Welcome to “Books in Review II,” the online-only column that complements “Books in Review,” which runs in The VVA Veteran, the bimonthly print magazine published by Vietnam Veterans of America.
That column and this site contain book reviews by writers who specialize in the Vietnam War and Vietnam War veterans. Our regular Books in Review II reviewers are John Cirafici, Kevin Hardy, Dan Hart, Bill McCloud, Mike McLaughlin, Harvey Weiner, Tom Werzyn, and Henry Zeybel. The late David Willson wrote hundreds of reviews for Books in Review II from its inception in 2011 through the spring of 2021. VVA Veteran Arts Editor and Senior Writer Marc Leepson assigns and edits the reviews.
Our goal is to review every newly published book of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that deals with the Vietnam War and Vietnam War veterans. Publishers and self-published authors may mail review copies to:
Marc Leepson
Arts Editor, The VVA Veteran
Vietnam Veterans of America
8719 Colesville Road
Silver Spring, MD 20910
We welcome comments, questions, and suggestions at mleepson@vva.org
Retired USAF Lt. Col. Thomas R. Waldron so often declared the men with whom he flew in Vietnam to be “heroes” that it is little wonder he made the word the key part of the title: I Flew With Heroes: A True Story of Rescue and Recovery during the Vietnam War Including the Raid at Son Tay (CreateSpace, 172 pp., $13.25 paper; $6.50, Kindle), first published in 2012. Clearly, Waldron himself served heroically in the war.
Few non-aviators would care about the details of flight training, airplane operation, and the Air Force’s way of assigning pilots to different aircraft, but Waldron’s inclusion of these and other details about each stage in his career—including why he switched from large fixed-wing planes to large Jolly Green rescue helicopters—are clues to understanding why he was a great pilot.
Even without anyone shooting at you, there are a lot of things that must work perfectly to keep a helicopter in the air. Pilots must know and understand each one of those things, but they also must check and recheck them every time they take off and land and know instantly what to do if just one of them stops working. That doesn’t even count other factors such bad weather or bullets, rockets, and missiles being fired at you. Waldron’s attention to detail makes his story interesting and awe-inspiring.
I was glad, however, that I joined the Navy and not the Air Force way back when. The thought of being high in the sky in a thin-skinned machine that could drop like a stone if just one thing went wrong combined with flying it into a hornet’s nest of hot antiaircraft shells, was too crazy to imagine. And yet that’s exactly what Thomas Waldron and other helicopter pilots did, mission after mission. Some didn’t survive, and Waldron writes about them, too.
He recounts the events of November 21, 1970, when he was part of a mission to rescue 61 American POWs at the Son Tay Prison camp 27 miles west of Hanoi. More than 12,000 North Vietnamese troops were within five miles of the prison. The mission went according to plan, but the POWs had been removed from the camp days before. The good news was that the only casualty was one American soldier who took a gunshot wound to the leg.
Blue Ghost: A Helicopter Pilot Writes Home from 1968 Vietnam (Platypus Publishing, 282 pp. $33.62, hardcover; $17.97, paper: $6.99, Kindle) contains one of the best records of an individual’s time in the Vietnam War that I have read. It basically consists of more than 70 letters written by Army helicopter pilot Thomas Pueschel to his family, with historical background added by his brother Larry.
Thomas Pueschel, of Holyoke, Massachusetts, had a boyhood dream of learning to fly, suggesting it would be like “singing love songs to the sky.” He enlisted in the Army in February 1966 and had Basic at Fort Polk. After a year of training at the Army Primary Helicopter School at Fort Wolters and Aviation School at Fort Rucker, he was promoted to Warrant Officer and received his wings. He took additional training at the Army Armor Center at Fort Knox before getting his orders to Vietnam.
Thomas Pueschel would serve in the war from October 1967 until December 1968, flying more than 900 combat assault missions, mainly in Huey gunships with the 17th Air Cavalry, and later in his tour, in the Americal Division in the newer Cobras when they arrived in-country.
He tried to send a letter home at least every two weeks. In one of the first letters he wrote to his parents he said, “I am plain scared.” Among the things, he asked his parents to send flashlight batteries, stationery, scissors, and cookies.
Pueschel early on began to question the reasons for the war. Sometimes he wrote that his letters were being sent from “the asshole of the world,” and sometimes from “never, never land.”
Much of his time was spent at the Chu Lai Combat Base with a unit dubbed the Blue Ghosts. Early in his tour he wrote his parents: “Yesterday, we received some automatic weapons fire from inside one of the villages, so we levelled the village, and I mean that literally!” He later wrote about flying escort for General Westmoreland for a short time.
7th Squadron/17th Cavalry troopers in-country with a Cobra attack helicopter
Pueschel volunteered to help a unit involved in heavy fighting that was short of pilots. and wound up taking part in the big, bloody Battle of Dak To. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross for providing close air support for a ground unit that was “outnumbered and in grave danger.”
He didn’t share everything with his parents. He wrote his brother, for example, that he had put a rocket between the legs of a “gook” and “blew him to hell and gone again.”
Thomas Pueschel died in 2019. His brother Larry has put together a great tribute to his service, which also just happens to be a fine record of the war in 1968, its most deadly year.
Leo Flory’s 101st Airborne Combat Medic Transition to Duty with the Screaming Eagles in Vietnam, 1968-1969 (Elm Grove Publishing, 374 pp. $29.99, hardcover; $18.99, paper) is an updated second edition of Flory’s 2011 Vietnam War memoir.
A combat medic whose pacifist parents forced him to go through military training as a conscientious objector, when Flory arrived in Vietnam in 1968, he was offered an M-16 when he reported for duty with the 2nd Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division in Hué. He took it.
The postscript to the new edition adds the reactions of many of Flory’s comrades-in-arms and others to the first edition. It also adds info about subsequent unit reunions.
In 2009, Leo Flory received an email from the niece of a 101st Airborne trooper killed in Vietnam. She wanted to know more about her uncle. Flory, who did not know the man, began a quest to learn more, which he did, and he gave the information to the niece. He dedicates the book to the uncle and the uncle’s story is the framework of the memoir.
The book is comprised mainly descriptions of the horrific day-to-day activities of being a combat medic in an infantry unit. Of particular interest are the variety of jungle creatures Flory encountered. Besides the rats, ants, land leeches, big bats, huge centipedes, and humongous beetles, he saw an orangutan, a green bamboo viper, and a 16-foot python, which his unit captured and kept as a pet.
Flory also discusses his in-country encounter with Chris Noel, whose radio show, “A Date with Chris,” on Armed Forces Radio was a big GI morale booster. There is an online petition to help get Chris Noel the Presidential Medal of Freedom. You can sign it at honorchrisnoel.com/about-chris-noel
Bill Matelski, Michael Roberts, and David Clausius of Flory’s unit in Vietnam, August 1969
The book also contains one of the saddest Dear John stories I’ve ever heard. One of Flory’s buddies in Vietnam was married with one child. He and his wife made plans to meet in Hawaii for his R&R, and he sent most of his pay home for their care and to fund the trip. The day finally came when he left for his R&R.
His wife met him at the airport in Honolulu, but instead of his young daughter in hand, she introduced him to her new boyfriend and handed him a set of divorce papers to sign. She told him that she and her boyfriend had just spent a glorious week in Hawaii and needed to catch their plane home in a few minutes. He signed and they disappeared.
He later learned that his ex-wife had cleared out their bank accounts. He had to spend his R&R week licking his marital wounds and then return to the jungle and the war.
A few nitpicks about the book. First, Flory refers to the the enemy (and the Vietnamese in general) as “gooks.” Even understanding the need to dehumanize the enemy, this racist word was frowned upon by many at the time and is all the more distasteful now.
Second, Flory describes narrow bamboo bridges, which were a challenge for big Americans to negotiate, but he does not identify them. They were commonly known by Americans as “monkey bridges,” as only a monkey had the dexterity to cross one safely.
Finally, Flory misspells and misinterprets the word “Chiew-Hui” [sic]. The program by which the enemy rallied to our side was the Chieu Hoi (“Open Arms”) program. An individual who rallied under was called a “Hoi Chanh.”
These are minor distractions in a book that seems to be based mainly, or perhaps exclusively, on memory. Plus, it’s rare that a war memoir has a second edition.
Historian William Nester relegates the Vietnam War to a mere second act in a long play about the Cold War. In setting the stage for his latest book, World of War: A History of American Warfare from Jamestown to the War on Terror (Stackpole, 472 pp. $39.95, hardcover; $28.99, Kindle), Nester analyzes the attitude of Americans toward the world at large. He begins by saying, “Americans are among history’s most war-prone people.”
At the same time, Nester cites the foundation of American culture as humanism and individualism, fortified by idealized and romanticized history. Hero worship, he says, has motivated many Americans in many ways. Nester also recognizes imperialism and hegemony as American traits.
A professor of government and politics at St. John’s University in New York, William Nester has written more than three dozen books on national security, military history, and the nature of power.
In World at War, he contends that Americans never lacked reasons for entering into warfare, but says that how commander-in-chief presidents justified entering conflicts has significantly differed, particularly in scale. War entails what Nester classifies as physical (hard) and psychological (soft) powers. In equal physical battles, he says, the “side with greater soft power will win.” In essence, diplomatic, economic, and political power complement military power. These truths apply to revolutions as well as wars between nations.
Speaking of leadership, Nester says that politics and psychology are as inseparable as war and peace. He quotes Henry Kissinger saying it is delusional “to believe that leaders gain in profundity while they gain experience…. The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.”
Within this framework, Nester deconstructs the nation’s array of wars during four centuries of American history.
He argues that the Vietnam War provided a wealth of mediocre and dismal examples of civilian and military leadership. At times, Nester relies on multiple sources to prove this point. For example, when he says, “Eventually nothing ultimately discredited the global containment strategy [of France and the United States against communism] worse than the Vietnam War,” he lists thirteen books that buttress that conclusion. He examines strategy from a lofty level and blames America’s missteps on a lack of insight by those with the power to rectify it.
World of War reviews the many American strategies we pursued in the Vietnam War from the time of Harry Truman’s administration through Richard Nixon’s. For people well-versed in the history of the war, reading accounts of U.S. actions from the Battle of Diên Biên Phú in 1954 to the communist takeover in 1975 is like reading headlines of the era.
“Only three American programs achieved some success because they tried to balance hard and soft power,” Nester says: the Combined Action Program (CAP), the CIA counterinsurgency Operation Phoenix, and the strategic hamlet Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) program. Two of the three were soft actions.
A Vietnam War CAP Marine on a “soft action” job
By categorizing the Vietnam War as but one episode in the Cold War, Nester foretells a diminishing of America’s hard and soft powers as a world leader. For anyone interested in American history beyond the Vietnam War, World of War offers 400 years of interesting and colorful drama with plenty of good and bad actors.
Naval historian Robin L. Rielly’s River Warfare in Vietnam: A Social, Political, and Military History, 1945-1975 (McFarland, 536 pp. $49.95, paper; $29.99, Kindle) is a very readable history of river warfare in Vietnam from the end of World War II to the North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam in 1975. Rielly covers operations that took place on the rivers, streams, and canals of Vietnam, not the action on the high seas. More than half of the book deals with the French war in North and South Vietnam and Cambodia from 1945-54.
The United States provided financial and material assistance, including many vessels and CIA-controlled personnel, to the French in Vietnam during their 1945-54 war against the anti-colonial and communist Viet Minh. There were many lessons learned (and not learned) by the U.S. during that time period, which informed the later river-war efforts.
Intensive U.S. involvement can also be bookmarked by two mammoth refugee transportation operations, both of which had significant naval components. The first came in 1954 when hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees, mainly Catholics, fled from North to South after the Geneva Accords divided the country. The second took place in 1975 when U.S. military personnel evacuated larges numbers of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the North Vietnamese invasion.
Refugees from Da Nang & Huế sailed on Navy barges to Vũng Tàu in April 1975
This thoroughly researched and detailed book includes particularly strong lists, photographs, end notes, a bibliography, glossary and, above all, maps, particularly tactical maps, mainly by the author. There is even a Viet Cong battle plan. Reilly analyzes tactics and strategies and evaluates combat situations.
There are interesting tidbits. The reader learns, for example, the practicable difference between a sampan and a junk. Rule of thumb: Only a junk is big enough to carry a water buffalo. Also, during the Vietnamization of the river war, Americans indicated that the Vietnamese showed little enthusiasm for training,did as little as possible to maintain their newly handed-over ships, and were absent much of the time.
Finally, in 1975, when the North Vietnamese government accepted the surrender of the South Vietnamese, the former presumably assumed ownership of the vessels that the U.S. had turned over to the South Vietnamese during the war. This would seem to include the many refugee ships that had left Vietnamese waters, including those docked in the Philippines.
The North Vietnamese demanded that Philippine President Marcos return the ships and he was in a quandary about what to do. Eventually, it was discovered that a provision in the contracts that governed the transfer of the ships from U.S. to the South Vietnamese said that in the event they were no longer needed for South Vietnamese military service, they would revert to U.S. ownership.
They were now American-owned vessels, much to the relief of the Philippine president. Thank God for the lawyers.
The Brown Water War at 50 – A Retrospective at the Coastal and Riverine Conflict in Vietnam” edited by Thomas J. Cutler and Edward J. Marolda is an excellent complement to this book. The Brown Water War at 50is comprised of twelve essays written by U.S. naval historians and, except for an essay that includes the French river warfare, covers the time period the Americans took over in 1954 to 1975.
Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Massachusetts Press, 280 pp. $99, hardcover; $28.95, paper) it is a scholarly book by Jason Higgins, a professor at Virginia Tech’s Libraries and its College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. The book, which includes 42 pages of notes, is a fact-filled and sobering review of veteran incarceration in the United States.
Higgins’ thesis is that the “lifelong” factors of war, “inequality, disability and mental illness,” contribute significantly to the unparalleled incarceration of American veterans—particularly those who served during the Vietnam War, especially Black veterans.
Vietnam Veterans of America figures prominently in book. Former President John Rowan and other VVA leaders are quoted throughout. Higgins highlights VVA’s longstanding commitment to veterans incarcerated, as well as the organization’s work on getting the VA to compensate veterans for health problems associated with exposure to Agent Orange recognizing the impact of service in the war and PTSD.
Higgins also delves into the genesis of the Veteran Treatment Court program, which VVA has supported since its inception. He looks into Robert S. McNamara’s Project 100,000 and other DOD programs that have challenged the future of active duty servicemembers and veterans.
In the second half of his book, Higgins examines the same carceral challenges and concerns of veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. That includes often-unreported, and certainly under-reported, instances of sexual harassment and abuse. He applies the same degree of research to this area as he does in the first half. All of it is well-researched and well written.
This book gives the reader a sobering look at the large—some 100,000—veteran prison population and at some of the reasons for it. Strongly recommended.
For too many people who did the right thing, the Vietnam War’s legacy has lasted far too long, stretching beyond half a century. Lanny Hunter, a Green Beret captain and doctor, personifies those people. His war memoir, Exit Wounds: A Vietnam Elegy (Blackstone, 343 pp. $25, hardcover; $17.99, paper; $8.99, Kindle), is written with a clarity that fascinated me from the moment I picked up the book. He holds back nothing.
Hunter went well beyond expectations as an Army doctor. He chose the Green Berets, earning a parachutist’s badge and qualifying in the use of weapons. He went to Vietnam in July 1965 and joined the 5th Special Forces Group’s Detachment C-2 at Duc Co in the Central Highlands.
After a year in-country, Hunter returned home to his wife and children and became a highly regarded dermatologist. In 1997, an unexpected letter from Y-Kre, his Montagnard interpreter and medical assistant, gave Hunter’s life a new significance. After years in re-education camps for aiding the Americans, Y-Kre said that his family was downtrodden and poverty-stricken. Hunter immediately flew a rescue mission to Vietnam.
This second trip to Vietnam taught Hunter new life lessons. In Exit Wounds, he intermingles stories of war and peace by sliding back and forth in time. At times, his dissection of conflicting American and Vietnamese values reads like poetry. His sense of language and command of words stretch far beyond normal.
His accounts of combat fascinated me. He recreates his and others’ battle activities by blending them with his medical skills and personal values–a doctor firing M-16s or M-79 grenade launchers between treating casualties. These accounts emphasize the gore of warfare. Hunter confesses to moments of intense concentration and then a moment of heart-stopping fear, “just like in the OR.”
His description of the week-long siege of Plei Me is as good as it gets in revealing the chaos of being outmanned and surrounded in a shooting war. The only doctor on site, he repeatedly made life-or-death medical decisions between attacks by two NVA regiments. He ranks as one of the most highly decorated medical officers in the Vietnam War.
The Plei Me Special Forces Camp near Pleiku
Hunter speaks of war and religion in a wondrous vernacular. In nine italicized pages he summarizes the Bible’s Old and New Testaments in the same manner in which he taught the Bible to Y-Kre and two other Montagnards who worked in the camp hospital. Impressed by Christ’s resurrection, the three men asked to be baptized. Hunter did it: a story in itself.
Vietnam’s social structure greatly disappointed Hunter when he returned to help Y-Kre. The good that he had done for his comrade had turned out to be the worst thing possible. Despite helping Y-Kre as a fellow soldier and Christian, the visit validated Hunter’s belief that, from the beginning, America utterly failed to keep South Vietnam free.
The same as I am, Hunter is a child of World War II who knew the good guys from the bad—until he served in the Vietnam War.
“We occupied the moral high ground,” he says, and recounts the down and ups of American international leadership in our lifetimes since then. He reviews history with vision that contains a grim certainty of failure, as if he has seen a lot in his nearly 90 years and most of it has proved to be disillusioning.
Four 9th Regiment U.S. Marine Corps junior officers who served in the Vietnam War in 1968-69 have written Courageous Dissent (184 pp. $14.50, paper; $5.99, Kindle), a small book with large ideas about U.S. military strategy. The book relies heavily on the thinking of USMC leaders, which merits the subtitle, The History Behind the Vietnam Warfighting Strategy and the Five Marine Generals Who Advocated Alternatives, 1965-1969.
The book’s authors—A.S. Kyle, G.M. Davis, Robert Packard, and John Cochenour—open with biographies that introduce themselves and the five generals—Wallace Greene, Victor Krulak, Wood Kyle, Lowell English, and Raymond Davis—along with justifying the rights of military dissenters. The book’s “dissent” primarily examines the difference between U.S. military strategies in the Khe Sanh and Dewey Canyon operations (the four authors all took part in Dewey Canyon).
A review of the multiple failures of President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara vividly portrays the ineptitude of politicians as military strategists who opposed dissenting suggestions of Marine leaders.
The authors do not stack the facts. They examine the pros and cons of war plans year by year. Mobilization planning took place in 1965. Differentiating between a Combined Action Program (a defensive hearts-and-mind scheme based on American troops living in small towns) and search-and-destroy tactics (offensive attrition of the enemy) came in 1966.
In 1967, McNamara’s plan to build a barrier parallel with the DMZ to prevent North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam overrode all others. The barrier’s cost in money and manpower defeated its usefulness–not to mention the fact that the NVA already had more than a division of infantrymen in I Corps.
Analyses of what happened at Khe Sanh and during Operation Dewey Canyon comprise the best parts of the book. They magnify the difference between conventional attrition and counterinsurgency, according to the authors, who present a nearly-day-by-day analysis of the two campaigns.
Action during Operation Dewey Canyon, January 1969
Several appendices could stand alone as a primer on dissent. They include Vietnam War memoranda, a strategic appraisal, a letter of non-concurrence, an exit interview, and a unit citation.
Even 55 years after the event, the strategic failures recounted in Courageous Dissent disturbed me. My mind repeatedly asked, “Why did nobody listen to the men who knew best—the generals and their staffs?”
Too many actions proved overwhelmingly incorrect. A.S. Kyle closes the book on a similar note: “By following the recommendations of our dissenters, the outcome of the Vietnam War might have changed. Regrettably, we will never know.”
The old Monty Python line, “And now for something completely different,” would certainly fit Bill Lynch’s novel, Mekong Belle: Love’s Impossible Choice (Hellgate Press, 328 pp. $17.95, paper; $5.99, Kindle).
The book tells the story of a fictional Brown Water Navy ship that was geared-up and crewed-up to travel the Mekong River during the war in Vietnam to put on musical entertainment to provide a little cheer to the troops. You may need to read that description again before it sets in, but I’m here to tell you it works.
Lynch, a journalist who served as a Navy officer on a small ship in the Mekong in Vietnam in 1967-68, admits that his novel borders on fantasy so you have to have the right mind-set to get the most enjoyment from it. I, for one, had no problem being drawn into this slightly off-kilter love story.
Ensign Rob Allen is surprised when, in 1967, he’s assigned to a World War II-era LST and told to bring his guitar. He quickly realizes that every member of the crew has been assigned to the ship because they have musical ability. Along with its regular supply mission, the ship is the only one in the Navy also designated to produce a lavish musical program that they regularly perform for the troops. In other words, to transform the vessel into a real showboat.
The ship’s home port would be at Vũng Tàu, southeast of Saigon, and one of the safest areas in South Vietnam during the war. It was as though the city “existed on two planes,” Lynch writes, “one ancient, another a fading shadow of French occupation, neither acknowledging the civil war fought with modern weapons just beyond the horizon.”
Bill Lynch
When Allen first goes ashore in Vũng Tàu he feels as though the city has an “other-worldly” vibe, and he almost expects the people he meets to break out in song. Meanwhile, the LST quickly becomes “the most unusual ship with the most uniquely talented crew in the Navy.”
Bill Lynch has written a mainly joyful novel with expressions of love throughout: love for the music of the era and its antecedents, love for the people of South Vietnam, love for the ship, love for the Navy. This book was truly something different and I enjoyed every word of it. The ending was immensely satisfying.
Reviewer’s note: I spent my entire twelve months in Vietnam on the Army airbase at Vũng Tàu in 1968 and 1969. My many enjoyable personal dealings and relationships with the Vietnamese people came flooding back to me as I read this novel.
Reviewer’s note II: It’s kind of funny how often the spelling of Vũng Tàu switches throughout the book from “Vung Tau” to “Vung Tao.” It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book, but happened often enough that I had to mention it.
The renowned poet W.D. Ehrhart’s latest collection is At Smedley Butler’s Grave (Moonstone Press, 40 pp., $10, paper), a chapbook of 40 razor-edged poems, some of which have appeared in journals, newsletters, and other chapbooks.
The subjects range in time from Bill Ehrhart’s childhood to his present advanced Baby Boomer age bracket, and in subjects from growing-up observances to tough-minded political musings. Several mention the Vietnam War and his service as a Marine in it.
That includes a few lines in the title poem and “The Longest Night of My Life,” which deals with a night in Vietnam in November 1967 and ends with these lines:
Raining hard. Cold in November
Me already utterly soaked. Teeth chattering.
No dry clothes. No place dry. Middle of nowhere
Sunrise hours away. Five/ Maybe six.
This is a top-notch collection from an accomplished man of letters.
Books in Review II 