Diary of a Young Man by Dan Dana

Dan Dana’s Diary of a Young Man: 1968-1969: Coming of Age at a Cultural Crossroads (Five Palms Press, 110 pp. $0.99, Kindle) is unlike any wartime journal I’ve ever read. And that’s a good thing.

Unlike any other, that is, because the book’s diary entries that cover his last two months in Vietnam and his worldwide travels afterward are based solely on the unedited words he wrote virtually every day more than 50 years ago. Words, by the way, that were not intended for any eyes other than his own.

Dana’s book begins in September 1968 in Qui Nhon, South Vietnam, as the young G.I. is dreaming of what it will be like after gets out of the Army. He has a frequent “urge to write” and a desire to fill up a variety of journals that he refers to as “books” once he’s completed them. He wants to write about things he considers to be “record-worthy.”

Interestingly, the book’s Foreword is written by VVA Veteran Arts Editor Marc Leepson, who served with Dan in the 527^th Personnel Service Company on the outskirts of Qui Nhon in 1968. There’s even a grainy, black-and-white photo of the two of them in the book.

Dana writes that “several GIs” didn’t like the Vietnamese people because “they are not adopting American traits fast enough.”  And: “Saigon is beautiful, so many trees. Nearly all of the streets around downtown are canopied with huge shade trees.” As for Vietnamese women, they “seemed to me physically beautiful,” he writes.

The diary covers Dana’s last few weeks of military service. He writes that he planned to make daily entries, and decided that on days when nothing much happened, he’d just say: “Nothing really worthy of petrification today.” Dana considers returning to school or maybe becoming a writer after his discharge.

“This book,” he writes, “is probably the most permanent thing I carry,” which is why he jots down all sorts of notes in it. At age 23, he hopes to get some traveling under his belt after ETSing in Vietnam before returning home.

Dan Dana

He goes on R&R to the Philippines and notes that the shorter he gets, the less he feels like writing. After coming back to the 527^th, Dana begins smoking marijuana day and night, skips a reveille formation, and is punished by filling sandbags.

When he gets down to single digits, Dana, a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America, notes that he is already is experiencing feelings of nostalgia. Once he’s out, he’s determined to have some adventures before returning to school. We follow his time in Mexico sleeping on the beach, trying to grow a beard, and hanging out with hippies with all that entailed.

Dana adds more countercultural experiences, and ends the book with a series of haiku, such as:

war can be good, eh?

only lessons learned, too late

in history books

Dan Dana’s Diary is one-of-a-kind book, indeed.

His website is https://dandana.us/

–Bill McCloud

Vietnam: No Regrets by J. Richard Watkins

Attitude makes J. Richard Watkins’ 2011 Vietnam War memoir, Vietnam: No Regrets: On Soldier’s Tour of Duty (Bay State Books, 244 pp. $19.50, paper; $9.95, Kindle) stands out from other first-person stories of grunts in action. Watkins fearfully but voluntarily went to Vietnam in 1969 at the age of 22. Within six weeks, his fears of being killed transposed into feelings of elation when sent into battle.

During that time, he spent many sleepless nights on ambushes, avoided B-52 strikes, and helped to explore Viet Cong tunnels, but more importantly, Watkins was part of search and destroy missions humping through rice paddies and jungles, speeding in Brown Water Navy gunboats, and on helicopter assaults, which he found exhilarating. 

Vietnam: No Regrets tells his story of serving with fellow Alpha Company grunts as an artillery spotter and radioman with the 25th Infantry Division’s 1/27 Wolfhounds in the Central Highlands, Iron Triangle, and east of Saigon out of Cu Chi. He also took part in the 1970 incursion into Cambodia. After ten months on the trail, Watkins accepted a rear-echelon job at the suggestion of his company commander. By then, his greatest fear was not being able to leave the adrenaline rush he found in combat behind.   

Initially for Watkins, the Wolfhounds operated in a free fire zone. That mean they were free to shoot on sight and, in several cases killed Vietnamese who were not combatants. The Wolfhounds were not heartless, however. Watkins lauds the men who befriended him and introduced him to the wiles of warfare, especially his platoon leader, Lt. Barker.

Ambushes—in both directions—became a significant part of his life. He learned how to kill up close, regretted it at times, and tried to forget it. As an artillery pro, he doubled down as a rifleman when necessity dictated it, often more than that.

Exposure to gore and death hardened him to “tune out the possibility that I too could be wounded or killed,” he says. “I would just go with the flow of the situation. After awhile one doesn’t really believe he will be making it home anyway.”

His callousness toward himself did not extend to others, friend or foe. He viewed dead enemy combatants as people, just like anyone else who “had given their lives for a cause that they had believed in.” Scenes of dead soldiers remain with him to this day.

Joel Richard Watkins’ stories grow more interesting as his tour progresses. Life in the warzone became more complicated and survival more precarious. He found satisfaction in efforts such as destroying an enormous multi-level underground North Vietnamese base camp while recognizing the futility of the accomplishment.

Regardless, it all came down to “we were out there for the body count,” Watkins says, and recalls the days with no holds barred.

Vietnam: No Regrets includes 29 pages of photographs shot by Watkins.

—Henry Zeybel

My Vietnam, Your Vietnam by Christina Vo and Nghia M. Vo

Memoir is a tricky genre, and it is made even trickier when more than one voice is thrown into the same project. Christina Vo’s new memoir My Vietnam, Your Vietnam: A Father Flees. A Daughter Returns (Three Rooms Press, 360 pp. $18, paper; $9.99, e book) amplifies the trickiness by adding a fraught familial and national relationship, as the book is interspersed with her father Nghia M. Vo’s self-published memoir, The Pink Lotus.

Father and daughter share a bond, Christina Vo writes, but “hardly interact with each other.” So, the connection between her memoir about finding herself and her Vietnamese heritage as a young woman and her father’s memoir about fleeing South Vietnam in the later years of the war is initially bound by faith alone.

Ten years after the publication of her father’s memoir, Christina Vo writes, she was living in Vietnam, and “the epiphany came to me that I would one day share his story.” That story is  the book we have today, an experimental sort of conversation through time between a daughter finding her way in Vietnam as a born-and-raised n American, and a father trying to integrate his origins with a new life as an American physician.

The format enriches the stories particularly in the way father and daughter speak to each other emotionally. Trauma is shared as the daughter’s melds her father’s life with her own.

There is something beautiful about the synchronicity of this kind of structure: A daughter hears a song in Saigon in 2003 that she recognizes as the same one her mother sang to her and one she thought she lost to time. Meanwhile, in the 1950s, her father describes returning to a lotus pond tended to by monks in Vung Tau again and again to try to recapture “an image of serene tranquility that symbolized Vietnam emerging from colonialism.”

The father’s story is deeply political – he is quite angry with the communists in Vietnam whom he blames for his exile in America – while the daughter’s story is more personal, a journey for meaning involving working with nonprofits and receiving graduate school fellowships. Christina’s Vo’ life is undeniably robust and compelling on its own, but the dissonance between the austerity and self-abnegation of her father’s chapters and the introspection of Christina’s can be jarring.

Christina Vo with her father, Nghia M. Vo

Ultimately, this book represents a project of familial reconciliation that is difficult for readers to appreciate because many important aspects of the father-daughter relationship are left out of the book. Christina’s friend who asks about her father in the afterword, for example, is surprised to hear that she and her father never really talk.

In sum, Christina Vo has written a lovely and compelling book that, due to the ambition and candor of its structure, at times feels less like a memoir and more of an assertion that Vietnam, the country, represents a loss and a division that can be felt through multiple generations. It also, however, does not always feel like her father’s text agrees with that, leading to an sometimes-disorienting reading experience.

–Trevor Strunk

I Flew with Heroes by Thomas R. Waldron

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.

–Bill Lynch

Blue Ghost by Thomas Pueschel and Larry Pueschel

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.

–Bill McCloud

101st Airborne Combat Medic by Leo “Doc” Flory

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 501^st Infantry Regiment in the 101^st 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.

The book’s website is https://101abncbtmedic.com/

–Harvey Weiner

Exit Wounds by Lanny Hunter

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.

—Henry Zeybel   

Deckhouse: My Story by Donat Le Blanc

Donat Le Blanc grew up a patriotic American. His father was a D-Day veteran. The son joined the U.S. Marine Corps because he felt it was his duty to serve his country. The Vietnam War was in its early stages and he looked forward to taking part in the action. Many years later, he wrote an essay, “Death and Dying,” that later inspired him to tell his story. It also led to him to confront his PTSD decades after the war. He realized he was suffering from survivor’s guilt.

Dan Le Blanc opens his memoir, Deckhouse: My Story (AuthorHouse, 120 pp. $26.99, hardcover; $3.99, Kindle), with a description of his upbringing. It was a fairly typical Baby Boomer childhood. He played sports. His father went to one game but did not stay the whole time. He credited his father for toughening him up, which would come in handy in Vietnam and after.

Le Blanc includes chapters on boot camp, escape and evasion training, and helicopter maintenance school. He turned out to be a model recruit, so if you are looking for a Hollywood-style coverage of boot camp, you will be disappointed. Being trained in helicopter repair meant that Le Blanc had a ticket to the place in the world where the U.S. Marines had the most need for fixing them. Although he was proficient at his job, Le Blanc ended up as a door gunner on a medevac helicopter. He arrived in Vietnam in 1966.  

He flew a variety of missions, including “transporting dignitaries, military photographers, and high-ranking officers; blood runs and mail runs; troop insertions; search and rescue ops; ammunition runs; and food runs.” The most important were the medevacs.

Le Blanc was stationed on the U.S.S. Princeton and later the Iwo Jima, so he did not have the full Vietnam War experience of living in-country. The missions he chronicles included a few hair-raising moments, but not enough to satisfy combat fans.

His tour ended when he was hit while landing in a hot LZ. This began an odyssey through the military and VA medical systems. It will be eye-opening in its incompetence. It seems like the further he got from Vietnam, the worse the treatment got. One time, back home, Le Blanc found himself in a prison ward with no nurses available for his constant pain. Many months later, he became an amputee.

The book covers his adjustment to that new reality. Le Blanc’s story should be inspirational for other Vietnam War amputees. It’ll also bring back bad memories.

Deckhouse might interest anyone who has read a lot of Vietnam War memoirs and wants to add a few nuggets to their knowledge of the war. It is not as memorable as most war veteran autobiographies since Le Blanc spent most of his time on a warship, and few missions were suspenseful.

The book might be interesting to anyone who wants to know more about the experiences of a wounded Marine. If you have read Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, you won’t be surprised about the egregious treatment Dan Le Blanc went through. Treat it as confirmation that Kovic was not exaggerating.

–Kevin Hardy

Together We Served by Bill Sheehan

For most of his adult life, Bill Sheehan tried to forget what he experienced serving in combat as a Navy corpsman in the Vietnam War in 1968 and 1969. Decades later he changed his mind and began trying to locate his old comrades and asked them to write about their experiences for a book he wanted to compile.

The result is Together We Served: Stories from Combat Navy Hospital Corpsmen Serving in the Vietnam Jungles (Luminate 7 Publishing, 176 pp., $20, paper; $2.99, Kindle), a collection of a dozen stories told by former Navy “docs.” The book is basically made up of random anecdotes about the men’s time in-country, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading. Each is written in a conversational manner.

Doc Bowling says that before arriving in Vietnam he served on Guam, and that there were “still Japanese soldiers from World War II hiding out on the island.” Bowling writes that he enlisted because, “Somehow, I knew this war was going to be one of the biggest things to ever happen to my generation; I didn’t want to miss it.”

Writing about trying to stop a napalm run that was getting too close to U.S. troops, Bowling says: “We were screaming over the radio for our platoon commander to call the company commander who was still back at the base, so he could call the battalion commander, so he could call the forward air controller, so he could call Bird Dog, so he could call off the air strike. They made three more runs with the napalm before we were able to get them stopped.”

A Navy corpsman helping a wounded Marine in Vietnam in 1968

Doc Hupp remembers being in the field “trying to sleep in a foxhole and rats the size of a toy poodle would fall into the hole with me. We also ate centipedes for survival.” Doc Monty writes: “We were on the ground with ponchos and the water table was saturated. The water table was high. We could not get any comfort, and I slept in a foot of water for three days. No cover. I peed on my leg to keep warm at night.”

 “To our readers,” Sheehan, says, “this is what it was like to walk in our shoes.”

Though this collection of stories about Navy corpsmen does not add much that is new to the Vietnam War memoir canon, there can never be too many books about the experiences of war veterans. Every story deserves to be told. Every story is worthy of being listened to.

–Bill McCloud

Hootch 8 by L. Paul Brief

If Hootch 8: A Combat Surgeon Remembers Vietnam (Toby Press, 177 pp. $24.95, hardcover; $9.99, Kindle), a short and delightful 2012 memoir, had been written 45 years earlier, I would have believed it was the inspiration for the 1970 movie M*A*S*H and the subsequent classic TV series. 

After suffering through officer Marine basic training at Fort Pendleton, Dr. L. Paul Brief, a young Berry Plan Navy orthopedic surgeon, was sent to the 1st Marine Division’s 1^st Medical Battalion Hospital in Danang in August 1970. He entered his hootch for the first time at night during a firefight between Marines and the Viet Cong; the next morning he performed five surgeries and seven the day after that. 

This baptism of fire was followed by a year of brutal surgeries under occasional combat conditions. Brief and his citizen-soldier surgeon buddies in Hootch 8 dealt with the incessant horror of the operating room by pulling pranks and coming up with humor of such a high caliber that the fictional Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre would be envious. Camaraderie and alcohol helped, too.

The book chronicles Brief’s short but intense military career, as well as the emotional and humorous New York City company medical personnel reunion in 1984.

Brief, who is Jewish, was born in Romania. As a child during World War II, he and his parents hid from the Nazis, only to experience intense antisemitism after fleeing to Paris in 1948. The family subsequently emigrated to the U.S. After being posted to Vietnam, antisemitism again raised its ugly head in the form of a Nazi-sympathizing doctor in Brief’s company. On the plus side, in Vietnam, Brief joined a Passover Seder in an airplane hangar in Danang with other Jewish troops. 

His book is well written and contains many photographs of the author and his buddies, as well as photos and X-rays of gruesome combat injuries. The much-needed glossary contains both military and medical terms.

Dr. Brief

Much of what the good doctor experienced in the military will be familiar to many of his readers: an abusive Marine drill instructor, sex and booze-filled R&R leaves, CP pills for malaria that give him diarrhea (aka Ho Chi Minh’s revenge), intense monsoon seasons, “fuck you” lizards, a hootch mamasan whose son was VC, being shunned when he returned home, and the inability and absurdity of a regular Army XO (a real-life Major Frank Burns?) trying to impose strict military discipline on a group of young, unruly, non-lifer doctors. 

The magnificent prank Brief and his Hootch 8 buddies played on that rigid XO is worth the price of the book. It sure beats most military jokes, including:

An angry sergeant walks up to a recruit and yells: “Smith, I didn’t see you at camouflage practice this morning!”  The soldier snaps to attention and replies, “Thank you, sergeant!” 

Now, read Hootch 8!

–Harvey Weiner