Battles brought more than bruises

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Local News

May 29, 2018 - 9:04 AM

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing — these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.

— Tim O’Brien,

“The Things They Carried”

John Sheehan’s job was to find trouble.

And he was good at it.

Sheehan was a “LURP,” a special forces scout tasked with scouring the South Vietnamese jungle, usually with a group of four or five of his fellow Green Berets, to look for the enemy.

“I figure 95 percent of the time, I’d get up, have some breakfast, tear down a bunker, put on my rough sack and start walking,” Sheehan said.

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