Frederick Downs and The Killing Zone in Vietnam

As Frederick Downs notes in the Preface to his memoir, The Killing Zone (1978), he has written this book because he finds it “necessary now to give another view of Vietnam, that of the day-to-day life of an infantryman on the ground.” He writes further that he has “always been asked what [he] thought about Vietnam, but never what it was like to fight in Vietnam. This [he declares to the reader] is the way it was for us in the platoon of Delta one-six.” Why do you think he finds it necessary to offer an infantryman’s perspective on the Vietnam War? And what, exactly, does his perspective offer that an historical or a journalistic account of the war cannot deliver? How does he convey the day-to-day-life of a platoon? Were there any particular sections of this excerpt that stood out to you? In class, we shall deepen our engagement with the text through a writing exercise in the form of a letter.