Bob

Worthington

Writer  |  Soldier  |  Pilot

Book #3 Update

 The third book of my trilogy about my last decade in the Army as a clinical psychologist is about 85% done.  I have 3 more chapters to finish.  I have added another article on combat flying in Vietnam to my web site, it describes my flight in an Air Force AC-47 gunship.  It was an interesting, exciting, and very, very, cold ride.  Open doors and windows at 130 mph 3000 feet above the ground, at night.  I also have a chapter in a military anthology being published an a couple of months.  A friend described his experiences as a new Army recruit undergoing basic training in a chapter in the anthology.  He suggested I do a chapter so I took the chapter in my forthcoming book, Fighting Viet Cong in the Rung Sat, about my year as the commander of a basic training company and condensed and edited it to comply with the anthology format.  My friend was at the bottom while I was at the top.  It will be published by the Military Writers Society of America this fall.

Combat Flying in Vietnam

My web site will have a new addition. I will be editing various chapters describing combat flights from my two books as a combat advisor. The chapters will be rewritten to become stand-alone articles on various combat flights I participated in. I was not a pilot then, so I did not do any of the flying. The flights were for recon, one med evac, combat missions or going from one combat area to another. Each article will be numbered, and they will appear, one at a time, over the next several months.

Book #3: From Combat Infantryman to Clinical Psychologist: All in the Army.

This book is half-way completed. It will have a Preface, 20 chapters, and an Epilogue for around 85,000 to 90,000 words. It begins when I left active duty in August 1969, covers grad school at Northern Arizona University and the University of Utah (where I went back on active duty and received my PhD in Psychology), describes my assignments and major research projects as an Army senior clinical psychologist. It ends with my retirement in October 1981.

Keeping My Books Honest

My military trilogy contains three books covering a 25-year time span. While I think my memory is excellent, I want to insure what I remember is accurate and correct. Here is how I do that. My books cover a specific time and initially I create a summary of what I want to cover in my book. I then go into more details and work out each chapter (another outline). Then I start on each chapter. My research tools are vast, dozens and dozens of books written about everything I will be writing about (as an example a military historian authored a book covering a five-year history of a province I was assigned to, it even had a description of a battle I was involved in). I have decoration citations, my officer efficiency reports, letters, documents, and articles of where I was assigned. Also, letters I wrote home to parents and wife. I have battle maps I used and hundreds of photographs. Probably the most valuable single resource is the internet. I can access government documents, master’s thesis and doctoral dissertations about battles, organizations, and people I worked with, and dairies and photos by service people who were at the same location I was, at the same time. For example, I have a chapter describing my med evac and the evacuation hospital where I was treated. To verify what I remembered I found on the Internet, journals kept by nurses there when I was a patient along with descriptions of what they did and photos of the hospital, ER, wards, etc. I can locate maps, photos, documents, papers, all related to where I was and what I did. Technical details regarding navy boats used in combat operations or photos of planes flown in are all available This is how I keep myself honest.

Book #2: Fighting Viet Cong in the Rung Sat goes to the publisher

In October, the final manuscript went to McFarlands Publishers. The book has 300 pages of text, 44 photographs, 8 maps, and 4 organization charts. Due to the COVID-19, the editing process will take longer than normal so the expected release date is late 2021.