Busted

by W. D. Ehrhart

Between March and September of 1974, as Richard Nixon's presidency unraveled on national television, Bill Ehrhart, a decorated Marine Corps sergeant and antiwar Vietnam veteran, fought to retain his merchant seaman's card after being busted for possession of marijuana. He was also arrested on suspicion of armed robbery in New York City, detained on the Garden State Parkway for looking like a Puerto Rican revolutionary, and thrown out of New Jersey by the Maple Shade police. All of this occurred while the House Judiciary Committee conducted hearings on Nixon's impeachment. Busted shows an acute awareness of the ironies of these juxtapositions, as Ehrhart recounts a surreal cross-country journey in search of justice in a nation that has lost its way, betrayed by its leaders. Picking up the narrative of Vietnam-Perkasie and Passing Time, this third book in Ehrhart's Vietnam War trilogy is an exploration of the contradiction between law and justice in Nixon's America and an examination of