According to the book description of Blood on the Risers: A Novel of Conflict and Survival in Special Forces During the Vietnam War, “An anxious, fifteen-year-old service brat eagerly returns home from a decade of living abroad...a childhood spent growing up in serenity in the recently defeated Empire of Japan.  His new home is an obscure sector of South Texas...a hot, barren landscape cluttered with palm and mesquite trees accenting the broad expanses of impenetrable brush and cactus.  He quickly adjusts to the immense culture shock, but suddenly, his docile world crashes swiftly around him.  The unexpected dread of nuclear war brought on by the Cuban missile crisis confronts him...confounding his carefree existence.  John F. Kennedy, his cherished catholic president, is summarily assassinated while he stands leisurely outside the shop class at his high school, listening in horror to the incident on a car radio during recess. Stunned by the events unfolding in his young life, he struggles with the reality that even his new favorite TV shows...Father Knows Best, and Leave it to Beaver...are rapidly being overshadowed by the evening news broadcasts. Night after night...black and white images of American boys dying in the steamy jungles of a distant land, shock his fledging adolescent sensitivities.