Drafted into the U. S. Army in the middle of the Vietnam War, Niel Hancock shipped out from Oakland just as the Flower Children were converging on San Francisco, arriving in Saigon in time for the cataclysmic Tet offensive of 1968.
Old Dime Box Stories is the insightful and entertaining saga of his adventures before and after that war, when his lifelong quest for meaning took him from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, to Los Angeles and home to the great Southwest. His spirited memories circle back from his buddies in Vietnam to the West Texas–New Mexico borderland where he grew up, equidistant from Alamagordo, where the first atom bomb was tested in 1945, and Roswell, where the UFO crashed in 1947. These mythic events of his boyhood tipped him off that there was more to reality than meets the eye, and lengthy road trips on his motorcycles gave him time to think. Recollecting the courage and practical wisdom of the wide range of off-beat characters he meets on the journey, he realizes that all along, even in the heat of war, he has seen signs pointing him onto the Road to the Sacred Mountain, his destination all along.
