by Richard Barlow Adams (Author)

Sông Bé A Legacy of Vietnam is a factually-based narrative told in flashback from a present-day evening concert at the New Orleans Orpheum Theater. It features a fit, world-renowned architect, Richard Foxworth, a West Point graduate, who reacts to what his wife finds in his old Army footlocker. It triggers long-buried memories of his role as a second lieutenant in the Vietnam War Tet Offensive battle of Sông Bé in 1968, the physical wounds he sustained in the battle, his treatment at Rollingwood Sanitarium for post-traumatic stress, the dream that haunted him nightly after the battle, and the emotional loss of a West Point classmate. Threaded through the story is a history of the American civil rights movement since the 1950s.

As to the authenticity of the military and battle elements of the story, as well as to the Battle of Sông Bé specifically, five months after graduating from West Point in June 1967, Rich Adams was one of the first in the Class of 1967 to serve in the Vietnam War and fought in the Battle of Sông Bé on February 18, 1968, during the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive. Prior to deployment to Vietnam to serve with the 101st Airborne Division as a forward observer and fire direction officer for an artillery battery, he shared a barracks room with an African-American lieutenant for Airborne training. The man responded to him at the end of the first week of airborne school as Redman does in Sông Bé when queried by Foxworth if he wanted to go with the guys into Columbus, Georgia, for a few beers and to blow off some steam ... it wasn't going to happen.

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