ACHILLES HEEL

  • But in August 1965—after just six months of basic officer training, newly married and stationed in California to learn intelligence work—the author and his helicopter squadron were shipped across the Pacific to the coast of Vietnam. We get a vivid account of Lieutenant Cochran’s 13-month deployment in-country: carrying out intelligence assignments but also commanding a perimeter defense platoon, extracting troops from “hot” landing zones, and serving as a judge in a court-martial. Episodes of terror, exhausting routine, and surreal dark comedy are punctuated by sharp analysis of why things so often went wrong and his growing doubts about the mission.

    Preceding that white-hot core story is a sojourn into the author’s background of privilege in his home town on Cape Cod. Postwar, his odyssey sails on through graduate school in psychology, a lauded career as a professor of early child development at Cornell, and a solid family life with his Swedish-born wife and their two children. He became an active opponent of the war but kept his own experience under lock and key—even while haunted by manifestations of post-traumatic stress. The combat death in 1968 of his beloved cousin made a tragic war even more intensely personal. In an afterword, he calls out a misplaced sense of American exceptionalism for getting us into that war and others that have followed.

    Writing this memoir helped the author make sense of and heal from his trauma. And the process yielded valuable lessons from that time, especially his attraction to cultures outside his own—not to mention a trove of photographs taken in Vietnam, many included here. His storytelling prowess, his grasp of history, and his perspective as a son of close-knit New England clans distinguish the book. Woven through it are his passions for social justice, the welfare of children, and the natural world, and his gift for soul-nourishing friendships. Achilles Heel is a potent story by a captivating narrator: a natural leader, a man of principle who found his own path through disillusionment and darkness.

A Vietnam Memoir

by Mon Cochran

About the Author

Mon Cochran is a writer, researcher, and teacher living in Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. His family on both sides has deep roots in New England: in Concord, where the Cochrans married into the Emerson (Ralph Waldo) family, and in Orleans, where his Cochran grandparents built a home on Pleasant Bay in Orleans early in the 20th century. He is a graduate of Phillips Academy in Andover, Harvard College (1964), and the Marine Corps Officer Training School in Quantico, Virginia. Deployed to Vietnam in 1965, he served as an intelligence officer and in several ad hoc roles for thirteen months, completing his two-year tour in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

After earning his Master’s and PhD from the University of Michigan in psychology, he joined the faculty of Cornell Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he conducted studies of early child development in context (day care, prekindergarten, parent empowerment), both in the U.S. and Sweden. During those years, he and his then-wife raised their daughter, Maria, and son, Monny; soon after the marriage ended, Mon retired and moved back to his home place on Pleasant Bay. He is professor emeritus from Cornell, and in retirement has focused on climate activism and writing. He cofounded the Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative and led a fundraising campaign to preserve a privately owned island in the bay, now open to the public.

Books authored or coauthored during his academic career include Extending Families: The Social Networks of Parents and their Children; Child Care That Works: A Parent’s Guide to Finding Quality Child Care (with Eva Cochran); Finding Our Way: The Future of American Early Care and Education; and the International Handbook of Child Care Policies and Programs. More recently he has published two e-books on climate science and clean energy for middle schoolers, Just Right: Climate Science for Young Readers and Sun, Wind, and Water: Clean Energy Solutions for Young Readers. Another e-book, The Fishing Trip, chronicles more than 40 years of fishing trips with two Swedish friends as they progressed from worms to flies, from counting the catch to protecting the species, and from matching the hatch to worshiping the watershed. Nearly 60 years after his tour of duty in Vietnam, he explored its impact on his life in his latest book, Achilles Heel.

Photos at left, from top: The Cochran family home on Pleasant Bay, Cape Cod. The author (second from right) and his siblings in 1949. Vietnamese troops transported by helicopter squadron HMM-336 in the Rung Sat region, 1966. MC after returning from Vietnam, with daughter Maria at age one. Taking part in a street-theater symposium at Cornell to protest the Guantanamo internments, 2004. MC and Swedish friends fly-fishing in Montana.