Well-written Vietnam War fiction almost always borders on nonfiction. The parlance, the slang, and the idioms that emerged from America’s second-longest war are embedded deeply in the dialogue and the action. That is especially true with a novel written by a veteran who was there.
Barry Levy, a Canadian, did not serve in the military. But that hardly matters in his new novel, The War Machine (Double Dagger Books, 263 pp. $19.99, paper; $7.99, Kindle). In the book, Levy takes readers on a literary ride as realistic as the Vietnam War action in the movie, Platoon, and as indicative of the world back home as in The Deer Hunter.
The War Machine’s main character, David “Kick” Tacker, travels in his mind between his tours in Vietnam, and 1988, which finds him in Vancouver, British Columbia, attempting to make sense of his past and present.
“When Kick opens his eyes, he’s looking down at his cowboy boots, and notices they need a good shine,” Levy writes. “But there’s something weird about the floor. It looks runny. On the other side of the stall door, he sees the tiny bare feet of a child. He opens the door and finds the young Vietnamese girl he saw a few days ago. He’s been seeing her off and on for years. One of his boots is on her shoeshine box.”
Soon Kick is in Dusty’s Bar, remembering his first day in-country out loud for Kelly O’Leary, a Vancouver newspaper reporter. She only has an inkling about Canada’s connection to the Vietnam War until she interviews Kick and he fills her in on the particular horror of his tour of duty. Kick’s battle rattle makes readers feel as if they are in the thick of things in the war.
At the end of the book, Kelly O’Leary is before ABC-TV news cameras face to face with famed anchorman David Brinkley, telling his American audience–and the world–that to Canadians’ participation in the Vietnam War was far more than welcoming draft dodgers across the 49th Parallel.
The War Machine would be a fascinating addition to the bookshelves of Vietnam War veterans and students of the war, Canadians, and anyone else who does not know how deep Canada’s connection to the American War in South Vietnam really was.
Legacy of Lies: A John Moore Mystery (Hellgate Press, 375 pp. $14.95, paper; $2.99, Kindle) is the third novel in Ed Marohn’s exciting CIA-thriller series. These are not stories of a CIA analyst sitting in his office in Langley, Virginia. John Moore is a field agent who is consistently in danger as he plies his trade around the world.
Moore likes to stay busy to keep his mind off of his experiences in Vietnam during the war where he served as an Army infantry Captain and the loss of his wife to cancer. Ed Marohn, a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America, served in Vietnam with the 25th Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division, and has taught military history at the University of Nevada. His previous titles in the series are Legacy of War and Legacy of Evil.
John Moore says his CIA boss had “a knack for placing me in difficult and dangerous situations because of my military combat experience.” His boss, for his part, tells him, “I have no other agent that I trust more. You have something that outshines me and everyone I have ever worked with—your honesty and ethics.”
Moore is sent to Nairobi, Kenya, in 2003 to meet a delegation from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. A business deal may be in the works between China and Kenya that could be of interest to the U.S and to Vietnam. Before long, a kidnapping takes place and all hell breaks loose.
While in Kenya Moore experiences more than one reminder of his time in the Vietnam War. He takes daily anti-malaria pills, for one thing, remembering how important they were when he was in Vietnam. When he eats a Kenyan meal it reminds him of the times that he had shared meals with Montagnards. He thinks of the Viet Cong when he sees Africans wearing sandals made from old tire treads. At one point, walking in darkness, he recalls the sounds and smells during a similar situation in Vietnam. For Moore, “the mental stress from the Vietnam War never seemed to go away.”
When he learns that he may need to be wary of fellow agents, he sleeps with his Sig Sauer P229 pistol strapped to a holster on his waist. He will shoot people. He will get shot. He will jump into a rolling Cessna Caravan as it’s about to take off.
This action-packed thriller takes place over a two-week period. Once you begin, it won’t take you anywhere near that long to read it. Legacy of Lies is another winner from Ed Marohn.
The old Monty Python line, “And now for something completely different,” would certainly fit Bill Lynch’s novel, Mekong Belle: Love’s Impossible Choice (Hellgate Press, 328 pp. $17.95, paper; $5.99, Kindle).
The book tells the story of a fictional Brown Water Navy ship that was geared-up and crewed-up to travel the Mekong River during the war in Vietnam to put on musical entertainment to provide a little cheer to the troops. You may need to read that description again before it sets in, but I’m here to tell you it works.
Lynch, a journalist who served as a Navy officer on a small ship in the Mekong in Vietnam in 1967-68, admits that his novel borders on fantasy so you have to have the right mind-set to get the most enjoyment from it. I, for one, had no problem being drawn into this slightly off-kilter love story.
Ensign Rob Allen is surprised when, in 1967, he’s assigned to a World War II-era LST and told to bring his guitar. He quickly realizes that every member of the crew has been assigned to the ship because they have musical ability. Along with its regular supply mission, the ship is the only one in the Navy also designated to produce a lavish musical program that they regularly perform for the troops. In other words, to transform the vessel into a real showboat.
The ship’s home port would be at Vũng Tàu, southeast of Saigon, and one of the safest areas in South Vietnam during the war. It was as though the city “existed on two planes,” Lynch writes, “one ancient, another a fading shadow of French occupation, neither acknowledging the civil war fought with modern weapons just beyond the horizon.”
Bill Lynch
When Allen first goes ashore in Vũng Tàu he feels as though the city has an “other-worldly” vibe, and he almost expects the people he meets to break out in song. Meanwhile, the LST quickly becomes “the most unusual ship with the most uniquely talented crew in the Navy.”
Bill Lynch has written a mainly joyful novel with expressions of love throughout: love for the music of the era and its antecedents, love for the people of South Vietnam, love for the ship, love for the Navy. This book was truly something different and I enjoyed every word of it. The ending was immensely satisfying.
Reviewer’s note: I spent my entire twelve months in Vietnam on the Army airbase at Vũng Tàu in 1968 and 1969. My many enjoyable personal dealings and relationships with the Vietnamese people came flooding back to me as I read this novel.
Reviewer’s note II: It’s kind of funny how often the spelling of Vũng Tàu switches throughout the book from “Vung Tau” to “Vung Tao.” It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book, but happened often enough that I had to mention it.
It was a pleasure to discover that L.V. Sage had completed her massive 2,000-page trilogy of fictional American social history as seen through the eyes of the members of a California motorcycle club. Red, White & Blues, Book Three (685 pp. $20.97, paperback; $2.99, Kindle) picks up the story in 1995 and carries it to the changing of the century.
This series has been looked upon favorably by The VVA Veteran, since 2013 when the late David Willson referred to Book One as “a giant accomplishment.” I then had the privilege of enthusiastically reviewing Book Two in 2020. I’m happy to report that the new book shows no drop-off.
Book One began in 1965, spending a great deal of time on the war in Vietnam and its effect on the nation as well as on some of the bikers’ families. Book Three begins in 1995. Stresses within the Souls of Liberty motorcycle club are threatening to divide the membership while bikers deal with their own family issues.
If this wasn’t enough, the late 1990s included societal challenges such as the new Internet, no-smoking laws in bars, the O.J. Simpson trial, Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and the hate-crime death of college student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.
The older club members favor reducing relations with a drug-selling Mexican gang that it’s providing protection for. Younger members want to continue the relationship because of the large amount of cash it brings to the club. Meanwhile, they engage in efforts to improve the club’s image. The Souls of Liberty has a friendly relationship with a rival club, Foxtrot Yankee. Both have members who are Vietnam War veterans. In fact, Sage describes the leader of the Foxtrot Yankees as still carrying “much shame and guilt from his experiences in Vietnam.”
While there are, appropriately, fewer mentions of the Vietnam War in this book, the war and its legacy are constantly beneath the surface. When a young man whose father was killed in Vietnam receives permission to attend a reunion of his father’s buddies, for example, his mom tells him, “I hated that damn war. I hated that your Dad went. He didn’t belong there.”
Another young man, during an argument with his father, says, “Dad, you’ve never wanted to put yourself out on the line for someone else.” His dad responds: “What the fuck do you think I did in Vietnam, son?” Later, a woman says that her husband, after returning from Vietnam, experienced periods when it was difficult to perform sexually because of the “emotional distress” he experienced after coming home home.
What L.V. Sage does so well, in the company of very few other writers, is present a fictional world with a huge number of distinctive characters, keeping each one identifiably separate and making each one someone of interest.
The provocatively titled Bikini Beach (340 pp. Kidder Mountain Publishing, $17.95, paper; $4.99, Kindle) is a raucous novel that does quite a good job of describing a wide variety of Vietnam War experiences.
In 1967 Spec.5 Mack Makinen is a UH-1 Huey crew chief in an Army helicopter company. The small-town guy from New Hampshire considers himself to be fighting in a “bullshit war…in godforsaken, God-forgotten, Vietnam.” The nose art on some of the helicopters includes illustrations of the Little Annie Fanny character from Playboy magazine so the flight line becomes known as Bikini Beach.
We read about what the men refer to as their daily adventures and our reading is often rewarded with descriptions such as lifting off from a hot LZ, in which Maki writes, “We took off like a homesick angel.”
There are concerns about territory taken with losses of American troops, only to have it abandoned just hours later. There’s friendly bickering among the crews of the Hueys and the larger Chinooks, “like cousins at family reunions.” There are Dear John letters.
Some of the missions last as long as twelve hours. Mack’s attitude is not improving as we read: “We finished dumping our last load to a little firebase on top of some give-a-shit hill.” Some missions are officially secret; others deal with rescuing downed flight crews and carrying Vietnamese “hookers” to private parties. Mack tries to always sit on the ship’s left side because, he tells us, “rotor blades go right in a crash.”
There’s an ironic moment after a crash when Mack realizes that “One bullet worth about 25 cents just caused a $300,000 helicopter to go down.” That’s followed by the “sadness” of having to destroy a crashed helicopter and its contents to prevent it from falling into the enemy’s hands.” Two hand grenades do the job.
After coming home, the sound of a Huey overhead can cause Mack to feel “something dark starting to build within me.” He leaves us all with something to think about, saying: “I honestly believe we went to change Vietnam, but Vietnam changed America.”
Bikini Beach is Butch Maki’s debut novel and is based on his experiences with the 170th Assault Helicopter Company based at Pleiku. Many fiction writers do a lot of research and I’m sure Maki did as well, but his fireside-style of telling his story leaves no doubt that he was really there.
If Maki didn’t lay out all the noteworthy things that happened to him in Vietnam in this book, I’d be curious to see what he comes up with in his next one.
Editor’s note: Books in Review II super contributor Bill McCloud served in the Vietnam War from March 1968 to March 1969 as flight operations coordinator with the 147th Assault Support Helicopter Company in Vũng Tàu
Ken Harper, a Vietnam War veteran, wrote two novels prior to his death in 2018. His wife Ingrid was determined to get them published. After reading and reviewing his first one in 2020, the mostly light-hearted, humorous There It Is, I greatly looked forward to the second novel. It did not disappoint.
In Big Shorty (Luminare Press, 366 pp. $15.95, paper; $5.99, Kindle), Ken Harper tells the story of Winston Saddlesworth from his preteen years until his return from Vietnam. As a young boy, Winston spent part of the year with his grandmother on her farm outside Jacksonville, Florida.
This literary novel, written by a man who attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, includes great descriptive writing, such as: “Sometimes I would just sit under a pecan tree and lean back and listen to the silence give way to a book of sounds as the wind blew softly.”
It was during the time when he was living with his grandmother that Winston learned to swim, to shoot, and to love the great outdoors. As his shooting skills improved, he made regular trips to the woods to clear out timber rattlesnakes using a shotgun and two handguns.
Once Winston turns eighteen, things really start hopping. His skill with firearms leads to a job running numbers for the mob. Winston then joins the Army and volunteers for OCS and Ranger school. He is sent on an “off the record” special mission to track down and possibly eliminate the Latin America guerilla leader Che Guevara. Then comes a year in Vietnamese-language school.
The next thing he knows, Winston is tracking North Vietnamese Army troops along the Ho Chi Minh Trail with a Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol. He spends forty-eight weeks in the field during his tour of duty, and is seriously wounded in an encounter he believes was a setup. Winston recovers, and gets out of the Army believing he lost his soul in Vietnam.
He plans to enroll in school, while regularly meeting with support groups to help with anger issues. His grandmother, Big Shorty, plans to sell her house and land so Winston makes a final bid to rid the land of as many rattlers as he can—this time with a flamethrower.
Unless another one turns up someday, it looks like Ken Harper left behind only two novels. Both should be on your reading list.
In Tom Doughty’s short but powerful novella, Childe Roland (102 pp. Stillwater River Publications $14, paper), protagonist Guy Burrows receives a letter from his draft board. When his mom asks what he’s going to do, he replies, “Die in Vietnam.” His job that day had left Guy covered in dried chicken waste. In some sort of foreshadowing, he takes a shower to “wash off the chicken shit.”
Tom Doughty served for three years in the U.S. Air Force in the 1970s. During the first Gulf War he enlisted in the Army National Guard, then transferred to the Air Guard and served for a total of 19 years.
In his novel, Burrows decides to enlist in the Air Force ahead of the draft sensing, Doughy writes, “that he was part of a continuum. Somewhere in the past, a man just like him had stared at midnight snow before an unknown, barren future and had been mesmerized by it, just as sometime in the future, a man just like him would do it again.”
After basic training he becomes a security guard at the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs. Upon landing in Colorado, in an example of a young man’s fantasy come true, a flight attendant “with light blond hair and laughing blue eyes” suggests they go out that night. But Burrows mumbles and stumbles so long “in panic” that she eventually walks away.
Burrows works a mile below the earth’s surface and spents most of his waking time in darkness. He fills much of his spare time taking oceanography and astronomy correspondence courses. His favorite place on the base is the library. He also takes walks through the local college campus “looking at women.” He enjoys reading poetry and says his favorite poet is Robert Browning, who wrote “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” which Burrows describes as being about “a knight who has to make a choice.”
It’s now early 1969 and Burrows knows he’s about to receive orders for Thailand or Vietnam. He hopes it would be the former rather than Vietnam, which would be “like a death sentence.”
Doughty’s short book, a true pleasure to read, seems to be a consideration of the choices that fate makes for us all. His website is https://tomdoughtyauthor.com/
The July/August 1992 VVA Veteran’s “Arts of War” column led off with the big news that Vietnam War Marine Corps Lt. Lew Puller had received a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant war memoir, Fortunate Son. The column’s Books section led off with a short review of a novella that told a spooky story about a Vietnam War tunnel rat, a short-statured G.I. who volunteered to ferret out Viet Cong cadres in their underground havens.
The column’s second review dealt with a work of fiction with a similar theme. I started that short review with these words: “Michael Connelly, a crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times, uses an ex-tunnel rat as his main character in The Black Echo, a very efficient and exciting first novel that came out in January.” I went on to praise Connelly’s depiction of his main character, Harry Bosch, “an iconoclastic LAPD detective who gets in trouble because he cannot help talking back to his superiors.”
After briefly summarizing the plot, which involved investigating the murder of a Vietnam War tunnel rat buddy, I quoted some evocative lines from Bosch about what it was like being in the tunnels, and concluded that Connelly had produced “an intelligent mystery” novel, and that it was a “great read and a good book in which to immerse oneself this summer.”
I knew I really liked the book—and the Harry Bosch character. But I had no idea that Connelly would go on to write a string of thrilling (and best-selling) novels almost every year for the next 31 years. Nor that I would read and review all 24 of his Harry Bosch novels, plus Connelly’s four detective/courtroom thrillers co-starring Harry and his half-brother Mickey Haller, aka the “Lincoln Lawyer,” and four novels starring Bosch and LAPD Detective Renée Ballard. (See list below).
Nor that in December 2023 I would be reviewing Connelly’s 38th novel, Resurrection Walk (Little, Brown, 416 pp. $30, hardcover; $14.99, Kindle).*
Over these three decades I have continued to be amazed and entertained by Michael Connelly’s taut writing, his careening, clever plots, and by Harry Bosch himself. As I’ve written before, Connelly has made Bosch come alive for me in all of his complexity. The guy went through a rough childhood and a mentally scarring Vietnam War tour of duty, but evolved into one tough, smart detective who does not rest until he brings evil doers (nearly all of them murderers) to justice.
As the years have gone by, the novels only occasionally mention Harry’s service in the Vietnam War. But those usually short references illustrate the fact that even though Bosch is not obsessed by what happened to him in the war, his experiences in 1969-70 in Vietnam forever remain part of his life.
I was more than mildly concerned about Harry a year ago after finishing the previous Bosch-Ballard novel, the brilliant, best-selling Desert Star. In this one, Bosch, who had recently retired after 40 years as a cop, helped LAPD robbery/homicide detective Renée Ballard solve two heinous cold case murders. It’s another plot-twisting, page turner set mostly in Los Angeles in which Harry uses his brains, experience, and an obsessively risky MO to solve the cold cases.
What bothered me happened near the end of the story, when Bosch underwent treatment for what appeared to be life-threatening bone cancer. I fretted that Connelly might be paving the way for Harry’s demise.
Then after Bill McCloud reported on our Arts of War page that in a recent webcast Connelly said that after Desert Star came out, he realized he shouldn’t have put Bosch in such mortal health danger. Phew! I then picked up the fast-moving, compelling Resurrection Walk, and breathed a sigh of relief as I read in the first few pages that even though Harry is still undergoing treatment at UCLA Medical Center, things are looking good on the health front.
You could even say that Michael Connelly has resurrected Harry Bosch in Resurrection Walk.
That said, Harry’s health is a relatively minor side plot in the book. The main one centers on a cold case Harry revives when he comes to believe that a woman imprisoned for killing her police officer husband was framed by—well, no spoilers here. Harry talks Haller into taking the case and does yeoman work leading the investigation that culminates in an extended trial that closes the book.
Haller tells Harry that his goal is to conjure up a “resurrection walk,” which he explains is “when the manacles come off and the last metal doors slide open like the gates of heaven, and a man or woman declared innocent walks into the waiting arms of family resurrected in life and the law.”
Connelly
As he has in recent Bosch books, Connelly includes a few references to Harry’s Vietnam War days. In making a point about Harry’s troubled youth in and out of detention centers, for example, he writes:
“He was so slightly built as a teenager that a few years later he was put on an Army tunnel crew in Vietnam. His size was an advantage while moving through the dark and narrow tunnels used by the Viet Cong. But it had made him an easy target in juvenile detention.”
Later, we learn that Harry has a “rat tat on his arm,” evidently in honor of what he did in the war, and that he still has dreams “of himself as a younger man, moving through a tunnel with a dying flashlight.”
Harry Bosch is a retired senior citizen in 2023. At times, as Connelly puts it, he feels “tired and old.” I prefer to think of him as alive and well, and look forward to reading many more Michael Connelly Harry Bosch novels.
*A version of this review will appear in Books in Review in the January/February 2024 print edition and the online version at www.vvaveteran.org
“Novels are better indexes of the temper of their time than any scholarly history,” according to The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. Michael Lund has taken that approach to history with five novels about a mid-American family that stretch from 1915 to 2015. His latest, Route 66 Déjà Vu: We Graduated in 1965 and Were Drafted (Glorybound, 239 pp. $14.95, paper; $3.99, Kindle), looks back to the 1950s and 60s through the lens of main character Curtis Lindbloom who is organizing a 50th high school reunion in Fairfield, Missouri, near the turn of the 21st century.
The book examines local, national, and international mid-twentieth-century problems that still exist today. Naturally, Lund writes about the Vietnam War. He served in-country as an Army correspondent in 1970-71. He holds a PhD in English, is a Professor Emeritus at Longwood University in Virginia, a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America, and has written many books in addition to the ones in his Route 66 series.
Lindbloom’s background parallel’s Lund’s. The references to the Vietnam War and its aftermath in Route 66 Déjà Vu typically breeze over complex problems with single sentences such as “The group nodded, aware of the high number of alcoholics among veterans” and “When he came back, he didn’t want to live like everybody else, didn’t see any point in it.”
The book broadens Lindbook’s wartime perspective with stories told by friends who were soldiers and nurses. Similarly, the dialogue often sounds as if each pronouncement is a lesson about our nation’s present or past behavior. Route 66 Déjà Vu‘s final wrap is perfect: A guy who dodged the draft enjoys scoring the 50th reunion’s last laugh.
The book might be the right Christmas gift for a teenager who cares about yesterday and/or tomorrow. In it, America’s long-lasting problems are aired well enough to impress an open young mind.
Lund
Lund has written two collections of stories that focus entirely on his Vietnam War experience: How to Not Tell a War Story (2012), and Eating with Veterans(2015). Those books might better satisfy the minds of old timers.
In evaluating those two books, the late David Willson wrote in these pages: “I highly recommend the stories to all those drawn to serious writing about the Vietnam War and to seekers after the whole story—not just a narrow story told over and over again. The stories showed me what rear-echelon personnel contributed to our war. Thanks to Michael Lund for bravely going with his short stories where no other Vietnam War author has gone before.”
For old timers too lazy to look for Lund’s earlier writing but in need of a nostalgia fix, I suggest cranking up Don McLean’s “American Pie” and playing it softly and singing along.
Richard LaMotte’s new novel, Follow His Lead (Koehler Books, 244 pp. $29.95, hardcover; $18.95, paper; $7.49, Kindle), is about a war dog and his handler in the Vietnam War. LaMotte says that one reason he wrote the book was “to let the reader know how important these special dogs were.”
LaMotte, a marketing executive and novelist, did a lot of research on the subject, and used true Vietnam War dog stories as inspiration for the book. Zeke, a German Shepherd, is the Army scout dog featured in the book. His handler is Chuck Anderson. They arrive together in South Vietnam in 1969.
The novel opens with the wounding of a scout dog by a Viet Cong sniper. Chuck and Zeke have just arrived and witness the sorrow of the dog’s handler as a doctor is unable to save his beloved companion.
Chuck and Zeke go on missions where their job is to locate land mines, booby traps, and tunnels. Zeke is even capable of sniffing out snipers. It is amazing what Zeke can detect, but it’s a partnership as Chuck must be able to read the dog’s alerts.
When not out in the field, Chuck befriends a grunt called Jonesy, a typical gregarious buddy that you find in war novels. Chuck ends up training Jonesy as his replacement. This is important because one theme of the novel is Chuck’s attempt to avoid the usual fate of war dogs: being turned over to the ARVN or euthanized.
Saving his dog becomes paramount for Chuck. He gets help from a chaplain, who becomes a mentor, and a Vietnamese brothel owner. He’s the kind of fixer you often see in stories like this.
I have posted stories about war dogs on my website, so I have an interest in the subject. Follow His Lead (a great title) has lots of good information about war dogs in Vietnam, including how they were trained and how they were used. Chuck and Zeke undertake a variety of missions and you get a good feel for why the dogs and their handlers were welcomed by the troops. They saved many lives.
49th U.S. Army Infantry Platoon Scout Dog, Vietnam War, 1969
But the book is not just about missions. Several characters are developed, mainly through dialogue, though LaMotte does not use a lot of Vietnam War G.I. lingo. He’s not a veteran and does not try to write like one.
He creates a subplot based on his own life, the fact that his father was an Episcopal minister who died young. Chuck Anderson has a similar background.
Dogs played an important role in the Vietnam War, a not well-known fact. Richard LaMotte attempts to rectify this through fiction based on fact. His tale is engaging and not predictable. All the characters are likeable. In fact, there are no villains in the book. Just don’t expect a gritty Vietnam War drama.
Books in Review II 