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

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

Whatever Cause We Have by Dan Moore

Dan Moore grew up in a military family. His father, who survived Pearl Harbor and the sinking of his ship at Guadalcanal, remained in the Navy after the war. With the Vietnam War in the headlines during his senior year in college, Moore joined the U.S. Marine Corps where he believed he could serve “honorably” as his father had.

After training at Quantico—which Moore vividly recounts in Whatever Cause We Have: Memoir of a Marine Forward Observer in the Vietnam War (McFarland, 263 pp. $29.95, paper; $13.49, Kindle)—he opted for artillery. In August 1967, Moore, a member of Vietnam Veterans of America, arrived at An Hòa Combat Base in central I Corps in South Vietnam. He believed that that the U.S. would prevail in the war, and was surprised to discover soon after arriving that many Marines of all ranks openly counted the number of days left in their tours.

The bulk of Moore’s narrative deals with his time as a forward observer with Golf Company, 2^nd Battalion/5th Marines in the 1st Marine Division. His first challenge came during Operation Essex when witnessed the limitations of artillery against a scattered, dug-in enemy. Moore sensed that the unit’s senior officers, anxious to advance their own careers, were too quick to send Marines and junior reserve officers into fortified villages, often pockmarked with spider holes.

In his book Moore held this reader captive by delivering ample doses of introspection. After a run-in with his commanding officer, for example, Moore writes: “Yes, I had made mistakes in judgment, like any new officer, and I acknowledged them. I did not dwell on them at the time. I could ill-afford the luxury of self-reflection, but memories buried for decades would later return.”

Most impactful for Moore were the opening days of the Tet Offensive after Golf Company was sent to dislodge the North Vietnamese from Huế City. When the bloody six-week Battle of Huế was over, Moore had lost his closest friend, Lance Cpl. Ken Stetson, whom he had trained to be his assistant FO. In the courtyard of Huế’s Medical School, Moore chanced upon Stetson lying on a stretcher, shot in the abdomen, waiting to be evacuated. He died a few hours later.

A group of 2d Battalion, 5th Marines in An Hòa in 1969

To give a complete picture of the battle, Moore relies on powerful accounts of Marines with whom he fought. Many highlight the heroism of enlisted Marines—shortchanged, Moore argues, when it came to citations.

Moore’s book is well-organized and the writing fast-paced and tight. Succinct portrayals of his commanding officers accompany full descriptions of I Corps’ mountains and valleys, which were beautiful—and dangerous. Late at night on Moore’s last day in the field, he and his driver raced on an unprotected road to An Hòa, where Moore would board a helicopter bound for Da Nang. Then the driver suddenly veered off the road to avoid something “that didn’t look right,” Moore says, most likely a hastily buried mine.

Forty years later, Moore returned to Vietnam, accompanied by his wife and a small group of veterans, including Golf Company’s former commander, Chuck Meadows. He came ready to reflect and remember.

–Stephen P. Learned

Runway Visions by David Kirk Vaughan

During the Vietnam War in 1967-68, I navigated 772 in-country combat support sorties in C-130 Hercules transports. Now, in 2024, I am reviewing Runway Visions: An American C-130 Pilot’s Memoir of Combat Airlift Operations in Southeast Asia, 1967-1968 (McFarland, 195 pp. $19.99, paper; $9.99, Kindle) published in 1998 and written by David Kirk Vaughan, who piloted similar flights.

A 1962 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Vaughn has written and edited many books of historic value stretching back to World War I. While on active duty, he earned a PhD in English and spent much of his military career as a teacher. He recorded more than 3,500 flying hours during his 20 years in the miliary.

The quality of Runway Visions is best attested to by the fact that I first read the book soon after it came out more than 20 years ago, and looked forward to reading it again. The second time around was as pleasing as meeting an old friend, particularly a chapter titled, “Dancing in the Alligator House,” which defies explanation.

In many ways, Vaughan’s Vietnam War experience is a coming-of-age story. He voluntarily went to Vietnam as a new captain and aircraft commander with 400 hours in the C-130. A youngster among old Hercules pros, he soon upgraded to instructor status with the 345th Tactical Airlift Squadron at Ching Chuan Kang Air Base in Taiwan.

The unit’s missions carried him throughout all of Southeast Asia. The squadron shuttled into Vietnam on temporary duty; therefore, its manpower was not included in the total number of American military personnel in Vietnam: another Johnson/McNamara political ploy.

Flying, partying, and juggling girlfriends from different counties filled most of Vaughn’s days. He describes risky takeoffs and landings at many South Vietnamese airfields and in doing so, offers a: a Cook’s Tour of the country.

C-130 making a drop at Khe Sanh in 1968

From January-March 1968, the Tet Offensive provided him with most of his in-country flying and included hyper-dangerous situations in virtually all the old familiar places, including Khe Sanh and Dak To. Readers unfamiliar with the war might learn a few lessons about airlifting supplies and troops (alive and dead) in and out of under-sized runways complicated by enemy gunfire and sometimes ugly weather.    

As for his post-war attitude, Vaughan says: “Winning and losing a war had never been more to me than an abstract concept while I was in Vietnam.” What mattered was flying his airplane well and not breaking anything or anybody on board. Vaughn cites luck and the remarkable resiliency of the aircraft he flew as factors that made his experience “more or less successful.”

Runway Visions tells it like it was—or at least how David Vaughn and I experienced it.

—Henry Zeybel

Hitchhiking Home from Danang by Gerald A. McCarthy

Hitchhiking Home from Danang: a Memoir of Vietnam, PTSD and Reclamation (McFarland, 240 pp. $29.95, paper; $13.49, Kindle) is a well-written memoir of self-reflection by a poet who spent a year in the Vietnam War. Gerald McCarthy, who enlisted in the Marines at age 17 after graduating high school, spent his 1966-67 tour of duty in Vietnam with the 1^st Marine Engineer Battalion on guard duty, loading and unloading supplies and cargo, and as an expert scrounger in Chu Lai and Da Nang.  

Although he did not see combat, McCarthy’s year in-country contributed to his PTSD, which seems to be the result of a series of traumas since childhood and during and after his Vietnam War service. After returning home from the war, McCarthy went AWOL and later deserted while assigned to guard duty at the Polaris Missile Facility in Charleston, South Carolina.

He was arrested, imprisoned, and treated for PTSD by VA doctors for years. He eventually went to college and graduate school, married and had a family. However, McCarthy’s PTSD persisted.

His book is not written in chronological order, but nevertheless hangs together well if read in the usual way. McCarthy says it can be read backwards and each chapter can be read independently. When a chapter or paragraph is in italics, it connotes something that disturbs the author. There is some repetition, which is deliberate and, McCarthy says, mimics his issues with the past. These affectations seem to work, and the book is a good read whatever chapter you begin with.

Throughout the book, McCarthy expresses regrets over his “foolish” decision to go to Vietnam and he explains why he later became an antiwar and antiracist activist. He taught creative writing at Attica Prison in New York and considers that the most meaningful experience of his life. He believes he is an example of how PTSD can result from negative experiences throughout one’s life, his wartime experiences being only one element of it. “This is not a war story,” he says, “although there is war in it and many deaths.”

Gerald McCarthy

Each short chapter’s title is a popular song of the late 1960s or later. The content of each chapter is loosely related to the chapter’s song title and song contents.

Surprisingly, McCarthy does not include an antiwar song, such as Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.”  Not surprisingly, he does not use “The Ballard of the Green Berets” by Army Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.

Channeling Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Gerald McCarthy spends an entire chapter enumerating every way in which one could die in the Vietnam War. Another chapter describes a fellow prison inmate who, while being transported on a train, went crazy as he believed all the people in the car were Viet Cong. Another chapter describes the author’s father’s exploits in World War II. 

In the final analysis, the diverse 52 chapters mix well together into a tasty jambalaya of a book.

McCarthy’s website is geraldmccarthypoet.com/

— Harvey Weiner

Memoir of a Hard Time, 614 Days, & An Invisible Suit of Armor by Chad Spawr

Chad Spawr shed his blood for America, lost friends in combat, and suffered a heavy dose of post-traumatic stress after coming home from the Vietnam War. He experienced an extended 1967-69 tour of duty leading a PSYOP field team with the 1st Brigade of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division.

Using an unusual pattern, he has written an autobiography consisting of three short books filled with memories he cannot forget.

Book One: Memoir of a Hard Time: Memories From My Time at War (100 pp. $14.99, paper; $4.99, Kindle) follows a loose chronology that takes Spawr from youth to old age. He says that the book is not intended to be any kind of history or to teach any lessons; it is “simply sharing some memories, some good, some not so good.”

Spawr discusses issues found in most autobiographies written by enlisted men, but his viewpoint tilts from the norm. He is pragmatic even when facing traumatic events. For example, he simultaneously contracted hepatitis and malaria, spent two blurry months in the hospital, and then eagerly returned to duty.

He summarizes being shot down in a helicopter by saying, “The hits just keep on comin’.” Seriously wounded by an exploding grenade, shot in a leg, hospitalized by surgeries for several weeks, and sent to convalesce on a beach near Cam Ranh Bay, Spawr thinks, “Such a juxtaposition I was experiencing.” His depiction of his return to America produces especially interesting reading.

Book Two: 614 Days: Memories from My Time at War (82 pp.) expands the storyline of Book One with vignettes ranging from humorous to death-defying. It continues to emphasize Spawr’s strong belief that surviving combat “does not bring satisfaction or contentment necessarily. Lasting friendship provides the bones of men who survive combat together.” Friendships, he says, “frankly, are unavoidable in the crucible of war.” Throughout his books, he profiles many men he admires.

Book Three: An Invisible Suit of Armor (87 pp.) lacks the vigor of the first two books. In this one, he compares his seven years of Army life to his subsequent role in civilian society. He contends that he does not mean to be “angry, whiny, and hurt,” yet resurrects the never-to-be-resolved disagreements between veterans and civilians about the Vietnam War. And he repeats a few arguments that he made in the first two books.

Based on reading this trio, I believe that Chad Spawr is a survivor in any situation. And several of his memories contain meaningful lessons.

—Henry Zeybel