Dead Center: A Marine Sniper's Two-Year Odyssey in the Vietnam War »

A former Marine scout-sniper, Ed Kugler served two tours in Vietnam as a sniper and sergeant with the 4th Marines in I Corps. He is the recipient of two Purple Hearts and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He is the author of the inspirational self-help booklet A Dozen Things I Learned About Life as a Marine Sniper in Vietnam. Following his four-year hitch in the Marine Corps, Ed distinguished himself in the corporate world. He spent ten years in his family's trucking business before working sixteen years in management with PepsiCo's Frito-Lay and Pepsi-Cola divisions. He was then Vice President, Worldwide Logistics, for Compaq Computer Corporation and vice president of Telxon Corporation. Today Ed is a business and change management consultant. He lives with his wife of thirty years and their family in Spring, Texas.

WHEN YOU'RE IN THE DEATH BUSINESS,
EACH DAWN COULD BE YOUR LAST.

Raw, straightforward, and powerful, Ed Kugler's account of his two years as a Marine scout-sniper in Vietnam vividly captures his experiences there—the good, the bad, and the ugly. After enlisting in the Marines at seventeen, then being wounded in Santo Domingo during the Dominican crisis, Kugler arrived in Vietnam in early 1966.

As a new sniper with the 4th Marines, Kugler picked up bush skills while attached to 3d Force Recon Company, and then joined the grunts. To take advantage of that experience, he formed the Rogues, a five-sniper team that hunted in the Co Bi-Than Tan Valley for VC and NVA. His descriptions of long, tense waits, sudden deadly action, and NVA countersniper ambushes are fascinating.

In DEAD CENTER, Kugler demonstrates the importance to a sniper of patience, marksmanship, bush skills, and guts—while underscoring exactly what a country demands of its youth when it sends them to war.