Red Boots Rebel: Keeping Secrets (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781542580977)

Lawrence Drake served in the nation's top-secret cryptologic intelligence gathering facility in Asia at the height of the Vietnam War, working side by side with the National Security Agency, Army Security Agency, Navy Security Group, and the Air Force Security Service. The secrets he learned ultimately led him and his friends to make a unique and bold protest against the war. It was a first of its kind and those in command were bewildered as to how to handle it.

The well-written book documents Drake's changing attitude toward the war, the military, and ultimately alters his consciousness toward the United States Government and particularly the military. It testifies to changing attitudes during a very volatile time and describes the many experiences that ultimately led to his act of defiance. Some of these experiences are humorous, absurd, and typical military SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) that sets the book apart from other Vietnam memoirs. It's not the violence or the mistruths perpetrated by the military and the government but the absurdity, (like Catch 22), that is at the heart of his rebellion. The Air Force doesn't know how to deal with him and his small band of rebels, which leads to the establishment's often hilarious and non-effective responses.

The conflict in Vietnam ripped Drake from college life in Middle America and planted him in the bowels of intrigue and government cover-up. The young airman found himself on a steamy island in the East China Sea in a maximum-security compound with access to top-secret information that changed his life and those of his friends. Moving from the serious to the humorous to the absurd, follow the events that led to the formation of the Red Boots, a patriotic rag-tag group that confounded the military establishment and challenged the moral conscience of Americans, both in and out of the military.

Prompted by his daughters to tell the remarkable story of a different kind of courage, Lawrence Drake writes his memoir of those pivotal years between 1966 and 1970 when American's became fiercely divided over the politics of war and race. Reading more like an intriguing novel than a memoir, Drake's story unfolds with adventure, hardships, love, and comedy. He smoothly takes the reader through the transition from boyhood to a young man faced with the antithetical joys of adolescent discovery versus the harsh realities of a world gone crazy.