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January 15, 2006Veteran writes memoirs of his time in VietnamWriting to be submitted as part of projectTRAVERSE CITY - Dominic Sondy wants to blast some of the stereotypes of Vietnam War veterans."I'm not a post-traumatic stress disorder person," he said. "And not everybody was treated badly when they came back. Nobody ever called me a baby-killer or spit on me. That would've been detrimental to their health." Sondy, 58, of Traverse City has written a memoir of his 12 months in Vietnam in 1968 and '69 as a front-line combatant toting an M-16 machine gun and later as a photojournalist. He finished the memoir, titled "Saigon Shuffle," to be submitted as part of the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project. The project focuses on firsthand veteran accounts of the six major wars the United States has fought from World War I to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Sondy is still a professional photographer who runs Vintage Image - a photography and computer graphic design business - with his wife Joann. He started writing his Vietnam memories long before he heard about the project a couple of years ago. "I'd written it over the past 30 years dozens of times," he said. The 133-page memoir starts with just before he volunteered for the draft, continuing through several months when he served as a "grunt" on the front lines, the rest of his tour as a photojournalist and the time right after he returned home. The highlights of the memoir include: - Once while guarding a stalled armored personnel carrier, he and a friend became hungry and offered a Vietnamese boy some money for food. They hungrily wolfed down the sandwiches the boy brought them from his family's hut. Only after did they ask the boy what was in the sandwiches, learning it was something that contestants might eat on "Fear Factor" decades later. - A description of a nighttime ambush against his platoon. Marked by bullets whizzing by and the night sky being lit up with flares, it ended with Sondy and others having to remove the bodies of their fallen comrades. - Working as a photographer, he shot such things as a visit from President Richard M. Nixon to pin medals on soldiers, to the everyday lives of soldiers and the adoption of a Vietnamese girl by a U.S. major. Working for the military, he was not allowed to take pictures of dead, dirty or wounded soldiers. In addition to submitting his writing to the Library of Congress, he has given it to a print-on-demand publisher. That means he can have one specially printed any time someone orders one, rather than having to print a certain quantity all at once; he can also continue to make revisions between orders. One of the revisions he's working on now is to take out a part about one of his friends having died. Shortly after he came home, he asked a friend about another photographer he worked with in the service. The friend told him the man had overdosed after receiving a "Dear John" letter from his girlfriend. But about six months ago, he ran the other photographer's name through an Internet search engine and found that he's alive and working as an astronomy photographer. Sondy contacted him. "He said, 'Nice obituary you wrote of me,'" Sondy said, imitating the sarcasm in his old friend's voice. Sondy said he had wanted to make a "positive" portrayal of Vietnam through a soldier's eyes. That's not to say he supported the war. "I think we didn't necessarily have to lose that war," he said. "When we were going to pull out, I was bummed. I wanted to win." He also sees some similarities between that war and the war in Iraq. "The book is relevant today, because we're in the same situation in Iraq," he said. Sondy disagrees with people who say the Iraq war is different because soldiers are fighting against armed insurgents who are out of uniform. "The Viet Cong were insurgents," he said.
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