Walking Off the Vietnam War with Doug Peacock

Roaming from the arid, scorching vastness of the Sonoran desert to his beloved Grizzly Hilton along the western edge of Glacier National Park to burying his friend in the southwest, the author reveals with admirable and uncommon candor his innermost torments including those of trying to define his relationship with Abbey, who did much to make Peacock famous by basing his character Hayduke on him in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. The author is ambivalent, to say the least, about this literary notoriety that seeped into nearly every corner of his life. Along the way in Walking It Off Peacock includes an interstitial story about his experiences in the Himalayas of Nepal. A nice touch that lends depth through both a variance in pace and setting and by the addition of a companion narrative.

A Midwesterner at birth, Peacock volunteered for an intense combat tour in Vietnam as a Green Beret medic. Ike many of his fellow soldiers, he returned home greatly changed to an equally troubled America. Happenstance joined him up with a group of desert rat wilderness anarchists led by Abbey.

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