William Osgood’s Hawk Recon: Head Hunters of the A Shau Valley (Pen and Sword/Casemate, 328 pp. $32.95) is a refreshingly honest and authentic war memoir. In it, Doc Osgood recounts his 1968-69 Vietnam War tour as a combat medic in the 187th and 327th Infantry Regiments in the 101st Airborne Division, particularly as part of a Hawk Recon platoon, a unit that spent as much as 40 consecutive days and nights in the boonies.
Osgood was airborne trained, but prevented from being a Green Beret because he failed the eye test. He then volunteered for and performed the most dangerous missions with the 101st. Osgood was also a combat artist who found beauty in the unforgiving jungle and even looked at VC tunnels with an artist’s eye. His combat art appears in the book.
Osgood hated everything about the war, although he admits he felt the “high” of combat and became “bloodthirsty.” His unit was involved in accidental baby killing and he carried around an enemy human skull, which he took home after his tour ended. He considered himself a horrible medic who was inadequately trained, and relates his many medical errors. He describes his constant fears, terrors, ignorance, inexperience, and confusion in most situations and exemplifies the personal fog of war.
Although he had great respect for the enemy (“Sir Charles”), he and others consistently refer to the Vietnamese as “gooks.” He describes in detail his sexual adventures on R&R in Japan and back in basecamp in his final month. Also, he explains in disgusting detail how to defecate in the monsoon rain without getting wet. Osgood glosses over nothing and there are no euphemisms in the book. Although the book has a few grammatical and spelling errors, to his credit, Osgood tells it like it actually was.
The book is more than half over before Osgood joins Hawk Recon. He earned several medals, although probably less than he deserved, and received the coveted Combat Medic Badge. He credits the Army with teaching him “to fall asleep anytime, anywhere and anyplace,” a lesson many veterans also may have learned while in the military. He concludes that mostly the war was a “lie” and that “where the 101st goes, dead children will follow.”
The book is not always a downer. Although there was racial tension at the battalion level, Osgood says that his two RTOs were the first Black men he had ever gotten to know. “You gotta love war,” he says. “It makes us all friends in the end.”
He tells a wonderful story of a 101st aviation crew that, against orders, flew into a typhoon at night to pick up a Vietnamese woman who was in difficult labor. A healthy baby boy went back to the village the next day “after a slight adjustment to the mother’s birth canal” in a wooden ammunition box cradle that was marked “US Army 105 shells.” I wonder where that cradle and baby boy are today.
Osgood’s website is vietnamcombatart101.com
–Harvey Weiner
Books in Review II 