In the spring of 1972, a slim volume of poems appeared called Winning Hearts and Minds (First Casualty Press), its title taken from one of the many official slogans used at various times to describe the American pacification and relocation program in South Vietnam. Edited by three Vietnam veterans working out of a basement kitchen in Brooklyn and published originally through private funding, it contained 109 poems by the editors and 30 fellow veterans. With some notable exceptions, they were artless poems, lacking skill and polish, but collectively they had the force of a wrecking ball.

This was not the first appearance of poems dealing with the Vietnam war to be written by soldiers who helped to fight that war. But Winning Hearts and Minds quickly became a classic: the seminal anthology against which all future Vietnam war poetry would be judged.

"[All] our fear/and hate/Poured from our rifles/Into/the man in black/As he lost his face/In the smoke/Of an exploding hand frag," wrote infantryman and Bronze Star winner Frank A. Cross, Jr. "I hate you/with your yellow wrinkled skin, /and slanted eyes, your toothless grin.../Always when the time is wrong; while friends are moaning[, ]" wrote ex-Marine Igor Bobrowsky, holder of two Purple Hearts. "I'm afraid to hold a gun now," wrote Charles M. Purcell, holder of the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, "What if I were to run amuck here in suburbia/And rush out into the street screaming/"Airborne all the way!"/And shoot the milkman."