Book excerpt: The year author K.G. McLaughlin graduated from high school, 1967, was known as ÒThe Summer of LoveÓ by an ever-increasing hippie movement that had been sweeping the country since shortly after the John Kennedy assassination in 1963. It was the best summer of his life. But that ended abruptly, he joined the Marines and was guaranteed a trip to Vietnam. In Scenes from a Vietnam-Era Diary, he chronicles his personal odyssey from a safe and content life in Cape Cod to a Marine Corps boot camp culture shock that unknowingly, at the time, was a gentle prelude to the hellish world of being a frontline combat soldier in Vietnam. Raw and uncomproming, McLaughlin presents a real-time, journal-based narrative describing combat while spending months in the hot, waterlogged, bug-infested jungle with one close call after another dodging bullets, bombs, and mines. Scenes from a Vietnam-Era Diary offers a multifaceted narrative of life, death, and the unspeakable horrors of serving in the Vietnam War.