Documenting his story  

Local Vietnam veteran shares his experience through published book  

For over a decade, 73-year-old Vietnam veteran René Lizcano has contemplated whether to tell his story of the war in a book until he finally pieced together his memories to write “One Life to Live or Give: From the Rio Grande Valley to the Ia Drang Valley and Back.” 

Lizcano, a retired police officer and legacy institution University of Texas-Pan American alumnus, told The Rider it took him about three years to complete the book using pictures, letters and memories from his deployment in Vietnam. 

Published on Dec. 13, 2022, the book is available to purchase through Amazon. 

“I didn’t want to check out before leaving something behind that documented my experience … and  I had the pictures there and some of my letters that I would send to my wife, who was my sweetheart,” Lizcano said. “So, I said, ‘Let’s put it into a book form.’” 

At 130 pages, the book is a true story spanning from Lizcano’s time attending Pharr-San Juan-Alamo High School in the late 1960s to his time spent deployed in Vietnam during the early 1970s, where he quickly learned how dangerous war is. 

The book also includes photos of Lizcano during the times mentioned. 

Upon arriving in Vietnam, he was trained as a supply clerk in charge of handling supplies that the soldiers needed. Things quickly changed when Lizcano was sprung into combat action as a helicopter door gunner, which involved daily combat missions with a risk of death above and in the jungles of Vietnam. 

“Every day that you go out on a combat operation, you never know if you were gonna come back,” he said. “So, every day was a bonus if you made it towards the end of the day. … And we flew combat missions every day, inserting fourth infantry troops into the jungle.” 

Lizcano said having common sense and fear was what helped him survive the daily combat missions in the jungle, where his duties were to clear a landing for the helicopter and watch for enemy troops.

“There are some areas there that I did not include that are violent,” he said. “War is hell, as they say, and I did not want to embellish that and make it into something big. … We lost friends, and you see the dedication in memory of my friends that were killed. But I would want for [the readers] to just understand what a Vietnam veteran went through. The good parts, the funny parts, the scary parts.” 

Throughout the book, Lizcano brings up many situations where he was not informed of certain life and death details or instructed properly. 

From being assigned guard duty with no prior experience and passing through the Mang Yang Pass, a deadly part of a highway between two camps with no knowledge of it to doing on-the-job training as a helicopter door gunner, despite never handling an M60 machine gun prior to that. 

“There’s a right way and then there’s the Army way,” he said. “So, we had to learn by mistakes. And that’s why young guys got killed. Because they didn’t know exactly, in a war like that, how to react, and many guys lost their lives.” 

With many Vietnam veterans suffering physically and mentally after the war, Lizcano encouraged other veterans to get help in forms of counseling and not to go the route of drug and alcohol abuse.  

“I did six months at a veterans hospital in Waco, which is [a] veterans hospital for combat veterans, about 10 to 12 years ago,” he said. “And there were a lot of veterans my age back then, having fought in the Vietnam War. … Don’t go that route [of drug and alcohol abuse]. I did go that route for a while and almost lost my family and my marriage.”