History Studied and Lived: A Vietnam Veteran Reflects on CORDS, Grenada, and the Army Reserve

After receiving his doctoral degree in American history from the University of South Carolina in 1969, Walter Edgar served as a CORDS advisor in Quang Tri province, facilitating the South Vietnamese government's pacification efforts. He left active duty in 1971 and began a four-decade career as a professor as USC. During his more than twenty years in the Army Reserve, he helped reorganize the education system in Grenada after the U.S. invasion, and served as the commandant of the U.S. Army Reserve Forces School at Fort Jackson, S.C. Here, he discusses his experiences as a CORDS advisor, the fragile nature of counterinsurgency successes, reconstruction lessons from Grenada, the impact of lengthy and repeated Army Reserve deployments, and parallels between the Vietnam War and the American Revolutionary War.