In the early 1970s, a number of Vietnam veterans sought publication for a collection of veterans' creative writing which they felt could make an important contribution to a political understanding of the war in Indochina. However, efforts to find a commercial publisher for their anthology met with no success. Their conviction that this literature both deserved and could find a substantial audience led these writers to establish their own independent publisher for the literature of Vietnam veterans, the 1st [sic] Casualty Press. In 1972, the Press published an anthology of veterans' poetry, Winning Hearts and Minds (or WHAM as it is often called), edited by Larry Rottmann, Jan Barry and Basil T. Paquet; it was followed a year later by Free Fire Zone, an anthology of short stories edited by Rottmann, Paquet and Wayne Karlin. As their epigraph, both volumes were given the quotation: “In war, truth is the first casualty.”