Elephant Ears and Bamboo Sticks by Philippe R. Hebert

Elephant Ears and Bamboo Sticks: Vietnam War Collection (Human Error Publishing, 76 pp. $15, paper) is a book of 41 poems by VVA member and U.S. Air Force Vietnam War veteran Philippe R. Hebert, based on his experiences in Southeast Asia during and after the war.

None of poems appear to have previously been published in literary journals. They are not quite written in a poetic way – not many metaphors to be found in here – but do use the format of poetry to provide information.

What follows are some passages I enjoyed reading.

From “Ideology of Race”:

There are nights

and times

when at 3AM

sitting up alone

remembering and thinking

back about 50 plus years.

There was a war,

Southeast Asia was a hot bed

and anything could be had

but peace.

Stateside there was no war

but there was no peace either.

From “As old as dirt”:

Time doesn’t matter

cause every day’s like before.

Next day, grubbing for food

old men smoke dope

opium or hash.

Old women chew betel nuts

and bitch at old men.

There is no future here

cause they’ve already

sold their daughters

to a whore house

in Saigon.

The poem. “Twaz a Good Life” includes the myth of returning troops from the Vietnam War being spat on. No details, just the generalization.

The most truly poetic lines may be these from “Mangroves”:

The Nam

dances on tip toes

through the bamboo jungle

and musty earthy smell

And these from “Jade Green Bamboo”:

I won’t go back

I can’t go back

even a week of business

I can’t go back, even 50 years later

I might never return

because I was there

Again, last night.

And, finally, my favorite poem from the collection, “Veterans Day Sale”:

Vets day sale

buy one get one free

no thanks

I was already there

no thanks…I was really really there.

The best group of poems appear in the final chapter, “You’re No Longer Here!”

–Bill McCloud

United States Marine Reconnaissance in the Vietnam War by Leo J. Daugherty III

United States Marine Reconnaissance in the Vietnam War” Ghost Soldiers and Sea Commandos, 1963-1971 (McFarland, 352 pp. $39.95, hardcover; $25.99, paper) is a deeply researched and very readable history of the highly trained U.S. Marine Recon units during virtually the entire Vietnam War. The author, Leo J. Daugherty III, is the Senior Command Historian for the U.S. Army Cadet Command at Fort Knox, Kentucky. 

Daugherty begins by reviewing the history of American military reconnaissance from 1898 until the Vietnam War, highlighting the evolution of tactics, strategy, equipment, personnel, and missions. There are excellent photos, diagrams, endnotes, a glossary, a bibliography that includes 24 memoirs, an index and many first-hand accounts from Marine Corps veterans.  

The bulk of the book chronicles the experiences of Marine recon units during the Vietnam War and includes some exciting and dramatic battle descriptions. Throughout the book, there is a continuing tension about whether those units should have been be limited to being just “the eyes and ears of the I Corps commandos,” or fighters, as well.

Four-man units were used solely for intelligence gathering, while eight-man units included a raiding and ambush function. All included a Navy corpsman. The recon units were analogous to Army LRRP’s, but had water-insertion capabilities and training and sometimes harbor-intelligence responsibilities.

While praising the effectiveness of these units for their intelligence gathering and for their fighting acumen, Daugherty is critical of many commanders’ disbelief of the units’ intelligence reports and of their reluctance to pass down that critical information to battalion commanders. 

As a prime example, he believes that substantial information about the enemy’s buildup before the 1968 Tet Offensive was obtained by the recon units, as well as by other intelligence sources, but was disregarded by commanders as unreliable. That disregard was one reason that U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were unprepared for the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive.

Moreover, human nature came to fore. Professional and personal jealousies caused many of the recon Marines to be reassigned to other units–mainly because some of the brass did not want “an elite within an elite.”

The book contains some interesting facts, including that the to avoid being detected, the Recon Marines made sure they had no bowel movements during their six days out in the field. They felt they could smell the enemy, so why not the reverse? One operation was in the “Leech Valley” near Da Nang, as if one place in South Vietnam location could have more leeches than every other one. It must have been a particularly horrible place.

A 3rd Recon Battalion company under the command of 2^nd Lt. Jim Capers, 1st row, right, in 1967.

The enemy called the recon units “ghost soldiers” because of their ability to be undetected when out on operations. They even placed a bounty on their heads.

Air-patrolling I Corps to gain intelligence was relatively ineffective because of bad weather, difficult terrain, and vegetation (mainly triple-canopy jungle). One wonders how modern technology, particularly drones and satellite imagery might have changed the boots-on-the- ground need for these units in Vietnam and how that technology will be will be used in wars today and in the future. 

As we learned after the Vietnam War, you shouldn’t fight a war with the tactics, strategy, and equipment of a prior war.

–Harvey Weiner

Hired Killer by W. James Whittaker, Jr.

W. James Whittaker, Jr.’s Vietnam War memoir, Hired Killer: A War Story (Bookbaby, 96 pp., $20, paper) contains some intriguing chapter titles: “Into the Heart of Darkness,” “Finding Kurtz,” and “The Little White Pill.”

The book begins in late 1967 when, as a young man with a college degree and an Army commission as a 2^nd Lieutenant, Jim Whittaker was assigned to the Infantry. “It was the peak of the war,” Whittaker writes. “Books have been written and classes taught about that pivotal [time] in American history. Some of the events nearly brought our country to its knees. It was, however, the never-ending war in Vietnam that tore us apart more than anything else.”

Whittabker arrived in-country at Cam Ranh Bay, then flew to An Khê, where he was issued a Colt .45 semiautomatic sidearm and an M-16. His next stop was Quản Lợi Base Camp where the young LT felt as though he had gone “out into the bush.”

Sometimes known as “Rocket City,” Quản Lợi, not far from the Cambodian border, was the headquarters of the 3^rd Brigade of the 1^st Air Cavalry Division. At one point, the “swirling clouds of red dust” being kicked up by helicopters landing and taking off, Whittaker says, created “a surreal feeling that I had been transported to an alien planet.” His reaction was: “What had I gotten myself into?”

Later, on a helicopter approaching LZ Sue, Whittaker found himself wishing he’d joined the Navy when he was put in charge of a platoon that would vary in size from 22-35 men, 80 percent of them draftees. It didn’t take him long to discover he just might not be taking part in a “good war” like the one in which his father fought. He soon began outwardly questioning military authority.

Jim Whittaker does the best job I’ve read of seamlessly explaining the meanings of Vietnam War military terms he uses throughout the book. He also tells his story well in a short, compact fashion, while finding a way to pack in a ton of information.

He shows great discipline in keeping the story to a small number of pages. That may actually encourage more people to read it. I hope so, because Hired Killer deserves to be read.  

For ordering info, email jimwhit3@yahoo.com

–Bill McCloud

3003 Days of Mike & Me by Martha Voutas Donegan

As opposed to the message in the song and movie, “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” Martha Voutas Donegan’s 3003 Days of Mike & Me and the Wars Between Us, (1495 Books, 372 pp. $21.99, paper: $2.99 Kindle) shows that love can also be a many-splintered thing.

The book tells the story of her relationship with Michael Creamer, a Vietnam War veteran she knew from high school, which initially is many-splendored. But as the couple’s story progresses, a lot of sadness darkens the happy times.

Mike Creamer enlisted in the Army in 1969 to fight in the war in Vietnam. At about the same time, Martha Donegan joined a few college groups who were protesting the war. After Basic Training, Creamer became a field medic with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam and received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star.

Creamer left the Army, but re-enlisted a few years later. During his second enlistment, he served with the 101st Airborne Division attached to the 187th Infantry Brigade. He was named that division’s Soldier of the Year in 1985.

After college, Donegan began her career in the New York fashion industry creating brands and working on promotional designs and marketing. But, bothered by the treatment Vietnam War veterans received after coming home—and drawn by Vietnam Veterans of America’s Founding Principle: “Never Again Will One Generation of Veterans Abandon Another”—she set out to search for and interview Vietnam veterans, and found Mike Creamer.

The book follows the couple during the 3,003 days (8-plus years) of their rollercoaster-ride relationship. Although they showed a lot of respect for each another, relationships based on dependencies tend to be fragile and become splintered, as theirs did.

For the most part, I found the book to be a hodgepodge of Donegan’s thoughts, worries, and suppositions. She felt Creamer was her soulmate, but I came away feeling that they looked at one another more like vehicles to satisfy each other’s needs.

If you are emotionally romantic, you will love 3003 Days of Mike & Me.

–Bob Wartman

Army Combat Medics in the Vietnam War by Harry Spiller

Army Combat Medics in the Vietnam War: Nine Personal Accounts (McFarland, 185 pp., $29.95, paper; $19.99, Kindle) is comprised the stories of men who served in I Corps from 1967-1971. Since each medic’s account is written by the medic himself, there is a different voice, a different perspective, and a different experience in each story. 

Some have humorous elements; some have critical elements. All have tragic elements, but all exemplify the courage and commitment of these young men, almost all of whom qualified for the Combat Medic Badge, which is awarded to medics who perform their duties under fire.

Since the stories appear unedited, the work of Harry Spiller—a Marine who served two Vietnam War tours and is the author of many books about the military—might have been limited to finding the medics and gathering and guiding their stories.

The stories have some common threads of interest, including the fact that most of the medics felt that their medical training at Ft. Sam Houston was inadequate. It was “sorely lacking in preparing us for the rigors of combat,” one man said. “Training was for what happened in Korea instead of Vietnam.”

The men uniformly praised good leaders and criticized bad ones, including an unidentified battalion commander who put in for and received a Silver Star, because during an attack he foolishly tried to save his personal latrine.  Another medic refused to write up a captain for a Purple Heart for a splinter in his butt sustained during a mortar attack.  (This reviewer had no love in Vietnam for an officer who received a Purple Heart after stepping on the business end of a rake on the ground, which hit him in the head as he ran for cover during a mortar attack.)

Each story ends with the medic briefly telling what happened to him after the war. Many had late PTSD. Some sought friendship and comfort at unit reunions. Almost all felt guilty they had not done enough in Vietnam. One medic, Leo Flory, wrote a full-length war memoir, 101st Airborne Combat Medic, which I reviewed on these pages.

This book is important reading in that it makes clear that these 19- and 20-year-olds—many of whose lives were unpromising up to their Vietnam War service—came from a variety of backgrounds and states, rose to the occasions. and became competent, unselfish, and heroic medics. 

Spiller, who wrote a book similar about Vietnam War Navy corpsmen, notes that, if treated in the field, a wounded soldier had an 85 percent chance of survival. How many lives must combat medics have saved? Some 1,100 medics were killed in Vietnam and 19 received the Medal of Honor, eight of them posthumously.  

I recommend this book, which tells the stories of nine combat medics who survived.

–Harvey Weiner

Letters Home by George Berg

First-time author George Berg’s Letters Home: Reflections of a Marine Rifleman (Prairie Lights Books, 216 pp. $25, paper) is a well-developed and presented Vietnam War memoir. In it, Berg concentrates on his Marine Corps experiences from his days during Boot Camp in San Diego and AIT at Camp Pendleton to his assignment with the 1^st Battalion/2th Regiment in the 1^st Marine Division in Vietnam.

“Person for person, possibly the most dangerous group on the planet is the United States Marine Corps,” he writes, “heavily armed, well trained, motivated, psychotic teenagers. The Marine Corps is the perfect amalgam of vicious street gang and college fraternity…a unique warrior cult.”

Berg served a truncated tour in-country from April to August 1968 when he was wounded upon entering an active minefield. His description of the carnage and human destruction he experienced in the war is lucid and well told. His chronicling of his recuperation and return to The World a wounded Marine war veteran is among the most introspective—yet matter-of-fact—accounts I have read.

Berg, as the title indicates, includes full-page reproductions of his letters home to family and friends. As the story moves along, the letters are liberally interspersed to support the surrounding narrative. Berg’s last chapter, “A New Life Starts,” is as worthy an Epilogue as any I’ve seen in recent years.

This is a well-planned, edited, and executed book. We need to hear the rest of this story, and more, from George Berg.

–Tom Werzyn

Ridgetown by Jim Tindle

Ridgetown (Oxford Book Writers, 427 pp. $19.99, hardcover; $14.99, paper; $2.99, Kindle), by Vietnam War veteran Jim Tindle, is a fast-moving thriller about one man’s efforts to stop a domestic fringe group hell-bent on bringing down the government.

Tindle’s main character, Arsen Arsen, a man with a double name, is a CIA contract assassin. His background makes him perfect for the job. His parents are dead and he has no siblings. He spent four years in Army Special Forces, much of that in Afghanistan, and then two years in private security.

For the past three years he’s been working for his mysterious boss, Nils, whom he rarely meets in person. That work has involved fighting arms dealers and drug smugglers, and tracking down members of the dangerous MS-13 gang. His job is basically to eliminate “the worst of the worst.”

Arsen Arsen is asked to investigate the post-January 6 militia movement. It’s a movement bringing together extremely violent anti-government people, pro-2^nd Amendment individuals, white nationalist groups, as well as veterans and a few lone wolves. The targets seem to be state capitols and federal government sites.

The most recent serious threat appears to be a group that has formed near Blue Ridge, Georgia. Their goal is to develop small units in many states and then carry out a guerilla strategy “like the Viet Cong used” in Vietnam. The leaders are also familiar with the Taliban’s successful guerilla activities, as well as the methods used by two snipers in the Washington, D.C., area who held the populace in fear for nearly a month in 2002. In addition, they admire tactics being used in Ukraine to hold back invading Russian forces.

Arsen is tasked with infiltrating this group and bringing their efforts to a halt before they can get too far underway. A Vietnam War veteran plays a small but important role in the story.

There are tons of books like this being written nowadays. This is one of the better ones.  

–Bill McCloud

The War You’ve Always Wanted by Mike McLaughlin

At one point in Mike McLaughlin’s captivating novel The War You’ve Always Wanted (Koehler Books, 252 pp. $26.95, hardcover; $18.95, paper; $7.49, e book) the  protagonist, the ever-thoughtful young Army Sgt. Pat Dolan finds a piece of a map holding up the wobbly end of a table at the newsroom he’s been assigned to as war correspondent.

After gazing at it, he realizes that the map represents some unidentifiable memory of the war, as “[original] symbols lingered around the edges like bad memories” with an effect he describes as “haunting.” Dolan is forced eventually to conclude that, when it came to the map as a witness to a moment in the Vietnam War, “determining a winner was impossible.”

This ineffable quality is emblematic of the novel as a whole, as we follow Dolan through his enlistment in 1971 as the war is winding down and Americans are being shipped out of Vietnam, to his position as an Army journalist whose mission is to sell the South Vietnamese on Vietnamization, essentially, the war sans American troops.

Dolan initially plunges into the war with fanciful expectations drawn from his father’s medals gained from taking part in the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach in World War II. From there, McLaughlin wisely gives us a first-person account of the elder Dolan’s own experience, a horror he describes as “too much to comprehend,” but which he berates himself for not conveying fully enough for his son to avoid what he went through.

Ultimately, however, Pat Dolan’s path into the Vietnam War reflects less the patriotic triumph or the stygian horror of his father’s experience than a blurred and frustrating stasis. It’s a confounding moral mess that seems to always hurt the ones most vulnerable and, while not quite disillusioning, does a lot to deepen and trouble Dolan’s sense of self, duty, and country.

McLaughlin has written a novel that reflects a lot of the popular culture surrounding the Vietnam War. He writes scenes, for example, that reflect the oppressive calm of “Apocalypse Now,” as well as the grating hurry up and wait quality of Persian Gulf War film, “Jarhead.”

Mike McLaughlin

But where McLaughlin shines most is through the voice he gives Dolan. He writes in third person, but in the classic Saul Bellow indirect third person that grants readers insights into the wit, humor, and disappointment of heroes as they go through their tasks. Like Bellow’s fictional Augie March, Pat Dolan’s journey is not a happy one. That said, when asked by a South Vietnamese soup vendor if he, too, is an optimist, the reader would be hard pressed to guess Dolan’s answer.

Mike McLaughlin has created a marvelous work of war and disillusion, of patriotic fervor – capitalist and communist alike – that cools to confusion and a will to simply get to the next day. The novel shines in its evocation of the war because it evokes a set of emotions as well, a series of questions and assurances we continue to ask ourselves today.

Dolan is asked at the beginning and end of the book what he expects now that he’s been given the war he’s always wanted, the danger, death, adventure and risk that childhood fantasy demand. Doing so, McLaughlin forces readers to ask the same questio, and his brilliant touch is that he refuses to give us a clear answer.

–Trevor Strunk

Achilles Heel by Mon Cochran

Mon Cochran’s very readable memoir, Achilles Heel: A Vietnam Memoir (Eelman’s Press, 348 pp. $25, paper), written almost 60 years after the author’s service in the Vietnam War, is mainly focused on two cousins of privilege who grew up together and were best friends and best man at the other’s wedding.

Both joined the Marine Corps after college, and served in the Vietnam War, but at different times. One survived and the other did not. The survivor, the author, has spent a part of the rest of his life trying to come to terms with this fact, with survivor’s guilt and with PTSD.

Cochran, a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America, and his cousin, Bing Emerson, are of distinguished Massachusetts colonial lineage. The author’s mother was a Cabot, one of Boston’s old-line families. Emerson was a direct descendant of the famed philosopher and abolitionist Ralph Waldo Emerson. The cousins attended elite private schools and Harvard College, Class of 1964. (Full disclosure: I was in the same Harvard class, but never met them at Harvard or thereafter.)

Only about a third of the book covers the Vietnam War, but Cochran’s wartime experiences permeate the entire memoir. permeates the entire memoir. After two summers of the Platoon Leaders Course and six months of Quantico training, Cochran was assigned to Marine intelligence and expected to spend his remaining time in the service in Southern California with his wife.

However, the Vietnam War intervened and his unit, Marine Aircraft Group 36, was sent to Vietnam in August 1965. Cochran was the only non-flyer officer in his helicopter unit. His 13 months in I Corps was comprised of taking command of a rifle company for nighttime defense, working as a landing zone coordinator for extractions, many of which were hot, and eventually doing intelligence work. He received several Air Medals.

After the war Cochran tell us, he shut down emotionally and became an antiwar activist. He
went on to a distinguished academic career, which he chronicles in detail, after earning a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Michigan and became a professor of early child development at Cornell. Cochran was considered one of the world’s leading experts in his field and has written several studies and books on the subject.

The book’s defining moment comes when he has returned from Vietnam and meets his cousin, who had just completed Marine flight training, and asks him “Why are we fighting in Vietnam?” Cochra responds, “to stop the spread of communism.” That personally dishonest response haunts Cochran thereafter, particularly after Emerson’s helicopter is shot down in Vietnam and he is killed.

Cochran suffers guilt, hypervigilance, and war-related nightmares. His PTSD manifests
itself particularly in response to each subsequent American war. His remedies are alcohol abuse, annual fishing trips, infidelity, and therapy. Writing the memoir perhaps has ha had a cathartic effect.

Cochran in-country

In general, privileged Americans avoided serving in the Vietnam War. That, however, does not apply to the 192 members of the 1,200 student Harvard Class of 1964 who served in the military, including scores who went to Vietnam.

About 12 percent of draft-eligible males served in the military during the Vietnam War, compared to 16 percent of the author’s and his cousin’s Harvard class.

The books contains excellent photographs. However, there is no index or glossary. Nonetheless, I highly recommend Achilles Heel, which is almost as reminiscent of a Greek tragedy as it is of the Greek myth embodied in its title.

The author’s website is https://moncochran.com/

—Harvey Weiner