Steven Lakernick enlisted in the Navy in 1965 at age 17, hoping to become a Navy corpsman assigned to the Marines. The Marine Corps tried to draft him, but the Navy honored the contract he had signed and trained him as a corpsman. After his hospital training, Mr. Lakernick “was asked if I would consider going to reconnaissance, Force Reconnaissance training with the Marine Corps. And I accepted, and they sent me to jump school at Fort Bragg. And I went to scuba school at Fort Pierce, Florida. And I went to jungle training in Panama with the Rangers, and then I went to Vietnam with Force Recon." He arrived in Da Nang and was initially assigned with a grunt unit, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. Soon afterwards he was assigned to a line unit in Quang Tri, doing patrols briefly, then assigned to 1st Recon in Chu Lai, where they ran radio relays mostly. “And I felt at home.” Then finally he was assigned to Force Company, “and that's when things got real interesting.” He describes training his fellow Force Recon Marines as medics, doing MEDCAPs, gathering intelligence with a MACV-SOG unit on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and learning to love kimchi with the ROK Marines. He survived three helicopter crashes, lost an Australian wife he had met on R&R to a drunk driver, and was at last medically retired for traumatic arthritis in the knees. “I've been told by my psychiatrists and psychologists that I kept going back because I had a death wish,” he says.