Through Smoke-Teared Eyes

2018 SAN FRANCISCO BOOK FESTIVAL HONORS VIETNAM SAGA FOR TOP PRIZESAN FRANCISCO: The remarkable story of an enlisted man's struggles in the jungles of Vietnam is the grand prize winner of the 2018 San Francisco Book Festival, which honors the best books of the spring.Johnny F. Pugh's Through Smoke-Teared Eyes (iUniverse) is an action-packed and vivid account of one soldier's thoughts and experiences in combat. Written to confront the demons of his past, Pugh recounts the year he spent as an Army rifleman, trapped in the Iron Triangle of the Vietnam War. His accounts of kill zones, mortar attacks and jungle survival are sobering and raise questions about the conflict and all wars.To confront the demons of his past, author Johnny F. Pugh relives the year he spent as an army rifleman battling unseen guerilla fighters in one of the most dangerous places during the Vietnam War, the Iron Triangle.Through his stories and poetry, he shows how it felt to be trapped in a kill zone, enemy bullets just inches from his face, and the mind-numbing terror experienced after being thrown by a land mine explosion while fighting off bloodsucking leeches, vicious mosquitoes, and stifling heat and humidity.Through Smoke-Teared Eyes offers an engaging, sometimes bilingual, account of the close friendship Pugh shared with his fellow squad members, learning from them critical survival skills and his own identity as a Chicano. After witnessing numerous atrocities against the Vietnamese peasants at the hands of the American military, he is forced to question his own role as a participant in this bloody war.