Surviving 13 Months in Vietnam
San Diego Veterans Magazine recently had an opportunity to visit with Bill Taylor, author of On Full Automatic: Surviving 13 Months in Vietnam. In this epic and largely untold story, Taylor reveals his personal story of an eighteen-year-old Marine recruit who ages a lifetime in a little more than a year and who is transformed into an experienced, hard fighting grunt while struggling to survive his time in the Vietnam War.
Homeland: You do a great job of showing vs. telling the reader what happened in Vietnam. How did you remember everything so vividly over 50 years later?
SDVM: At what point did you realize you needed to write a book about your time in Vietnam?
Taylor: My notes really helped. And rewriting helped. I was also able to put the battles together with letters I had written home to my dad that he saved. My medical records listed when and where I was wounded, my treatment etc. I also obtained the battalion record to explain all the different locations our troops were in. At the time, I may have known the name of where we were going, but the record allows me to see on a map where we were and the different cities we traveled through.
Taylor: After Vietnam, I always knew I had this incredible story to tell, I just had a difficult time sharing it. As a child, I remember asking my dad about his experiences fighting in WWII and he just never wanted to talk about it. As a Veteran myself, I finally understood how hard it is to talk about. But when my children started asking, I started talking about it, even though I really didn’t want to. That’s when I started to visualize the stories on paper, over thirty years ago. I realized I needed to write a book someday. Whenever I’d remember a particular story or experience from Vietnam, I would write them down and put them in an envelope. After years of doing this, I had accumulated this unbelievable package of stories for my book. And I had basically told so many people I was going to write a book, that I was kind of embarrassed not to at that point. 22
WWW.SanDiegoVeteransMagazine.com / FEBRUARY 2022
SDVM: How did you obtain the official records? Taylor: It’s not that hard, you have to be a detective. And you had to talk to people. I actually found the guy that had maps of the areas at the time, including information on where all the different battalions and companies were. I was able to put together all kinds of great information.
