The toughness he found within prepared him for the test of combat, where he substituted rage for fear, violence for words—skills which, though they may ensure survival in combat, leave the survivor one of the walking wounded, and left O'Meara with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
In a career spanning three decades in uniform, Colonel O’Meara witnessed sacrifice by American servicemen in Cold War Europe and Vietnam. In Vietnam, as a young ARVN advisor, he spoke their tongue, ate their rice, and came to love his Vietnamese comrades as brothers in arms. When later ordered to betray them, at the risk of his career, he refused. A wounded O’Meara returned home to find an America changed, an America where those fallen in battle had become the enemy, an America where a liberal media had turned the tide of public opinion against the war and served as cheerleaders for a peace movement persecuting American servicemen.
More than memoir, Accidental Warrior is the story of a war lost, not on the battlefield, but in the hearts and minds of a people. Here are the failures of the Johnson Administration leading to the expansion of America’s role in the conflict. Here is the media's distorted view and its impact on foreign policy. Here is the career-long campaign by an officer against misguided efforts at economy jeopardizing the well-being of his men. Here, too, in his own words, is the life of an accidental warrior, a man who might have been you or I, forced into the role of warrior who made war his life, and yet bears its scars.
