Book Review: The Path I Walked
Many veterans, especially those who have spent significant time fighting an enemy in combat, have difficulty talking to their families about their time in the service. Many of us gloss over important details, if we talk about it at all. Richard Cacace, a United States Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam, was no different.
His book, "The Path I Walked," details the first 20 years of his life, which he describes as a "roller coaster ride that ended badly." Then it talks about his enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. His time in the Corps gave him a renewed sense of energy and purpose; a sense of pride that helped him pull himself out of an "abyss," and taught him to value people not by their color or nationality, but by their effort and desire.
Vietnam gave him the will to live again.
At first glance, the early years of Cacace's life look like they might be ideal. He was a graduate of the New York Military Academy and later attended the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. At the height of the Cold War, Cacace was studying national security affairs, Russian history and American diplomacy.
He left the Air Force Academy to work for the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, working on technology that was being developed to land the first men on the moon. But something was not right, and it soon came crashing down. Then, he enlisted in the Marine Corps.
Cacace served with the 3rd Recon Battalion, 3rd Marine Division in the Republic of Vietnam. The recon Marines of the 3rd Battalion hunted down the Viet Cong in the jungle areas around Da Nang, secured beachheads in Chu Lai, and saw intense combat the entire time. And that was just 1965.
Richard Cacace was there for all of it. As his autobiography puts it:
"There were incidents where he should have been killed but walked away without a scratch. There were incidents where he was at the edge of his sanity and someone stepped in to keep him from doing something that would have destroyed his life. Vietnam helped simplify the equation of the relationship of people to people in his eyes. They needed one another at a crucial time and didn't care whether they were White, Black, Hispanic, or Asian. It also taught him that in each of us, there is a battle raging between good and evil and, if we are not careful, the evil can win."
After his time in Vietnam ended, he attended the City University of New York, became an electrical engineer, and went to work for Syska & Hennessy, an international consulting engineering firm based in Manhattan. He began leading international projects that took him to Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, and beyond.
But he wanted to be able to share his life's story with his sons, an incredible undertaking for anyone, but a difficult task for a recon Marine with so much time spent fighting the Vietnam War. When he told his sons about the idea, they told him to do it, but only if he could be completely honest and if he could include every detail: the good and the bad.
"The Path I Walked" is the result of that undertaking, from his formative years through his time in Vietnam. According to the book, his intense pride in his accomplishments made the writing come fast, but it also meant he had to force out the skeletons in his closet, writing things no one ever knew about himself.
It came as a relief.
Veterans interested in writing their life stories, either to themselves, to family, or to the world at large might want to read "The Path I Walked" by Richard Cacace. It's an honest, detailed retelling of the first 25 years of Cacace's life, intended to inform his sons, but also freed him from the burden of keeping it bottled up for decades.
"The Path I Walked" is available for around $8.99 and is available in paperback, audiobook, and Kindle versions. It can be found on Amazon, Google Play, Target, Walmart or Barnes & Noble. You can also find it in the iTunes Store.