnel who served in Vietnam were support troops rather than grunts in the field. Because most books on Vietnam are from the perspective of U.S. infantrymen, this book is unique because Part I is from the point of view of a company clerk of Company B, Troop Command, U.S. Army Depot. As a college trained enlisted man, Sexton offers rich insights into the people and culture of Vietnam, as well as many U.S. servicemen, who were sent there to help save them from communism.Parts II and III are from the viewpoint of Marilyn and James' trips to Vietnam in 2004 and 2008, traveling with and interviewing Vietnamese guides in Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Bat Trang, Tam Coc, Hue, Da Nang, Nha Trang, Cam Ranh Bay, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Cu Chi, the Mekong Delta, and Tay Ninh. Maps, photographs, notes, and an appendix enrich the entire story, and an epilogue updates significant events in Vietnam to 2015. Finally, an index enhances searching for key subjects within the text.
James Sexton graduated from UCLA with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in anthropology. After completing a tour of duty in Vietnam, he returned to UCLA, where he completed the degree of Master or Arts in anthropology in 1971 and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in anthropology in 1973. He won the Northern Arizona University (NAU) President's Award for teaching, research, and service in 1981, a Regents' Professorship in 1991, and the NAU Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Scholar Award in 1997. During his 41 years of active service at NAU, he wrote, translated, and edited eight books on the cultural anthropology of the Guatemalan Maya, and he published a number of refereed articles and book reviews. On 10 May 2014, he became Regents' Professor Emeritus, which, during the following year and one-half, allowed him to give almost all of his attention to updating and completing this book, his first one on Southeast Asia. For more information on his background and publications, you may visit his website at www.mayaguate.com. His wife, Marilyn, earned the degree of Bachelor of Arts in sociology from UCLA and the degree of Master of Social Work from Arizona State University. She is a licensed social worker who retired from working twenty-two years at Flagstaff Medical Center. Marilyn and James have one son, Randall, a patent attorney and senior computer engineer who has a son and a daughter. In addition to enjoying their wonderful grandchildren, they like to travel, grow roses and other flowers, and play catch with their miniature schnauzers.
