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was making. Thinking he ought to stay home and help his mother, he took the job but quickly began to reconsider his decision.
    The war was blowing up, and my friends were all there, two of them were already in Vietnam. And I said, “Nah, I’m going to go.” I really wanted to go there; I wanted the adventure of it, you know. Throughout the ages, young boys have been wanting to go to war for the adventure and the excitement; I’m no different.
    At first he aspired to be a Marine, in part because he loved those old movies so much.
    They ate up my mind. I wanted to be a Marine, and they were an elite unit. I was going to go into battle and be with an elite unit; I don’t want to be with some scrubs that got drafted, you know. That’s the way I’m thinking back then. I don’t feel that way about draftees now, but back then … But I said, “I’m not going to join for four years. I just don’t want to join.” So I did a lot of research, and I realized that Airborne to me was an elite unit, too, you know. And if I got drafted, I could volunteer for Airborne; that means I would be in an Airborne unit, like the 101st Screaming Eagles. And to me that’s as good as being in the Marines.
    I figured I was going to get drafted eventually; everybody was getting drafted—everybody. I was 1-A [immediately available for military service]. But I couldn’t wait; so I found out that I could volunteer to be drafted. I went down to the draft board and waited until they opened, got in, and volunteered to be drafted. I didn’t tell my mother or anything. I just made believe that I had gotten drafted.
    The Hamill family, from Brooklyn, are well-known in New York. Pete, the oldest of seven, is a widely acclaimed novelist and has had a long career in journalism. In 1965 he covered the war as a reporter. He went on to write for The Village Voice , New York Newsday , and the New York Daily News .
    Pete’s brother John, now in his sixties, works for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a director of external affairs. He has a full head of gray hair and walks with a limp at times due to the shrapnel that remains embedded in his knee, a gift of the North Vietnamese. When we spoke about his Combat Medical Badge, John told me that it was the only medal I ever received that meant something to me. He wanted that badge for the hard-earned knowledge it represented, just as he wanted to serve.
    I met John through his younger brother Denis, who is a New York Daily News columnist. In 2004, Denis wrote a column about John’s service in Dak To in 1967—one of the bloodiest battles of the war. They agreed to sit down and talk to me about the Brooklyn they grew up in and the impact Vietnam had on their lives. We met in Denis’s home in Queens.
    John described himself as one of the lucky guys. I got to experience Vietnam and the ’60s both here and abroad, and I’m still on my feet. I mean, I’ve done some damage, you’d say, since, but I consider myself lucky.
    Denis explains further:
    I did a column about this a couple of years ago. I was walking with my little guy, and I stopped to look at this wall where we [his childhood friends] all used to carve our names in the wall with can openers. I was fifty years old, and I looked at it and I said, “Holy shit. All these guys are dead.” Glen blew his head off. Bat died on drugs, got hit by a car, you know. The Doyle brothers are all dead, about four of them. And there’s just an endless march of guys from AIDS and from shooting dope. And it is just an endless parade of guys who were my friends in the ’60s who are all gone.
    Denis described the Brooklyn he grew up in as a collection of small towns: a big, notorious place, with clearly delineated neighborhoods, like the one he lived in. Now known as Park Slope, when the Hamills lived there it was simply called South Brooklyn. John says:
    It was a