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 1st Battalion/2th Regiment in the 1st 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
Books in Review II 