Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

My father’s name is Juan A. Saucedo Jr., and his story begins at 17 years of age in 1974 right after high school. Being too poor to afford college and too young to join the army, he got a marriage license so they would accept him. The military was perfect because it offered job training for civilian jobs that could help him succeed when he got out. After a year of training, my dad was sent to Laos for what the military calls OJT or ‘on the job training’ where he held the rank of Corporal, his job was as an intelligence analyst. From Laos he volunteered for a special ops mission called The Evacuation of Vietnam. The main objectives were to locate certain people on a list, and get them out. The helicopter would drop them far away from their objective so that it would not alert the Viet Cong that they were there. Vietnam was beautiful, but uncomfortable. My father’s team wasn’t the typical army. They didn’t eat rations, they didn’t use bug repellent, and they didn’t even use soap. They ate what the Vietnamese ate, and they would wash in the rivers in order to get acclimated to the area. The key to their success was stealth and surprise, the Vietnamese couldn’t know they were there. So by eating the same food as