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A March from Private to Colonel |
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A March from Private to Colonel |
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The Most Fun I Ever Had With My Clothes On: A March from Private to Colonel ISBN: 978-1-931575-83-6 Paperback, 328 pages with 120 action packed photos:-) Retail $25.00 + $3.00 P&H. To order: send check/money order (PREFERRED) to Tom Davis, 85 John Allman Ln, Sylva, NC 28779.Purchase two or more copies and receive free shipping. This is a memoir written by Tom Davis, author of The R-complex. Chapter 2, the author's year spent in Vietnam (Helloooo Vietnam: 364 Days and a Wake-up), now available at the Kindle Store! Return to Main Page. Also available at City Lights Book Store in Sylva, NC Available through Amazon.com This is a companion book to his wife's, Polly, memoir: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment: A Wife's Thirty-year Journey with Her Green Beret Return to main page Purchase this and Polly's memoir for $35.00 and FREE shipping! Click Podcast to hear the reading of Tom and Polly's memoirs conducted at City Lights Bookstore. Portions of this memoir that are on Kindle Chapter 2, of the author's year in Vietnam (Helloooo Vietnam: 364 Days and a Wake-up), now available at the Kindle Store! Also from the memoir: Special Forces A Teams. The author recounts his time spent on A Detachments specializing in High Altitude Low Opening Parachuting, Underwater Operations, Mountaineering, and Small Atomic Demolitions Munitions. Now available at the Kindle Store! Also from the memoir: Adventures in Iraq and Bosnia. The author Recounts his time spent in Iraq and Bosnia. Now available at the Kindle Store! AND a story that didn't make it into the memoir as it was deemed, "Too immature!" by Polly. Check out Pass Me that Skull: Misadventures in Vietnam at the Kindle Store. Other Special Forces and Action Adventure Kindle books. To order, PREFERRED send check or money order for $20.00 + $3.00 P&H to: Old Mountain Press PO Box 66 Webster, NC 28788 Or Or Some time ago a guy named David
Brown interviewed me for an article he was writing for Foreign Policy
Magazine. It dealt with my time in Special Forces when one of the teams
I commanded had a SADM (Small Atomic Demolitions Munitions) capability.
I recounted this operation in my memoir. I invite all to read David's
article by click on Foreign
Policy SADM Article. Portions of this memoir have been accepted for publication in: Fayetteville Observer Times Southeast Missouri State University Press Cahaba River Literary Journal The Road Less Traveled
Previews: CLICK A
LINK BELOW to bring up a PDF Adobe file or the Amazon Kindle
Store. PDFs are formatted to read well on iPhone, iPad, Kindle, or your
computer. |
Support your local independent book store! If you live close to one of the below bookstores, please purchase your copy from them. Call (828) 456-6000 to reserve a signed copy! Blue Ridge Books, Waynesville, NC
Call (910) 678-8899 to reserve a signed copy! City Center Gallery, Fayetteville, NC
Call 828-586-9499 to reserve a signed copy! City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, NC
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 Author’s Comments My wife Polly and I labored through each of our memoirs at the same time. You will find hers also listed on this site. It will be of great interest to the reader to compare the two. One may well wonder if we were actually together at the same place at the same time as our views of identical situations seem as far apart as Venus is to Mars. Go figure. Stay low, keep moving, and never ever quit! De oppresso liber. COL (Ret) Tom “The Squid” Davis Review written by Henry Zeybel for Vietnam Veterans of America. 5 June 2015. Here’s the deal. When you pick up a book, do you expect to read all of it? If not, why not? That is the dilemma posed by Retired Army Col. Tom Davis in The Most Fun I Ever Had with My Clothes On: A March from Private to Colonel (Old Mountain Press, 328 pp., $20.00, paper). This good-natured memoir. which covers Davis’ thirty-plus years in the U.S. Army, resembles a course in the many macho career fields available to soldiers. Davis says that only his three closest loved ones "will read this epic from cover to cover." He tells the rest of us, "You don’t have to," and suggests that we "peruse the table of contents and pick and chose what most tickles [our] fancy." I called his bet, read every page, and found a lot to like—along with bits of repetition and predictability. Davis devotes most of the book to his years as a lieutenant and captain in jobs that prepared him for his climb up the leadership ladder. Davis used the Army training system to his advantage by taking as many courses as possible. A newlywed with a low draft number, he forestalled being sent to Vietnam by enlisting, earning a commission through OCS, then completing parachute and Special Forces training, followed by failing Vietnamese language school. Hey, nobody’s perfect. Eventually, Davis spent a relatively calm year in Vietnam. In his first four months during 1970, as a Special Forces lieutenant at Duc Hue, he led CIDG troops on Search and Destroy missions, which he called "Seek and Avoid." They battled enemy forces only once. In Long Hai for his last eight months, he trained Cambodian civilians (ages twelve to sixty-four) to be soldiers. On his return from to the war zone, Davis helped to organize a Special Forces mountaineering team before mastering SCUBA techniques and moving on to the Infantry Officer Advanced Course and Ranger training. A short time later, he also qualified in HALO parachuting. He details these activities with greatest emphasis on SF SCUBA operations. As a junior officer, Davis unhesitatingly called on his senior sergeants for guidance. In particular, he pays great respect to SFC Ronald Brockelman, his SCUBA Team Sergeant. For twenty years Davis plied his many SF skills in England, Germany, Denmark, France, Korea, Zaire, Turkey, Tunis, Italy, Iraq, and Bosnia. His sense of duty was exemplary: He took virtually any assignment at a moment’s notice. Reading the entire book teaches you more than you ever expected to know about peacetime operations in his areas of expertise. A hundred-plus photographs emphasize the chapter highlights. Davis explains the minutiae of running SF units at higher and higher command levels and details what he calls the Five Principles of Good Management— his Five Pillars of Command Philosophy—plus the acceptability of making exceptions to them when "downright necessary." Hey, no plan is perfect. Overboard about physical fitness, Davis cannot stop when he talks about participating in triathlons and marathons, along with other ever-more-clever-and-complex athletic competitions he devised. In this respect, his ego grows as big as the Ritz—and its annex. I ran distance races for several decades, but just reading those sections exhausted me. Nevertheless, I greatly admire Tom Davis because he frequently used his leadership positions to challenge authority, mainly to question his superiors. A few of his stories project unwholesome pictures of pettiness within the U.S. military structure, based on (excuse the cliché) the father-knows-best attitude of senior officers. Davis often was a rebellious son. More power to him. Readers’ Comments Comment on this book.
Excerpts: Basic Training, Ft Dix, NJ Officer Candidate School, Ft. Benning, GA 82nd Sports Parachute Club, Ft. Bragg, NC Special Forces A Detachment, Vietnam Doc Jungling, the senior medic on the Team, was the most knowledgeable in his field and not only provided medical support to the Team, but he also supervised Vietnamese medical personnel he had trained to take care of the CIDG and their families. The young wife of one of the CIDG was going to have a baby. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal as Jungling and his trained Vietnamese medics delivered babies all the time. As luck would have it, the birth wasn’t going as well as it should have, and we called for a MEDEVAC. Several of us helped Jungling get the girl to the helipad. It would rain, then clear up as a thunder head passed over. As she screamed and Jungling worked on her, I held the corner of a poncho that seemed to weigh fifty pounds. I closed my eyes as the blood drained from my head, and my knees quivered. I prayed for her, and I prayed that I wouldn’t pass out. I would’ve never lived that one down. It was a breached birth, on a helipad, in the rain, under a poncho, and Jungling pulled it off, or maybe I should say “pulled it out” just as the chopper touched down. He, the new mother, and her husband, who was holding a corner of the poncho and trying, like me, to stay conscious, got into the chopper and lifted off. Mother and baby would be just fine. It was then that I realized that there was just about nothing that an SF soldier couldn’t and wouldn’t do. B-36 FANK (Forces Armee National Khmer) Training Command Vietnam ODA 223 Mountain Team Ft. Devens, MA ODA 232 SCUBA Team Ft. Devens, MA Field Training Exercise in Denmark Testing Dry Suits Under Extreme Conditions The Korean Special Forces Compound, Soul, Korea
His short stories, articles, and poetry have been published in Poets Forum, The Carolina Runner, Triathlon Today, ByLine, Georgia Athlete, The Saturday Extra (magazine section of the Fayetteville Observer), A Loving Voice Vol. I and II, Special Warfare (a professional military journal published by the Special Warfare Center) Whispers a Poetry Blog, Poetry and Beyond, Southeast Missouri State University Press’ Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, volume 3 & 4 anthology, County Lines: A Literary Journal 2015 Issue Vol. 2, Winston-Salem Writers’ POETRY IN PLAIN SIGHT program, Passing Through Stories and Art about the Road Less Traveled, Asheville, NC’s Rapid River Magazine, Soap Stone Creek Literary Journal for kids of all ages . Many of his short stories and poems have received honors in writing contests sponsored by ByLine magazine. Other traditional books by Tom include: The Life and Times of Rip Jackson, The Patrol Order, The R-complex, Pickaberry Pig (a children’s coloring book) What Would You Like On Your Mashed Potatoes, and his memoir The Most Fun I Ever Had With My Clothes On: A March from Private to Colonel. He authored and published the following Kindle books: Helloooo Vietnam: 364 Days and a Wake-up, Special Forces A Teams, Adventures in Iraq and Bosnia, Pass Me That Skull: Misadventures in Vietnam, Growing up in Vienna Georgia: A Collection of Short Stories The Long and The Short of It: A Collection of Poetry and Prose The Liberian Funds Transfer Scam Detailed An Analysis of a Scam, and Some Things to Think About BEFORE the Engagement: A PRE-Engagement Checklist. All of these are found at his eBook at www.oldmp.com/e-book View photographs of Special
Forces Advanced Skills training/operations the author has conducted. Welcome Visitor # Return to top Return to Old Mountain Press Books In Print |
years
in the Army serving with Special Forces (Green Berets) on four continents
and in ten foreign countries. He has worn a Green Beret at every rank from
2LT to Colonel and commanded at every level from Special Forces A Teams to a
Joint Special Operations Task Force. The various A Teams he commanded
specialized in Mountaineering, Underwater Operations, High Altitude Low
Opening (HALO) parachute techniques, and Small Atomic Demolitions Munitions
(SADM). In addition to the Army’s Command and General Staff College and
Army War College, he has attended Airborne, Ranger, Special Forces,
Underwater Operations (UWO), Danish Combat Swimmer, Special Forces Surface
Swimmer Infiltration Technique Course, High Altitude Low Opening (HALO)
parachute school, Small Atomic Demolitions Munitions (SADM) and others.
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