Reaching by Allen Dorfman

Allen Dorfman was drafted into the U.S. Army and served a 1967-68 tour of duty as an infantryman in Vietnam. He wrote Reaching (CreateSpace, 278 pp., $11.99, paper; $3.99, Kindle)  in the early 1970s. It is a decent in-country infantry novel that seems more like a thinly disguised memoir.

The cover blurb does an excellent job of encapsulating the novel. To wit: “In the spring of 1967, Hal Patsin receives his draft notice as the Vietnam War escalates. He plans to register as a conscientious objector—until his father says, ‘I’ve never asked for anything, Patty, but now I ask this: Serve your country.’”

So the oddly named Patty goes off to Vietnam a grunt determined never to fire his M-16. During the 1968 Tet Offensive, however, Patty is where the action is, and his resolution does not last long. He fires that M-16 because he doesn’t want to let down his friends Mac, Italy, Doc, and Timmy.

The author in Vietnam

A lot of the usual Vietnam War combat novel things happen to Patty and his friends. They complain that they don’t get to fight Hitler like their fathers did. They talk about going back to The World.  They sing “Green, Green Grass of Home.” They get into a mess of red ants and have conflicts with a green LT. Friendly fire takes its toll. They envy Bonnie and Clyde after they see the movie. Leeches get them; Humphrey Bogart and “The African Queen” come up.

This group of grunts—like so many of us in the Vietnam War generation—has been much affected by boyhoods spent watching movies and television and reading comic books. John Wayne, strong silent cowboys in white hats, and western saloons have filled their brains.

But their war does not measure up to that preparation. They want to get out of Dodge. Who can blame them?

Buy his book. I suspect it is the only one that Allen Dorfman—who today enjoys a nice life in Spokane, Washington, with his beautiful family, including two granddaughters—will ever write.  It’s a miracle he lived to write this one.

The author’s website is allendorfman.blogspot.com

—David Willson

 

No Apology by Richard Foerster

 

No Apology: A REMF Draftee’s Tour of Duty in Vietnam by Richard D. Foerster (Lulu Press, 65 pp., $25.80, paper, $20, e book) is a clearly written, brief account of the author’s experiences in the Vietnam War where he served from August 1968 to June 1969. The book begins with Foerster’s “freedom bird” flight back home to California for compassionate leave. A timeline provides a valuable source of the highlights of Foerster’s tour, augmented by color photos he took in Vietnam.

“As an eighteen year old who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, registering for the draft was a rite of passage,” Foerster writes, “and a reality.” In 1966 Foerster—a VVA life member—married and went to work at Audio Graphic Supply. Mentioning the word “supply” during his induction interview “got me assigned to Supply School in the Quartermaster Corps,” he writes, which led to rear echelon duty in Vietnam as a “Refrigerator Man” at USARV Headquarters Mess No. 3 at Long Binh Post

Dick Foerster’s supply clerk MOS challenged him to keep the mess hall supplied within budget. “I also looked for ‘deals’ that added to our menus,” he writes. “Once a semi-truck load of ice cream had to be distributed because no freezer was available at the docks. I took all the drums that would fit and we were able to offer ice cream at breakfast, lunch, and dinner for weeks thereafter.”

Some food items were valuable on the local underground economy. But Foerster did not give in to the temptation to cash in. One such item was raisins. “We got them in #10 cans any time a recipe called for even just a few,” he writes. “Each can was worth about $20 on the black market, but I didn’t allow unauthorized use.”

There were about 18 civilian workers employed at various jobs in his mess hall, Foerster says. “One of the workers came to me and said that [another workers] was having her baby. Baby, what baby?” That turned out to be one delivery Mess Hall #3 was not equipped to receive, so Foerster drove the woman to the base gate where she had to “walk through the ‘exit maze’ before re-boarding the truck. She didn’t live far away, so we saw her safely to the door at her doctor’s office”

Some red alert attacks interrupted the usual peace at Long Binh before Foerster was sent home early. His main regret: “I wish I’d kept a diary. I wish I had taken more pictures.”

I also wish Dick Foerster had kept a diary and taken more pics, as I enjoyed reading the book even without them.

—Curt Nelson

The Great Mars Hill Bank Robbery by Ron Chase

Ron Chase served in the U. S. Army during the Vietnam War in Korea and Alaska. The subject of Chase’s book, The Great Mars Hill Bank Robbery (Down East Books, 160 pp., $16.95, paper), Bernard Patterson, also served in the Army. As a nineteen year old during the peak of the Vietnam War, he was a tunnel rat for three tours of duty.

The prologue notes that like “hundreds of thousands of other young men who served during the Vietnam era, we both returned disillusioned, distrustful of our government institutions and with an abiding sense we no longer fit neatly into the society we left.” Patterson deals with his disillusion by robbing the Northern National Bank in Mars Hill, Maine, on November 12, 1971. He escapes with $110,000. When I read the details of that robbery, it seemed like a comedy of errors as Patterson muddled his way through the event and escaped.

When Patterson is interviewed later about what caused him to rob the bank, he says the federal government promised to pay for his college education, but when he asked for the money, the government refused. Patterson—all of five-feet, three-inches tall and 140 pounds—uses the considerable skills he learned in Vietnam as a tunnel rat and paratrooper to elude capture for seven months. He had been awarded four Bronze Stars for valor.

One of his neighbors in Mars Hill say that “he was alright until he came home from the Army.”  I heard that often myself, and when I heard it, I had the thought that many Americans wished that Vietnam veterans had not returned from our war.

By the time Patterson is captured, he’s traveled 20,000 miles in seven countries on three continents. He is much underestimated by the FBI and other law enforcement personnel who pursue him. Someone asks: “How did an unsophisticated, under-educated young man from rural Northern Maine elude the might of American law enforcement?”

Nancy and Ron Chase

I suggest that you read this fascinating book for the story alone, including finding out in detail where the money winds up. In seven months Patterson spends the $110,000 on what’s often referred to as “wine, women and song.” Actually, not that much song, but a lot of wine, the most expensive that Switzerland, France, and England had to offer.

Ultimately, Bernard Patterson remains a mystery. As the author says, “he has an enigmatic, convoluted, uncompromising persona.”

I highly recommend this book to those who want to learn about what one Vietnam veteran chooses to do with his life after coming home from the war.

Patterson pays the price for his bank escapade. After a lengthy time in prison, he settles down to become a pot farmer and dealer. His time in prison had been spent learning about marijuana horticulture; he learned it well.

The author’s website is ronchaseoutdoors.com

—David Willson

Perfume River Nights by Michael P. Maurer

 

Michael P. Maurer enlisted in the Army and served as an infantryman with the 82nd Airborne Division in the Vietnam War. Maurer moved to Vietnam in 2003. He stayed there until 2009. He took more than twelve years to complete his novel, Perfume River Nights (North Star Press, 329 pp., $14.95, paper), most of which was written in Vietnam.

The novel’s main character, Jimmy Miller, called Singer by his platoon mates, is the same age, 18, as Maurer was when he served in Vietnam. I don’t think that is the only similarity between the author and the protagonist.

As the novel’s title indicates, some of the story takes place in Hue (the Perfume River runs through it), after most of the fighting is over during Tet 1968 and the city is destroyed. Later, the novel moves to the A Shau Valley, where the scenes are cloaked  in great darkness due to the dense forest overhead. The platoon stumbles into an enemy base camp in the Valley and dire things ensue, all of which are well described and had me on the edge of my seat.

That includes bad leadership, which is decried often in this book. Fragging is suggested more than once. “Inept leaders and stupid orders” dog the platoon throughout. Their lieutenant tries to pick up a booby trap and blows himself and others up. At one point a character says he’d kill for a glass of water. Bees attack them. Our hero receives a Dear John letter. His letters to his mom are lies that tell her he is in a base camp watching a lot of old movies.

Our hero is angry all the time. After seven months, Miller refuses to shoot his rifle anymore. His Top Sergeant and the new Captain send him to Camp Eagle where he’ll “finish out [his] tour with the company support elements.”

Maurer

We get many of the same motifs in this novel that are in the the hundreds of in-country fictional works that preceded it, but the writing is much better than in most infantry novels.

We hear “It don’t mean nothing;” we get the phrase, “the things they carried,” as well as rants against REMFs (“fuckin’ pogues”), shit-burning details, shake and bake leaders, chickenshit deferments, clerks with nervous fingers, friendly fire, and cowboys and Indians.

Near the end  we are told that there is no glory in killing, but the novel already made that more than clear to this reader.

Perfume River Nights is a superb novel of the American infantry in Vietnam, and I highly recommend it. If I were still teaching a class on the war, I’d use this novel as a text and the class would learn a lot from it.

I rank Perfume River Nights right up there with Marlantes’ Matterhorn, even though Matterhorn is at least twice the size.

The author’s website is www.michaelpmaurer.com

—David Willson

Miller’s Valley by Anna Quindlan

Anna Quindlen, a newspaper columnist and novelist, writes bestsellers. Her books are about the American family. Her target audience is mostly American women. She has ventured into new territory in her latest novel, Miller’s Valley (Random House, 272 pp., $28), with varied success.

Mimi Miller is the narrator of this family saga, which begins in the 1960s and follows the family and its toxic secrets to the present. We are told that Mimi’s mother struggled to maintain her family, but all it says about Tommy, one of the two sons, is that he “becomes unrecognizable.” I wondered what it meant, but I had my suspicions. Only as we get into the book do we learn that he joined the military and fought in the Vietnam War.

Tommy’s story becomes the backbone of this sad novel. Mimi’s ostensible obsession with the flooding of Miller Valley is the surface subject of the book.

“When my brother had finally come home for good, people said he was changed man,” Mimi says. “That wasn’t true. He looked a little like Tommy Miller, and sometimes he even talked a little like Tommy Miller. But the real Tommy Miller was gone. I don’t know where he left him, but that guy didn’t live in Miller’s Valley anymore. One day a car had dropped him opposite the barn just as I was getting home from school. I wrapped my arms around his neck, but it was like hugging a mannequin. He peeled me off as soon as was decent, or maybe sooner.”

She goes on: “We weren’t even sure where he’d been.  He’d been gone more than three years, but Eddie was certain he hadn’t been in the service all that time. It was funny, Tom had changed so much but Eddie hadn’t changed much at all, still serious and a little anxious.”

Tommy “even scared me a little,” Mimi says. “He’d grown a big moustache and his hair was even longer now, and everything about him had coarsened, his skin, his body, his language, his eyes. The light in his eyes was gone, and so was the grin. That broke my mother’s heart I think.”

Later she says: “Tommy was one of those drunks who went through all the stages: sociable, silent, mean, nasty, violent. He tuned my father up, although he’d probably say it was the other way around.”

Mimi and the author are right on the money about how mother gets freaked out about the long hair and the big mustache, but to choose the word “coarsened” for his changes is hardhearted. It’s one example of too many false and suspicious notes that Quindlen hits in this short book.  Three years are about right for him to be gone, for one thing. Also, the use of term “being in the service” is not right for a tour of duty in Vietnam.

Mimi’s curiosity about Tommy’s tour of duty continues throughout the novel. “Every once in a while,” she says, “Tommy would get drunk and say something like ‘the bugs, man, you can’t even believe the size of the bugs. They’ll eat you for breakfast.’ But you couldn’t ask him a direct question about Vietnam.  On the news they showed some boys who burnt their draft cards. And Tom said, ‘I wasn’t even drafted, I signed up of my own free will.’ Then he laughed and laughed, and then he started to cry and he fell asleep on the couch before dinner and had disappeared by morning.

Anna Quindlen

“Sometimes at the diner one of the old guys would say, ‘they make it look pretty bad over there, son.’ And Tom would say one of two things, either, ‘You have no idea’ or ‘You don’t want to know.’ Then someone would say that we had to beat the communists or they would take over everything, and Tommy would stand up and leave. He always got comped because Mr. Venti told the waitresses we had to honor his service to our country, even though I wasn’t sure Tom felt that way himself.”

I believe the comments of the old guys in the diner. But a Vietnam veteran getting comped for his food during that era was hard for me to swallow.

Later we’re told that he “took a lot of pills, some to help him get up in the morning, some to help with the pain in his leg. He took something that was supposed to make him puke if he drank, and he took it and drank anyway and got so sick he seemed he would turn his insides out. ‘I always start the day with good intentions,’ he said to me once.

“Sometimes he would even fulfill them. He would help my father deliver a heavy engine in the truck to someone, or he would pick up groceries for Ruth. He would sit with her and watch television, and he would make the two of them baloney sandwiches with mustard and potato chips. And then he would disappear and we wouldn’t see him for days, maybe longer….  Usually when he turned up again he looked exhausted, and sometimes he was bruised, or cut up.”

Mimi would sometimes watch him sleep on the couch. She didn’t look at his face, “but at the rise and fall of his chest under the grimy T-shirt. I wondered what his plan was now. Getting through the day, I figured… I guess Tommy’s whole life now was a war wound.”

Nothing much good ever happens for Tom. To be fair, nothing much good happens to his Aunt Ruth either. She is a Gothic character who never leaves her house and keeps a dead baby in a suitcase in her attic. Tom never becomes more than a stereotypical emotionally damaged Vietnam War veteran who never gets his life together. He deals drugs, gets into fights, and serves time in prison. Eventually, he disappears. We never find out where or why.

Few, if any A-list authors at top-line publishers are dealing with Vietnam veterans these days. So I was driven to read this book and find out how it would be done. I could be wrong, but I didn’t get the feeling that Quindlen actually has known any Vietnam veterans personally, let alone had one for a brother or husband or a father. Her characterization of Tommy seems well researched, but not torn from personal relationship or personal pain.

Bruce Willis as Emmett in In Country, the 1989 movie

Tommy reminded me a lot of Emmett, the main Vietnam veteran character in another novel by a top American female author, Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country. That novel was also well-researched, but is infinitely more worthy than Quindlen’s effort. Perhaps it was the help Mason had from Vietnam veterans she know, including W. D. Ehrhart.

Tommy lacks the positive traits of Emmett. I would have liked to have seen some positive traits. But that is just me being a Vietnam veteran who looks for those things in fellow vets.  And I usually find them, both in real and fictional veterans. That’s because people are usually a mixture.

I had high hopes for Miller’s Valley. I thought we might finally find a fully developed, fully rounded, realistic portrait of a Vietnam veteran. I didn’t find that in this novel—not by a long shot.

—David Willson

Unaccounted by Michael McDonald-Low

Michael McDonald-Low’s Unaccounted (First Edition Design Publishing, 364 pp., $19.95, paper; $9.99, Kindle) begins with a startling statistic: More than 83,000 American military personnel—the overwhelming majority from World War II— have been listed as missing in action.  The military did not systematically search for MIAs until after the Vietnam War, the author points out, when the families of those unaccounted for demanded answers.

Unaccounted looks at the service of, and search for, Clifford D. Van Artsdalen, an American soldier who went missing in May 1968 at the beginning of the second Tet Cffensive. Using a unique style of storytelling, the author presents a fictionalized account of the war from Van Artsdalen’s perspective, starting with his first duty station at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii and ending with his presumed death in the Que Son Valley. McDonald-Low intersperses this retelling with personal experiences and interactions he had as Van Artsdalen’s platoon leader, along with details gathered from after-action reports.

Convincing reconstructed dialogue and descriptions put the reader firmly in the combat boots of the two main characters in Vietnam. The story starts with McDonald-Low waking in the present, drenched in sweat, from a nightmare that has haunted him for decades—the day when, as a platoon leader with Delta Company, 1^st Battalion, 20^th Infantry, he and his men walked into an ambush along the hills of Que Son Valley.

The Author

The events leading up to the ambush are what the author attempts to reconcile through this retelling—could something have happened that would have spared the lives of Van Artsdalen and other men? Was there some crucial detail that he missed?

When Van Artsdalen is shot and goes missing, the book leaps forward to the present, where McDonald-Low is advising a JPAC recovery team searching for Van Artsdalen’s remains. The last third of the book describes the team’s recovery efforts in Hawaii and Vietnam. Without giving too much away, the recovery team is only marginally successful, but its endeavor enables McDonald-Low to confront Van Artsdalen’s death.

Inattentive readers may miss the shift in POV when a new chapter starts, as there’s not much change in tone. Plus, sometimes chapters skip weeks, months, or even years in a non-linear fashion. But overall, McDonald-Low’s book does an excellent job portraying the chaos of battle and the similar thoughts and emotions of officers and enlisted men.

Unaccounted evokes Clifford Van Artsdalen’s war experiences and the ultimate sacrifice he paid—even if it took 44 years for him to be accounted for.

The author’s website is www.unaccounted.net

—James Schuessler

Russell’s Purple Heart by Russell D. Ward

Russell’s Purple Heart: Memoirs and Musings of Russell D. Ward, Purple Heart Recipient and Patriot (CreateSpace, 210 pp. paper; $4.89, Kindle) delivers exactly what its title offers. Russell D. Ward (with the help of Colleen Fitzgerald McCoy) tells his life story in the first three-quarters of the book. The rest consists of Ward’s explanation of his solutions to a dozen current worldwide problems.

Drafted into the Army in 1966, Russell Ward went to Vietnam the following year as a machine gunner on an armored personnel carrier. After six months, he was reassigned to an infantry company. Shot during the battle for Hue in 1968, Ward was shipped home when his wound did not improve “quickly enough.” Shortly before he was wounded, he recalls that “there were only three of us left of the twelve who started out in my third squad.”

The Vietnam War provided Ward with grisly and long-lasting memories. He describes the mutilation of enemy bodies in detail and wonders “why we had to act like such barbarians.” He talks of the deaths of comrades and the resultant punishment that battle survivors meted out against villages and people suspected of being Viet Cong.

“I have heard that a man is only as good as what he has gone through—that his life experiences form his character,” Ward writes. “This statement makes me believe that we, as veterans of war, who fought for our country, experienced these things for a reason and for some good purpose. At the very least, our experiences have taught us to be tough enough to keep on surviving. No matter what. I know that I have had my heartbreaks, just like everyone. But through all my struggles and heartbreaks, I have believed in myself because of my trust in the Lord to overcome the low points in my life. Vietnam taught me that.”

Early in the book, Ward paints picturesque scenes of growing up in West Buffalo, New York, during the 1950s and early 1960s. He takes pleasure in remembering fist fights with rival neighborhood gangs and pegging the speedometer of his ’58 Chevy. In every way, he enjoyed taking chances.

He returned to Buffalo after the war and found it difficult to cope with the changing social values. He fell back into the habit of taking chances. He experienced business and marital problems, depression, residual pain from his wound, and drug abuse. “My brain,” he says, “was cooked at the age of twenty-seven.”

Russell Ward at the Williamsville, New York, Purple Heart Monument.

Ward’s emotional burden lightened during his passage through middle age as the result of a successful second marriage and a quarter-century career with the U.S. Postal Service. Following retirement, he found a calling in promoting the Military Order of the Purple Heart.

This book was difficult to read because Ward’s suffering often resulted from his own mistakes, which he admits. He repeatedly fell for get-rich-quick schemes that I found frustrating because of their transparency. Nevertheless, I admire Russell Ward’s ability to restart his life after repeated crashes.

The author’s web site is www.russellpurpleheart.com

—Henry Zeybel

Where the Water Meets the Sand by Tyra Manning

Some people who never take part in a war still have trouble finding “home” again after the war is over. Having a spouse or family member go off to military service, even temporarily, can put undue stress on the children and spouses back home. Of course, many families are permanently broken by loved ones who never return home, either physically or mentally, from their time in service.

In Where the Water Meets the Sand (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 256 pp., $15.95, paper), Tyra Manning, the widow of an Air Force pilot, shares her personal struggle dealing with the loss of her husband and any semblance of her former family life when he was killed in action in Vietnam. Her memoir will resonate with anyone who has suffered through the loss of a loved one. It also will provide support for those who feel as if they are alone in their struggle to return to normal life.

Tyra Manning, who holds a doctorate in education administration, was a newlywed, twenty-something mother of a one-year old girl when her husband deployed. Already suffering from anxiety, depression, and substance abuse related to her father’s death, Manning collapsed entirely without the emotional support of her husband. She found herself unable to hold her family together in his absence, and dropped her daughter off with relatives to check herself into the Menninger Clinic, an upscale psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kansas.

Much of the story revolves around Manning’s experiences at Menninger as she confronted, albeit shallowly, the enduring pain she’d suffered since losing her father, a wound aggravated by the sudden absence of her husband and the stress of not knowing when, or if, he would return. In the months of treatment that followed, Manning rediscovered confidence in herself with help from doctors and patients at Menninger.

Tyra Manning

Manning’s memoir brings attention to the often un-discussed psychological trauma that spouses and other family members of veterans endure, along with the depression and substance abuse that can lurk in the wake of a family member’s service.

Manning brings this up in a Q&A at the end of the book, saying, “Many of us discuss our own struggles and those of the ones we love in whispers, and we keep our illnesses secret, perpetuating the barrier to treatment.”
This is not a self-help book. But Where the Water Meets the Sand contributes to a growing body of Vietnam War literature that encourages discussion of mental health and substance abuse issues among those who’ve experienced—or know someone who has endured— similar struggles.

“The stigma and lack of empathy toward those who require treatment is still a gigantic hurdle,” Manning writes. That is exactly what her memoir attempts to resolve.

The author’s website is tyramanning.com

— James Schuessler

You Don’t Lose ‘Til You Quit Trying by Sammy Lee Davis and Caroline Lambert

The fight begins with a North Vietnamese Army mortar attack that detonates a makeshift ammo dump at Fire Support Base Cudgel. One round momentarily stuns PFC Sammy Lee Davis, one of forty-two U.S. Army artillerymen at the site. Then a bugle call signals a charge by hundreds of NVA soldiers.

Sammy Lee Davis, with Caroline Lambert, describes that scene to begin You Don’t Lose ‘Til You Quit Trying: Lessons on Adversity and Victory from a Vietnam Veteran and Medal of Honor Recipient  (Berkley, 275 pp.; $27 hardcover; $13.99, Kindle). Davis received the Medal of Honor for his actions that day. But the book recounts far more than that event.

Sammy Davis most definitely is his own man, fully cognizant of his capabilities. His greatest attributes are self-sufficiency and unselfish concern for others. His upbringing had role-model quality. His parents and two older brothers taught him how to take care of himself, traits he passed to two younger sisters and another brother. His mother repeatedly told him, “You don’t lose ’til you quit trying,” which she learned from her father.

Davis was precocious in dealing with everyday matters. He learned to drive at the age of five, and got his license at thirteen. At eight, he learned to handle firearms and hunt. He always had a job—as newsboy, a cook, a lumberjack., a powder monkey. When he enlisted in the Army at twenty in 1966, he followed a family tradition of military service that stretched back to the Spanish-American War.

At Cudgel, wounded by both enemy and friendly fire, Davis singlehandedly fought back with his rifle, a machinegun, and a howitzer. His actions stalled the NVA charge, then he crossed a canal under fire and rescued three wounded and stranded infantrymen.

Sammy Lee Davis 

His post-battle story follows a pattern that challenges reason. His injuries included kidney perforations and vertebra inflicted by flechettes that also shredded his lower back; a bullet in his leg; ribs separated from his sternum; shrapnel wounds and burns across his face, hands, and neck; and traumatic brain damage. Doctors treated Davis in Saigon and then shipped him to  Japan. He appeared destined for return to the United States. Instead, Davis persuaded Gen. William Westmoreland to allow him to return to his unit as soon as he could walk.

“I still don’t know how I managed to convince anyone to call the highest-ranking U.S. general in Vietnam,” Davis says.

Davis returned to Saigon for rehabilitation and eventually to his unit at Tan Tru, where he completed his recovery. He fought in Cholon during the 1968 Tet Offensive. In March of that year he finished his tour of day.

His return to the United States included a band of hippies accosting him and two traveling companions at the airport in San Francisco with acts of disrespect beyond anything I knew. The confrontation introduced Davis to the fringes of the antiwar movement.

During his last eighteen months on active duty, Davis often was assigned to speak publicly on behalf of the Army. He experienced more disrespectful treatment. After his discharge and up to today, Davis has continued to make public appearances and speak to “whoever will listen,” including veterans, soldiers, business people, and schoolchildren. His goal in life is to be “a good man.” His speeches emphasize duty, honor, and country. He tolerates protesting war but not the warrior.

Medical problems have plagued Davis since his discharge. Agent Orange damaged his body in ways that required many operations. He also suffered from post-traumatic stress with nightmares and flashbacks. For years, he slept only in two-hour increments.

Sammy Davis receiving the Medal of Honor from President Johnson in November 1968

Beyond describing the events in his life, Sammy Lee Davis also provides an insightful picture of what it is like to receive a Medal of Honor. The award brings a high degree of recognition and privilege. But, of course, the act that qualifies a person for the medal also elevates that person far above average. I was unaware of several of the well-deserved benefits MOH recipients receive.

“The Medal of Honor changed my life in ways I never expected. Wearing it comes with duties and obligations,” Davis says, “honoring what it represents and refraining from anything that would tarnish what it stands for.”

—Henry Zeybel

 

 

 

 

 

Landing Zone by Carlos L. Arce

 

Landing Zone is the title of an illustrated serial novel about the Vietnam War by Carlos Arce, a disabled veteran who served in the war from 1969-70 with an Airborne Ranger Special Operations Unit of the First Cavalry Division. Landing Zone: The Beginning (HEDSA Publishing, $2.99, Kindle) is Arce’s first book on the war in Vietnam. He tells his story with words, photos, maps, and diagrams.

Arce’s choice to use an augmented text results in the clearest introduction to the life of a soldier in Vietnam that has yet been published. This volume is a tiny piece of the total story. We follow Pvt. Vida from the time he receives his orders to report to the Oakland Army Base on July 20, 1969. His alarm clock wakes him up at 5:00 a.m.

On page 95, we leave Pvt. Vida behind until we get the next volume in this novel.  Chapter 8, “The American Killing Machine,” involves the private getting in-country training in how to kill people. He is yelled at by Master Sgt. Scalia. To wit: “You are here to kill gooks. You are not here to feel sorry for anyone. Never mind what anyone tells you; you are not here to pacify people. You must understand you are here to kill, to kill—you are here to kill.”

So the novel goes. I enjoyed much of it. The illustrations eliminate all confusion about what a flak jacket looks like. We also are shown illustrations of American soldiers receiving “paid manual sexual favors.” We are told that girls were kept in closed, prison-like conditions. “The operations belonged to warlord Vietnamese generals and were run by iron-fisted Mama Sangs; they operated inside American military bases, as American slave brothels.”

My tour of duty took place too early to witness that, I guess. Certainly the scene that Arce describes is not what I saw when I was in Vietnam.

The author

Acre also describes a war zone in which dope is easily available everywhere and most guys are using it. American fire power gets a lot of respect. Daisy cutters and Rome Plows seem to make it more than likely we will win the war against a corrupt people who lack our resources. Baby Killers are mentioned.

For those who wish to read a detailed, illustrated novel of the war, I suspect that no author will top this series in those respects, once all seven books are available.

Readers who are obsessed with commas and semicolons being used correctly will be bothered. But are there many folks like that even left in this modern world?

—David Willson