Dark Days for White Knights - Paperback

by Dick Jackson (Author)

Dark Days for White Knights is the story of one Veteran's loss of innocence and his sojourn down a lonely corridor...a chronicle of his quest to recover something of what he lost in Vietnam.Combat veterans of every war and from every nation have been scarred by the atrocities of war. However, because of the rotation system implemented during the Vietnam War, the veterans of Vietnam straggled home, one by one, to be scattered across an increasingly hostile America. America seemed as foreign as Vietnam had once been, but these were no longer the boys who had dreamed of serving America. The dreams of many had died in the soul-sucking mud of fetid rice paddies. There are many novels about Vietnam, most of which highlight heroic actions in combat. Heroes are a part of all wars and their stories are exciting and important. Vietnam was no exception. The devotion the warriors shared for one another spawned many heroic actions...but perhaps the important lessons from Vietnam were about personal responsibility, misplaced trust and the ultimate cost of survival. In that light...Dark Days for White Knights is a unique perspective on a still controversial time in American history.

Author Biography

Dick Jackson was born in the Oklahoma panhandle in 1949. He grew up on the Great Plains of Kansas, Oklahoma and west Texas. Dick spent his seventeenth birthday on a Greyhound bus traveling to Oklahoma City for his Marine Corps physical. He left the Marines in 1969, after being wounded in Vietnam. Dick attended college on the GI Bill, graduating from Texas A&I University with a B.S. degree in 1977, and from Idaho State University with an M.S. degree in 1979. He met his wife, Julie, while attending Idaho State, and together they have lived in Idaho, Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Kansas and Missouri. Their abodes have varied from a five bedroom, tri-level in the suburbs of Denver to a 63 Chevy school bus parked in the forest of Arizona. During their adventures, Dick has worked at different times as a petroleum geologist, a mud logger, a carpenter, a newspaper editor, a college teacher, a freelance writer, a real estate agent and a sailing instructor. Dick earned his USCG Captain's License while teaching sailing. Dick and Julie have three children and five grandchildren. They presently live on a small farm in the Missouri Ozarks, where Dick works as a senior petroleum geologist.