When the 160 men of Charlie Company were drafted in 1966, they were part of the wave of conscription that would swell the American military to eighty thousand combat troops in Vietnam by the height of the war in 1968. In the spring of 1966 the war was still popular, and the draftees saw their service as a rite of passage. But by December 1967, when the company returned home, only thirty men remained—and were among the first veterans to be harassed by war protesters. The Boys of ’67 examines the experiences of a company from the only division in the Vietnam era to train and deploy together in similar fashion to World War II’s famous 101st Airborne Division.
