Memories of a Marine Infantry
The full story behind the memoir — what it covers, and why it was written.
The Story
Eddie Abney grew up poor in rural Southeast Missouri — picking cotton, wearing homemade shirts, running wild in a small town with no real police force. At seventeen, on a teenage vow, he chose the Marines over the Navy. A year later he was in Vietnam.
Most of this book is life on the ground with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Division: ambushes, malaria, monsoons, and the friends who didn't make it home. It builds to the night in August 1969 when his company commander, Captain Sam, was killed leading his men — a loss that still sits with Abney fifty years later.
The rest of the book follows him home: finishing his tour in Okinawa and Japan, choosing college over reenlisting, a law degree, and nearly forty years practicing law in California. He married, raised two sons — and carried Vietnam the whole way. The book closes on a harder fight decades later: Agent Orange-related diabetes, a brutal stretch in VA hospitals, and the loss of his leg, met with the same plainspoken grit as everything before it.
It's a war memoir, but just as much a story about where a person comes from and what they carry forward — told straight, raw, and uncut.
