No one in Vietnam had to tell door gunner and gunship crew chief Al Sever that the odds didn’t look good. He volunteered for the job well aware that hanging out of slow-moving choppers over hot LZs blazing with enemy fire was not conducive to a long life. But that wasn’t going to stop Specialist Sever.

From Da Nang to Cu Chi and the Mekong Delta, Sever spent thirty-one months in Vietnam, fighting in eleven of the war’s sixteen campaigns. Every morning when his gunship lifted off, often to the clacking and muzzle flashes of AK-47s hidden in the dawn fog, Sever knew he might not return. This raw, gritty, gut-wrenching firsthand account of American boys fighting and dying in Vietnam captures all the hell, horror, and heroism of that tragic war.

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“A grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War by a good soldier.”
–DAVID HACKWORTH

“Xin Loi, Viet Nam lays it all on the line. . . . A story that every reader who wants to feel part of the battles he fought should know.”
–WILLIAM R. PHILLIPS, author of Night of the Silver Stars: The Battle of Lang Vei

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AL SEVER, a crew member on various types of helicopters, served in Vietnam from the heavy combat days of 1968 to the moral and physical disintegration of our forces in 1972. From the Delta to the DMZ, he observed the varied facets of the war as the opposing armies clashed and maneuvered throughout the country. He lives in Montoursville, Pennsylvania.

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