No Where Man by Stephen J. Piotrowski

 

As Stephen Piotrowski makes clear in No Where Man: One Soldier’s Journey Home from Vietnam (450 pp. $19.95, paper; $4.99, Kindle) being in combat for a year is emotionally and physically draining, and the experience of coming home can be no less traumatic and stressful. Piotrowski’s story is like that of countless young veterans who have returned home from a war and found it nearly impossible to let go of what had been an all-consuming time in their lives.

As I read about his struggles I thought that this is what many war veterans need to write, even if it’s just a personal journal, to externalize the emotions and get them out in the open to be dealt with, and ultimately put to rest.

The book starts during the author’s final days as an RTO with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam in 1970, and the beginnings of his alienation as he finds it difficult to decompress in the rear at his battalion’s base camp. From there, his emotions continually erupt as he transitions in little more than twenty-four hours from the war zone to a very, very different world back home.

Anyone coming home from war will recall many of the same feelings and experiences Piotrowski, a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America, describes as he reluctantly prepared to leave his combat buddies and return to a country where he no longer fit in. Adding to the confusion back home were family and friends who appeared to have little or no interest in what he had undergone or was now going through.

An RTO in the field in Vietnam

One of the most mindless questions he heard again and again—just as many of us have—was, “Did you kill anybody?”

Aside from a brother who had returned from combat the year before, there was practically no one to help him sort out his confusion and alienation. A car mechanic who had been in the Korean War said it was the same for him when he returned. What made it worse was the contemptuous attitude of many World War II veterans who dismissed Korea as a nothing war. That same attitude would be experienced by many of us coming home from Vietnam; hence the founding principle of Vietnam Veterans of America: Never Again Will One Generation of Veterans Abandon Another.

It’s difficult to believe that those who had known war would reject returning war veterans who needed their support. For the author nearly everything seemed so bewildering. Even everyday sounds and sights took on ominous meanings in his mind.

I read each page carefully to catch all his take-aways as confusing sensations arose from things happening to and around him. I kept recalling similar moments that I had when I came home from my war. I can still remember well my involuntary reaction when I was walking to college classes and heard the high-pitched noise of metal on metal made by worn-out brakes. The sound was nearly identical to the final seconds of incoming North Vietnamese artillery rounds fired at us day and night during the battle for Khe Sanh. Who on campus could possibly imagine what was going through my mind at that moment?

Piotrowski in country

 

This book doesn’t attempt to explain the Vietnam War or describe the battles that were fought. It’s an every-man’s account of one young soldier trying to come to grips with his war and then struggling to bring closure to it.

In the end, Stephen Piotrowski realized that the first giant step for him to leave the war behind was to take control of his life and not wait for others to make the decisions.

It is on that positive note that the book ends.

–John Cirafici

Snow in Vietnam by Amy M. Le

Snow in Vietnam (Mercury West Publishing, 229 pp. $26.99, hardcover; 16.99, paper; $3.99, Kindle) is a debut novel by Amy M. Le. The author was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States at the age of five. She now considers both the Pacific Northwest and Oklahoma to be her homes. 

I love the title, even if it is somewhat gimmicky. I also loved the novel. “Snow” is the name of the main character, a woman who is the youngest of seven children. Within the family she is called “Eight” because her parents are “One.” In May 1973 she is a 34-year-old virgin living with her family in Vinh Binh Province in the Mekong Delta, and is about to marry a Vietnamese man she hardly knows. She’s a former schoolteacher who now works for a bank. The Paris Peace Treaty has been signed, bringing hope that normalcy will come to Vietnam.

She marries and gives birth to a daughter a year later. Shortly afterward she learns that her husband has been living another life with another woman. It’s a deceit that Snow refers to as “a Nixonian blow.” With her life falling apart, she strikes out with her daughter in a bold move of independence. Before long, though, she returns to the home of her parents and siblings.

By early 1975 communist troops, which Le refers to as the “northern army,” are moving on Saigon and pretty quickly the city falls. As the communists gain control over all of the former South Vietnam western books and clothes are burned and families are encouraged to spy on their neighbors. By the end of 1976 Snow has missed three opportunities to escape this oppressive society—in which, she notes, even the sunlight seems to shine differently—and flee to the U.S.A. She saves money for years to try to buy freedom for herself and her young daughter.

But time marches on. Her child seems to be suffering from a serious heart condition. There are fears of a war with Cambodia and China. She wants to be able to give her daughter the life that she used to dream of for herself. With 1977 coming to a close, any possible escape still seems “light years away.”

Then in early 1979 she seizes what may be her last opportunity and faces the dangers involved in getting herself, her daughter, and a nephew onto a small fishing boat with forty other people. There’s no turning back as the boat sails into the South China Sea.

The final chapters continue Snow’s story, telling of storms, pirates, and many months in Indonesia before receiving the news she has waited years to hear.

This novel is dedicated to “the boat people of Vietnam and the refugees who left Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.” Le wrote it as a tribute to her late mother’s bravery and selflessness.

Amy Le should be pleased with her work and know that her mother’s memory has been well served.

The author’s website is amy-m-le.com

–Bill McCloud

Fury by Joe Myles

Joe Myles wrote Fury: A Soldier’s Journey (Salt Water Media, 174 pp. $19.95, paper) to record his military experiences for his sons and grandchildren. In the book Myles describes his life as an infantryman with the Big Red One, the U.S. Army’s 1^st Infantry Division, in the Vietnam War during his 1968-69 tour of duty. He also uses the book to teach his offspring lessons from experiences far beyond ordinary life.           

For example, after witnessing several members of his platoon die in combat, Myles says that he stopped dwelling on the loss of life. “I don’t feel I had become insensitive,” he writes. “I just shut down in some way, just to be able to cope. Our wonderful minds have a way of protecting us by putting us on automatic pilot to allow us to continue to function.”

As a draftee a year out of high school, Myles rapidly adapted to the Army’s demands. He demonstrated leadership skills and facility with weapons in infantry AIT and the accelerated NCO candidate course (AKA “Shake ‘n Bake School) at Fort Benning’s Infantry School, and during his brief duty as a drill instructor at Fort Polk. After less than a year on active duty, Myles was promoted to Staff Sergeant, E-6.          

How Joe Myles accomplished that feat is a marvelous story that takes up the first half of the book.           

Old timers resented his rapid rise through the ranks and questioned his abilities, which he more than adequately repeatedly proved to them while conducting search-and-destroy missions from Lai Khe Base Camp in South Vietnam. Assigned to a brigade woefully undermanned because of casualties, Myles was chosen to lead a platoon, a position normally filled by a lieutenant. Employing tactics he learned at Fort Benning made him more than the equal of OCS graduates. When a replacement lieutenant arrived, Myles’ company commander assigned him elsewhere and Myles kept his platoon leader slot.

Eventually, a glut of new lieutenants reduced Myles to the position of platoon sergeant. Soon after, however, the company commander called on him to pick a squad and lead a difficult rescue mission, a success for which Myles received a Bronze Star.                         

His strangest encounter occurred after his point men got lost in a rainstorm. His unit then walked into a firefight with NVA troops—at their Cambodian R&R camp. “We couldn’t report the battle results,” Myles says, “because we were out of country.”

After being hit by an RPG during an attack on Hill 178, his company commander’s last words appointed Myles to lead the company, which Myles did until his men reached the plateau and a lieutenant colonel replaced him. That’s when Myles suffered a horrendous chest wound. He survived and returned to his unit with four months left to serve in Vietnam. 

Myles’ accounts of combat make interesting reading because he experienced the Vietnam War from both the level of a grunt and that of a commander. Regardless of his leadership status or the task, Myles took part in everything his men did.

Despite an offer to remain on active duty with a choice between a commission as a second lieutenant or a promotion to Sergeant First Class, E-7—which would have made him the youngest SFC in the Army—Myles decided to accepted a discharge after arriving home in July 1969.

Big Red One troops in Vietnam

His final lesson to his offspring appears in an epilogue, and compares life to a roller-coaster ride.  As Myles puts it: “When you’re at the top of your game and taking a dive toward the bottom, throw your arms up above your head and enjoy the ride, because you won’t be at the bottom long.”

The book closes with twelve pages of color photographs. Their arrangement triggered flashbacks to the book’s major episodes, making them a perfect conclusion to the memoir of an exceptional warrior. 

—Henry Zeybel

What the F*** Was That All About? By Tom Barber

What the F*** Was That All About? (136 pp. A15 Publishing. $9.99, paper; $3.99, Kindle) is the unfortunate title of a short novel by Tom Barber aimed at helping veterans deal with demons they sometimes battle for decades after their military service has ended. I really liked this book, but believe it would be better served with a different, equally creative title. This one is an attention-getter, but I fear it might cause some people to avoid the book.

Barber—who also is an artist specializing in fantasy and science fiction paintings—served as a U.S. Army medic during the Vietnam War.

The back cover tells us the story is going to be about a troubled veteran who is close to the edge of suicide until another vet shows him a better way. It also prepares us to deal with the concept of moral injury, in which a soul can be wounded when his or her basic understanding of right and wrong is blown away by war.

The main character, Eric, is a high-school art teacher in Boston who decides one day to join the Army because he is “searching for adventure” during the time of one of our most-recent wars. Looking back, he says he “turned out to be a half-decent warrior.” That phrase struck me because I think it’s how many of us regular guys feel after we’ve gone through Basic Training, advanced training, and a few months in a war zone–that we were “half-decent warriors.”

Eric receives a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. Once his military time is over, it’s not long before he has picked up three drunk-and-disorderly charges. Despite that, he gets his old teaching job back. But then flashbacks of his combat experiences begin to kick in. Eric goes through ten more years of drinking during which he loses his job and is divorced by his wife.

He reads somewhere that “if you’ve never really thought about suicide, you haven’t lived a full life.” So Eric takes this to the next step and decides that if you think about taking yourself out your life would then be complete—as long as you don’t actually do it. Talk about a Catch-22. This thinking leads him to decide to drink a beer for breakfast and visit Mitchell’s Place, a one-room veterans center, for some possible counseling.

Eric eventually begins to bond with Mitchell and conversations ensue over matters such as why conflict is so much a part of human history, the tenets of Buddhism, and even the possible role of ancient astronauts. No matter what the subject matter, Barber’s dialogue always seems natural and unforced. But these discussions fail to resolve one of Eric’s worst recurring flashbacks, which involves a child.

Before long Eric struggles to quit drinking, begins keeping a journal, and starts delivering pizza. Then come relapses. Then art therapy and meditation. The struggle to be well continues, as does the desire to get there.

Vet Center poster by Tom Barber

There are several illustrations by the author throughout the book and contact info in the back for Vet Centers throughout the U.S. This would be a great book to be placed in each one of those centers.

Tom Barber’s website is tombarberart.com

–Bill McCloud

Tiger Papa Three by Edward F. Palm

Although Edward F. Palm titles his book Tiger Papa Three: Memoir of a Combined Action Marine in Vietnam (McFarland, 213 pp. $29.95, paper; $17.99, Kindle), it includes stories from his first seventy years of life told in an existential, nonlinear narrative. The subtitle for a self-published edition of the book more closely describes it: The Illustrated Confessions of a Simple Working-Class Lad from New Castle, Delaware.                      

Ed Palm started life as the child of a selfish mother in a broken home. He overcame that, and went on to earn a doctorate in English, appointments as a dean of two colleges, a fifty-year marriage, fatherhood, and a career in the U.S. Marine Corps. At eighteen, with barely an inkling about the war in Vietnam or the realities of life, he ran away from home, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Along with many detours that recall other phases of his life, Palm includes descriptions of two distinct periods of his 1966-67 tour in the Vietnam War. During the first half the young Marine performed menial supply duties, which he loathed. So he volunteered for the Combined Action Program (CAP), a counterinsurgency plan that supplemented search-and-destroy tactics with self-help projects and better security to raise living standards for villagers—in Palm’s case, between Cam Lo and Dong Ha, ten kilometers from the DMZ.

Led by a sergeant, thirteen enlisted Marines and a Navy corpsman comprised the Tiger Papa Three CAP in which Palm served. The men worked with forty members of the Vietnamese Popular Forces, soldiers analogous to U.S. National Guardsmen. The U.S. Army offered no help or encouragement, Palm says. He labels CAP as the Marines’ “enlightened gesture of dissent” against a strategy that was “proving to be self-defeating.”

With a bow to Tim O’Brien, Palm says he tells it “the way it mostly was, which “could sometimes be fine.” His stories of fellow soldiers, combat, difficulties in working with the PFs, and attempts to win the hearts and minds of civilians provide entertaining and informative reading. His Tiger Papa Three teammates are his heroes.

When discussing life’s problems, Palm frequently finds support for his solutions by citing quotes from world-famous novelists and playwrights. He is critical of himself and analytic about his past. At the same time, he displays a restrained sense of humor. Logic, challenged by unpredictable and unexpected events, is his forte as both soldier and civilian.

Beyond reminiscences of the Vietnam War, Palm delves into common controversial aspects of life, particularly those related to women and the different forms of intercourse between the sexes. He also strives to clarify connections between politics and war.          

Ed Palm

An excellent collection of photographs, mostly shot by Palm, supplement the text.

Palm has written three other books—two about coming of age and one a very short political treatise. Anyone with even a vague interest in military matters or life in general should enjoy his insights in Tiger Papa Three.

The book’s website is edwardfpalm.homestead.com/TigerPapaThree.html

—Henry Zeybel

The Battle for Chu Moor Mountain by Fred Childs

In 2010 Fred Childs attended his first unit reunion of Charlie Company, 1/22 of the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division. At that reunion he volunteered to complete some unfinished manuscripts written by a few of the attendees about a seven-day fight the company had at Chu Moor Mountain in northern South Vietnam in April 1968.

The result is Childs’ The Battle for Chu Moor Mountain As Told by the Soldiers Who Were There (Author House, 128 pp. $14.95, paper; $3.99, Kindle), a short, intriguing, and well-constructed book. In his acknowledgments Childs credits ten of his fellow Charlie Company veterans for helping get the book assembled, written, and into print.

He begins each chapter with a copy of the S-3 Duty Officer’s Log for each day of the battle. He uses the logs to help reconstruct the battle incidents of each day. From those administratively terse, concise entries he fleshes out the story with quotes and remembrances from the survivors who were willing and able to speak all these years later. At the close of each chapter, Childs gives us the battalion S-3 Duty Officer’s Logs. He also notes entries from the 4th Infantry Division Operations Summary.

The narrative moves along smoothly, with comments and quotes from troopers on the ground and in the thick of it for the duration of the battle. Personnel loses are noted as well as actions by supporting U.S. forces. Childs provides enough good details to move the story, but not too much minutia. He includes a bit of history of the 4th Infantry Division and lists the KIAs of the encounter and the major medals awarded.

This battle, developing not long after the 1968 Tet Offensive, took place in the far northwest corner of II Corps in Kontum Province near the borders of Laos and Cambodia along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The 4th Division had been charged with interdicting goods and war materiel flowing into South Vietnam.

If you hanker for a well-done battle tale, this is your book. There is a bit of redundancy in the quoted material, but all of these men were in the same place at the same time fighting the same enemy. So there was bound to be some overlap.

All in all, this is a quick, informative read.

–Tom Werzyn

My Vietnam Education by Martin Havran

Martin Havran’s My Vietnam Education: Or How to Conduct Research Without Really Trying (131 pp. $6.06, paper; $3.99, Kindle) is a strange, compact book that includes three pages of footnotes and changing fonts. Havran dedicates the book “all those who served in Vietnam, their families and descendants.”

Departing from what most Vietnam War veterans write in their memoirs, Havran does not name the high school or college he attended and gives only fleeting mentions of his family. We pick him up during Army basic training at Ft. Dix, then follow him to AIT and NCO school before his deployment in 1969 to III Corps in South Vietnam.

This story is at once unsettling and common. We have a man in his seventies telling the story of a very young man and his introduction to the realities of war and personal combat. There are no extended battle scenes, just descriptions of the occasional skirmish, along with the day-to-day doings of a harried, overworked E-5 supply guy trying to keep his unit all together, moved, set up, resupplied, and replenished.

The author relates his story with minimal dialogue, few names of his comrades, and the barest of info on his unit and its history. We hear him tell us an Everyman’s story of going to war, coming home, moving along with a civilian life—and later the need, as his pace slows and the vision widens, to share his story.

Havran is almost refreshing in sticking to his in-country narrative. There are no riffs about the VA, about medical challenges brought about by his service, or about jobs lost and battles at home un-won.

In this self-published and self-edited book Havran comes to us as a non-professional writer, not an un-professional one. He is well spoken and writes a well-constructed story. His years as a teacher and leader shine through the text. He tells us that “only recent realization” was how much his war experiences “influenced the remainder of my life,” the reason for writing this book.

This was an enjoyable, quick, read. I suggest it could be used in high school AP English classes. Havran has no agenda; his book is simply a nice story told by an old-young man.

Havran is donating all of the book’s royalties to veteran scholarship funds.

–Tom Werzyn

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

The best literary novelists have the ability to conjure up worlds that most readers never have experienced, people them with complex, fully formed characters, and launch those characters into compelling narratives that keep you turning the pages. Elizabeth Wetmore has accomplished that rare and difficult feat in her brilliant first novel, Valentine (Harper, 320 pp. $26.99, hardcover and Kindle)

In it, Wetmore—an Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum—gives us an indelible portrait of the place where she was born and raised, the West Texas oil patch, centered on the hardscrabble town of Odessa. The action (and there’s plenty of it) begins on Valentine’s Day 1976 with the brutal rape of 14-year-old girl named Gloria Ramirez.

In the succeeding chapters Wetmore spins out the stories of seven women and girls whose lives become entwined following the arrest of the man who committed the crime. All of them—including the two main characters, Mary Rose Whitehead, a young mother who came to Gloria Ramirez’s aid, and Corrine Shephard, a recently widowed retired schoolteacher—come alive in Wetmore’s capable hands. So does the stark physical landscape of the oil patch and the day-to-day lives of the men, women, and children who live and work there.

Two of the book’s lesser but important characters are Vietnam War veterans: Gloria’s Uncle Victor, who did two tours in the war and is scraping out a living in the oil fields, and Jesse Belden, a down-on-his luck former Army tunnel rat barely surviving in Odessa. To Wetmore’s enormous credit, she does not portray them as stereotypical maladjusted Nam vets. Far from it. She gives us word portraits of both men as multidimensional human beings.

Victor is a humble, decent man who has adjusted as well as can be expected since he came home from the war. As she does with all of her characters, Wetmore beautifully illuminates the psyches of Victor and Jesse. Here, for example, is how she lets us know the main lesson Victor learned from his time in the war:

Of “all the things he learned during the war—that living to see another day is almost always a matter of stupid luck, that men who know they might die any minute can learn not to give a shit about who’s the All-Star and who’s the Mexican, or that heroism is most often small and accidental but it still means the world—the greatest lesson was this: nothing causes more suffering than vengeance.”

As for Jesse, he is not faring well in 1976. He suffers physically from hearing loss and emotionally from flashbacks to a horrific incident in a VC tunnel. That’s in addition to the vicious treatment the physically small man is subjected to by many of the denizens of the oil patch. This “small and frightened critter,” as Wetmore puts it in a particularly harrowing scene, is a simple, naïve, good man.

Wetmore even manages to include a bit of sly humor in the book, mainly in the form of corny jokes that mock the West Texas oil patch. Such as: “What the difference between a bucket of shit and Odessa? The bucket.”

In addition to Mary Rose and Corrine, the book’s third main character is an 11-year old girl named Debra Ann. The novel’s exciting and harrowing penultimate scene brings the troubled but good-hearted girl together with Corrine, Jesse, and Mary Rose in a heart-stopping encounter in the desert. It’s tour-de-force writing that would fit in a first-rate thriller. And it puts an exclamation point on this terrific novel.

The author’s website is elizabethwetmore.com

–Marc Leepson

Blaze of Light by Marcus Brotherton

Every American should know the life story of former Green Beret—and Vietnam War Medal of Honor recipient—Gary Beikirch. It’s an admirable life filled with honor, valor, service, and humility. And with severe physical and mental pain and anguish.

Gary Beikirch was born and raised in Rochester, New York. He struggled through a rocky childhood after his father deserted the family when he was in first grade. When he was twenty, Beikirch dropped out of college and joined the Army in August 1967. He volunteered for Special Forces, made it through the physically, emotionally, and intellectually vigorous SF training, and opted to become a medic.

Gary Beikirch arrived in Vietnam in July 1969. He wound up serving with a 5^th Special Forces Group A Team in a remote Montagnard village called Dak Seang about a mile from the Laotian border in the jungles of the Central Highlands.

Beikirch found his calling tending to the medical needs of Montagnard men, women, and children. Like other Special Forces medics, he treated a myriad of health conditions, from pulling teeth to delivering babies, treating tropical diseases, and removing shrapnel wounds. He bonded with—and came to love—the Montagnard people, especially a 15-year-old boy named Deo, who more or less became his bodyguard.

On April 1, 1970, an NVA force numbering in the thousands launched a surprise human-wave attack on the camp. Caught off guard, the Green Berets and Montagnard fighters (and their families), suffered huge casualties. Beikirch and the other Green Berets sprang into action, defending the camp. Not long after the battle began, as he ran into the teeth of the assault to rescue a wounded Green Beret, a shrapnel burst knocked him unconscious. When he came to, Beikirch couldn’t walk—the metal had lodged near his spinal cord.

He shook off the injury and ordered Deo to carry him back to the perimeter to continue fighting the enemy and treat the wounded. Somehow—without the use of his legs—he helped rescue wounded Americans and Montagnards and treat them in the medic shed. During that time he was shot a second time, in the side. Again, the young Green Beret was treated and Deo took him back to the fighting. Beikirch took another bullet, this time in the stomach, but he refused entreaties to get back under cover. He continued to fight, even with Deo and two other men carrying him on a litter.

Then NVA rockets started falling. Deo jumped on top of Beikirch during a barrage and paid for that selfless act with his life. Somehow, Beikirch continued to fight until he collapsed and was medevaced out. The fighting would go on for nearly a month.

Next came months operations in hospitals in Vietnam and back in the U.S.A. He had to learn to walk again. When he recovered, Beikirch asked to be sent back to Vietnam. Instead, he spent his remaining time in the Army at Fort Devens in Massachusetts. When he took his honorable discharge, Gary Beikirch enrolled in college again. That’s when life got really rough.

“The war injured me physically,” he said in a TV interview in 2019, “but it was my homecoming that destroyed me.”

Being all but shunned and scorned by antiwar college students, he dropped out and for the next few years fought what seemed a losing battle with severe PTSD. He tried self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. He tried turning to the Bible. To little avail. Beikirch wound up living in a cave in the White Mountains of New Hampshire for nearly two years trying to come to terms with the carnage he’d experienced in Vietnam and survivor guilt—even after receiving the Medal of Honor in 1973 in a ceremony at the White House.

When Beikirch met his future wife Lolly in 1975, his life began to turn around. Her love and attention (and their embrace of Christianity) eased much of the psychic burdens he wrestled with. He graduated from White Mountain Seminary in New Hampshire, and two years later earned a BA in Psychology and Sociology from the University of New Hampshire. In 1981, he received an MS in Education Counseling specializing in adolescent psychology, trauma, and PTSD, from the State University of New York at Brockport.

Gary and Lolly Beikirch in 2019

But during those years there were setbacks and backsliding. Soon after Vietnam Veterans of America was founded in 1978, Gary Beikirch joined the fledgling organization and became one of VVA’s early leaders. He helped form Chapter 20 in his hometown of Rochester, and served as its first president from 1981-84. He was elected the first president of VVA’s New York State Council in 1982, and served in that position till 1984, and also did a 1983-85 term on the VVA National Board of Directors.

In 1981, Gary Beikirch—who was running Rochester’s pioneering Veterans Outreach Center and serving as a team counselor there—joined a small group of VVA leaders including then-president Bobby Muller that made a controversial trip to Vietnam to work on POW/MIA and other issues with the former enemy.

In the summer of 1988 Beikirch began working full time as a school counselor at Greece Arcadia Middle School in his hometown. That’s when he overcame the worst of his PTSD and became a loving husband and father—and a caring mentor to countless young teenagers. He spent nearly 25 years at that job. Since his retirement in 2013 Biekirch has traveled the country speaking to students, church groups, veterans, and others about overcoming adversity through faith and what he has called “finding love and being able to experience it” and “loving others more than myself.”

Marcus Brotherton, who specializes in writing inspirational books about military men, worked closely with Gary Beikirch to put together Blaze of Light: The Inspiring True Story of Green Beret Medic Gary Biekirch, Medal of Honor Recipient (Waterbrook, 261 pp. $26). Brotherton uses much reconstructed dialogue to tell Beikirch’s story in a style that calls to mind books aimed at young-adult readers. He stresses positives, but Brotherton does not shy away from describing the many low points in Beikirch’s life.

There is a strong emphasis on religion, which is fitting giving how important becoming a Christian had in bringing Beikirch out from the depths of emotional despair.

Brotherton mentions Vietnam Veterans of America only once in Blaze of Light, in the final chapter. He provides no information about the nation’s only congressionally chartered veterans service organization that concentrates on working for Vietnam War veterans and their families—other than writing that we are “a group.”

There’s not a word in the book about Gary Beikirch’s important role in VVA’s early years on the local, state, and national levels.

–Marc Leepson

Receiving the Medal of Honor at the White House in 1973

The Long Journey Home by Craig Blackman

Focusing on the concept that “sacrifice without remembrance is meaningless,” Craig Blackman enlisted students in his advanced placement American history class at Indian River High School in Chesapeake, Virginia, to study the lives of twenty-five local men who died in the Vietnam War. Twenty-three of them were killed in action. He had the students find and interview the men’s family members and friends, research their unit records, and write the stories of their pre-war lives and military service.

Blackman has compiled the students’ findings into The Long Journey Home: The Untold Stories of Forgotten Soldiers (292 pp. $11.00 paper). 

Sound historical scholarship forms the book’s roots. Page after page overflows with notes that validate the students’ findings. A bibliography is loaded with primary sources. Several of the students overachieved on the assignment and wrote longer-than-required accounts of their subjects, including their units’ activities. Some wrote wrote about in-country situations and locations previously unknown to me.

Despite growing up close together in Chesapeake, the men had diverse backgrounds: White, black, Native American; an only child; one of thirteen children; good guys and bad actors; draftees and enlistees. There’s an almost even split between those who were in the Army and in the Marines; only one officer is profiled. Their deaths stretched from 1966-70; fourteen took place in 1968. They shared a grim commonality in military assignments: straight from training to Vietnam in the combat arms. Nine died while still in their teens.

Each man’s story reveals a distinct personality. Photographs flesh out their personalities. A few experienced a rapid and perhaps premature transition from youth to adulthood. Determination to do the right thing prevailed among them. One definitely deserves his own book.

The students learned to appreciate the sacrifices made to American values by people barely older than themselves, even as a result of questionable diplomacy. “These high school students will never be the same,” Blackman says. “Interacting with the Gold Star families forever sculpted them emotionally and intellectually.”

The biographies are both sad and joyful. They brought unexpected resolution to some family members of the deceased by memorializing the deaths beyond a name engraved on a wall.

Craig Blackman in the classroom

Blackman’s project peaked with a 2014 “special reception honoring Chesapeake citizens who made the ultimate sacrifice in the Vietnam War,” followed three days later by a Memorial Day ceremony. Relatives and friends of the men in the book attended both events.

Blackman also describes how he organized the project. In an appendix, he includes the worksheets he designed to guide his students’ research. Initially, his efforts produced spotty results, and he almost stopped the endeavor. Now he wants other educators to emulate this method for teaching American history.

—Henry Zeybel