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. 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. 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. 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. CHAPTER ONE   Snipers Up … Hell Yes!   It might be January, but it’s hotter than hell. The sun’s streaming through the trees, creating shadows that streak across the sergeant’s face. He’s working himself into a thick lather as he describes what Nam’s like. It’s for the education of trainees like me in the audience. “At night, it’s blacker than the inside of an ape’s ass at midnight!” he bellows. He’s dark with a Nam tan; his looks betray his irrational nature. He works to impress the fifty or so of us, the fresh meat, seated on makeshift wooden benches. It’s jungle training, it’s Camp Pendleton, and it’s weird.   My mind drifts away from his antics to my arrival in California just two days earlier. I’m back sitting in a little park just outside the bus station in Oceanside. I’m fresh in from the frigid January winds of Cleveland. And I love the warm, short-sleeve weather of Southern California. I sit, listening to someone’s radio playing “Monday Monday.” Me, the Mamas and the Papas, and all this wonderful weather, how can it be? I’m sitting in Oceanside, waiting for my bus to Pendleton, and I think, Man, this’ll be a good place to come when all the Marine and Nam stuff is over. This is nice, it’s