To Be Somebody Life Story of a Man Called P. David Hicks

Résumé du livre

Barefoot and dirty, his only pair of pants smudged from rolling abandoned tires for play, the twelve-year-old boy, whose father was a coal miner and his mother a "cutter" in a shirt factory, had only one dream - to be somebody. Born in post-WWII forties, raised in the fifties in a scruffy Appalachian small town with extremely limited career opportunities, David escaped in the sixties via the U.S. Army only to find himself at the age of 18 on Hill 875 in Vietnam - one of the deadliest engagements of that infamous war. Now strapped with post traumatic stress disorder, he refused to lose his vision of becoming a person of merit - but with conditions: he had to like what was under his skin, never abandon his roots, always treasure and support his family. To do so, he lived by a motto: adapt, improvise and overcome. Scrambling over the wall of an eighth grade education, and through years of struggle, he became a highly successful homegrown entrepreneur. God came along on the journey. Pushing his sons and grandsons to not just shoot for the moon but aim past it, Reverend P. David Hicks of Jacksboro, Tennessee is the boy who became the man who simply wanted to be somebody. Did he succeed?