Promises Kept

What if a severely wounded Vietnam veteran discovers after thirty-one years that the platoon for whose death he believed he was responsible didn’t die?

On a 1968 afternoon, Len Rugh opens a letter he’d hoped never to receive.

Although he’s been married less than two years and his twenty-third birthday is just days away, Len is ordered to report to the induction center in Los Angeles. Somehow, he’s been drafted, and soon, he’s in Vietnam.

Although he’s fighting in a war he never asked to join, Len suffers a severe head wound. No one thinks he’ll survive, but he does, and he returns home to his loving wife, Luanna. Once back home, he learns to talk, walk, be self-sufficient and even graduates from college.

But nightmares of the war still haunt Len. Years later, seeking closure, he visits the Vietnam War Memorial to pay tribute to his brothers who died. But for some reason, none of their names are listed.

Now, Len must find out if the fate of his comrades is how he remembers, or if something else happened altogether.

Get ready to go on a journey where being true to love is just as important as being true to your country, where secrets that linger are meant to be uncovered, and where in times of uncertainty, it’s important to remember Promises Kept.

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Len Rugh was shot in the head by an AK-47 round during a patrol in the jungles of Vietnam. Instead of becoming one of the over 58,000 names on ‘The Wall’ in Washington DC, he survived and made it home, not walking off a plane, but being carried off on a stretcher, more dead than alive. The book, Promises Kept: How One Couple's Love Survived Vietnam, tells the story of how he finally discovered the truth of that day and gained peace thirty-one years after returning from the war.

The story begins at the moment Len's draft notice arrived in August, 1968 and continues to the present. Len spent thirteen years putting his memories on paper. In March 2002, he finally asked Lu to become involved. She had waited patiently to read what had been written.

Lu started working on the reconstruction of the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. She admits English is not her forte, but knows a run-on sentence when she sees one. The book expanded. The original thirteen chapters grew to fifty-three.

Len had sent over a hundred and thirty letters to Lu while in Vietnam. Many of them appear in the book. As instructed for security purposes, all of Lu’s correspondence was burned in Vietnam. Those which appear in the book were reconstructed from memory.

They have kept in touch with Lieutenant Don Bratton and Marty Glasgow since meeting them again in 2000. Marty's email put them on the track to finding out the truth about what happened that fateful day in Vietnam, with details supplied by Don. They were dismayed when Don sent news of Marty’s death in December of 2003.

The book is as factual as they could make it. In the places where memory failed, they filled in with what they believe happened. The names were adjusted to protect the private lives of the characters in this writing.

09/22/14