I was born in 1944 in Alturas, California, and grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon, with his brother Tony, sister Mary Ann and his parents Eva Pericle and Robert Dedrick.

 

I moved with my family to Seattle, Washington in 1963 where I entered the University of Washington and worked in the building trades to support his college tuition.

 

In March, 1966, after losing my student draft deferment after flunking out of college, I was drafted into the US Army, sent to Fort Holabird, Baltimore, Maryland, for Intelligence Analyst and Interrogation training and then assigned to Fort Bliss, Texas (El Paso) for Vietnamese language school.

 

Arriving in Vietnam I was sent to the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion worked as an Interrogator-linguist with the Combined Military Interrogation Center in Cho Lon, Saigon, Vietnam in 1968. I was present in the Saigon-Cholon area for the Tet and massively destructive May offensives.

 

After discharge from the Army, I returned to Seattle, finished my undergraduate degree in history at the University of Washington in 1971. Finding no work as a History graduate he returned to the building trades and spent most of my working life as a remodeling contractor retiring in 2012.

​

My sadness and anger as witness to the war led me to become a member of Vietnam Veterans against the War, serving as a Regional Coordinator, Washington-Alaska Region in 1971-2. I am a member of Veterans For Peace, Chapter 92, Seattle since 2003 and served as that chapter's first president.

​

As an anti war veteran I have participated in and organized numerous public conferences, panels and other public discussion venues related to war, militarism and peace.

​

Married to librarian Mary Kay since 1983 I live in Seattle and, when not traveling with my wife, cook, garden, and work on the twenty years of deferred maintenance on our home, and continue my involvement with Veterans For Peace.

​

In October 2017 I participated in a panel at the University of Washington sponsored by Veterans For Peace and the Southeast Asian Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies titled : Ken Burn's Vietnam Series: Critical Reflections by Veterans and Academics

​

The magazine Mekong Review published an essay on the Biet Dong project under the title Heroes of Tet, and it can be found on the internet under that name. I also recently presented a paper titled NLF/Biet Dong Narratives & Saigon Tet Attacks at the Texas Tech April 2018 panel on the 1968 Tet Offensive using the Biet Dong narratives as source material.

​

For the last seven years I have been working on the Biet Dong project Southern Voices, which has involved a dozen Vietnamese translators and linguists. The eight narratives, published in English and Vietnamese are a ground breaking project of the University of Kentucky Press. Currently I'm working on a memoir of my military service.5

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​