Bill Lord volunteered for the draft “because I just wanted to get it over with.” He remembers not really wanting to “tell my kids 30 years later, ‘Yeah, it was the biggest thing going and I sat it out at The Old Eden Club drinking beer out of a boot.’” He describes the “physically painful indignities” out in the field, from the terrible, muggy 100 degree heat to the red ants that swarmed you, the snakes, the bees, the leeches, the mosquitoes. And all of that “without even thinking about somebody trying to kill you. … It was very, very uncomfortable.” He describes the status, the influence, and the fun of being a company commander’s radioman. He remembers a wonderful R&R in Australia. He recalls the “very, very scary” first 24 hours of the Tet Offensive, when his unit received alarming news of a North Vietnamese battalion about to burn the village they were in, when they had more news that the Tet truce had been violated throughout the country, and when they were called “in a panic” to the Cholon Racetrack to interdict Viet Cong. He describes quite unconsciously and entirely unintentionally learning leadership lessons in the Army that set him up for success throughout his career in journalism.