Once There Were Green Fields

This book is partly about football and partly about war. It is also about America's loss of innocence. John Kennedy was president, and we lived in a sliver of time many called Camelot. However, Vietnam was rising. Most of the narrative takes place in 1961 on the west side of Evansville, Indiana. During the autumn of that year, the Reitz High School Panthers became the only high school team in modern football history to go through a season without allowing a point-nine straight shutouts. It was in October of that year when President Kennedy, acting on the advice of Gen. Maxwell Taylor, sent 16,000 "advisors and trainers" to South Vietnam. Prior to Vietnam, the United States was undefeated on the battlefield, its only blemish being a stalemate in Korea. Vietnam would be America's first taste of defeat. Two players on that football team, both all-state tackles (one an Eagle Scout and honor student, the other a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks) would die in Vietnam. One would die by a sniper's bullet, the other in a plane crash during a bombing mission. The other characters are strong: identical twin ends; a coach who constantly chomped on antacids, which caused him to foam at the mouth when he ranted; a black sheep who spent time in the state reformatory as a youth and in a correctional facility as an adult; the girls/women who loved these guys. The narrator is a player who quit the team before they achieved immortality and later became a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. The book is fiction, but it is based on events that happened in Evansville and globally during the fall of 1961. Names have been changed. Events have been changed. Nonetheless, the story is an attempt to examine who we were and who we have become and to inventory what we have lost and what we have kept over the last fifty years.