Vietnam Voices edited by Edward Caudill, William Minser, and Jim Stovall

Vietnam Voices: Stories of Tennesseans Who Served in Vietnam, 1965-1975 (359 pp., $24.99, paper; $9.99, Kindle) is the third oral history volume produced by the Friends of the Blount County Library in East Tennessee. Volume 3 almost begs the reader to pick up the first two volumes to continue the story. This small book is a quick but fulfilling read.

Editors-Stovall, Minser, and Caudill have tried to contact as many local Vietnam War veterans as they can, then offer them the opportunity to become part of the project through interviews conducted using a same-questions format. That process makes for continuity for the reader and the participants.

Each of the volumes contains 12-15 interviews with veterans from all of the military branches and ranks, enlisted and officers alike, that are condensed into thumbnail versions of longer, in-person interviews. Each chapter contains verbatim answers to mostly identical questions with a bit of editing that provides a readable flow.

The book also includes reprints of drawings by soldiers who took part in the U.S. Army’s Combat Artists Program during the Vietnam War. Between 1966 and 1970 nine teams of artists moved throughout the four war zones recording what and who they saw.

Vietnam Voices is a short but personable book—an opportunity for each participant to contribute to the Vietnam War historical record of individual experiences, efforts, and accomplishments. A county library undertaking such a project speaks well of its support of hometown war veterans. It’s well worth the read.

The full audio interviews are archived on the library’s website. 

–Tom Werzyn

Navy Corpsmen in the Vietnam War by Harry Spiller

Harry Spiller’s Navy Corpsmen in the Vietnam War: 17 Personal Accounts (McFarland, 215 pp. $35, paper; $21.99, Kindle) contains just about everything you need to know about the U.S. Navy enlisted medical specialists who served with U.S. Marines in the war. Spiller, who served ten years in the  Marines with two tours in Vietnam, put together this book primarily with interviews of 17 corpsmen whose combat duties in the war stretched from July 1967 to October 1970. Seven of them were in-country during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

Spiller has written 17 books, including  World War II and Korean and Vietnam War oral histories. A former sheriff in Illinois, he was an associate professor of criminal justice at John A. Logan College.

Although the 17 corpsmen in the book enlisted in the Navy as sailors, in Vietnam they primarily performed as infantrymen in I Corps, exchanging fire with the enemy until somebody called, “Corpsman up,” which meant someone had been wounded and needed immediate medical attention. After completing medical studies in the Navy, the corpsmen underwent Marine Corps field medical training. That training strengthened them physically, familiarized them with weapons, and taught them how to perform medical procedures in combat with an emphasis on keeping their butts down at the same time. To a man, they saved lives—and became Marines at heart.

Spillman tells each man’s story in a chapter of its own. The men’s recollections of caring for the wounded and dead fascinated me because on the Corpsmen’s high degree of selflessness as they came to the aid of others. In their minds, they felt they never did enough and believed there was always one more person they should have helped or saved.

As former Corpsman John Cohen puts it: “I would just go into a mode of not paying attention to what was going on around me” as he performed first aid and triage seemingly endlessly. Paul McCann and Leon Brown say they maintained “tunnel vision,” disregarding what was going on around them. “Fighting sometimes lasted for hours, and sometimes for days,” Leon Brown says. His twin brother Loren Brown, who served side-by-side with him, said, “All the combat just made us numb, with no grief.”

The book overflows with remembrances of battles. As soon as he arrived at Da Nang, for example, Lamar Hendricks says his commander put him on a helicopter and dropped him into a rice paddy where his new company was in a firefight. Corpsmen suffered high losses and were in great demand. “The chances of getting killed at Con Thien,” Paul Douglas Reininger says, were “about 50 percent.” Little wonder the Marines nicknamed the DMZ the “Dead Marine Zone.”

Although all of the men experienced unusual combat situations, Daniel Milz provides the book’s most gruesome accounts. Coming upon a burned-out crash site, he says, “There were 17 briskets that looked like people in the helicopter.” He also remembers a priest at a helicopter pad who performed last rites for men leaving on a mission. Dennis Kauffman tells of operating from patrol boats as part of the Mobile Riverine Forces, a job that came with many types of of saving and killing.

Occasional Combined Action Platoon duty pleased all of the corpsmen, particularly doctoring children, because it provided tangible help to relatively helpless people.

Navy Corpsmen in the Vietnam War is an insightful collection of exciting, happy, and heartbreaking tales that played out in an environment that should be wished upon nobody. Corpsmen faced limitless responsibilities in the midst of almost indescribable chaos. They were fighting men who saved other fighting men under horrendous conditions.  

—Henry Zeybel         

Stories Untold by Charlotte McDaniel

Assessing the significance of an author and her topic is a primary duty of a book reviewer, especially when dealing with oral histories and memoirs. Likewise, forging a connection with a writer is vital. In both respects, Charlotte McDaniel and her book, Stories Untold: Oral Histories of Wives of Vietnam Servicemen (Bowker, 196 pp. $20, paper), made a dominant impression on this reviewer.

McDaniel focuses on more than thirty women whose husbands took part in the Vietnam War. She lost a family member in that conflict, which she barely mentions. Her interviews include wives of officers and enlisted men from all military branches. She identifies the women only with their first names.

Each interviewee speaks several times about the stages of war-time family separation. Their collective stories evolve chronologically: deploying, adapting to absence, managing children, supporting each other, losing a loved one, reuniting, and coping with the lingering effects of war.

The book’s major revelation is illuminating the spirit and the depths of involvement of young and inexperienced women with duties they never expected to encounter. Anxiety tempered by an acceptance of responsibility dominated most of their behavior. Those with children found themselves fulfilling the roles of mother and father. They look back on their year—or years, when a husband served multiple tours—as character building.

The chapters about loss and its lingering effects describe extreme hardships and disappointments. Those events presented the ultimate test of love. Within the same framework, a few of the women’s stories—such as the one titled “The Horizontal Christmas Tree”—read like outtakes from a script of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

I can’t say that Charlotte McDaniel opened my eyes, but she did refresh my view of nearly forgotten drama.

A former Fulbright Scholar, McDaniel’s academic career included appointments at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center prior to her retirement from Emory University in Atlanta. She has written many research studies and academic books.

The book is available on line at Amazon.com.

—Henry Zeybel

When We Came Home by Jack McCabe

Jack McCabe begins When We Came Home: How the Vietnam War Changed Those Who Served (OddInt Media, 350 pp. $19.99, paper; $9.99, Kindle) with his own story, including observations about his homecoming and the intervening years when he struggled despite the VA telling him, “just go home; there is nothing wrong with you.”

The more McCabe wrestled with his own demons, the more he realized he was not alone. Finally, after a successful business career in real estate, he began devoting his time volunteering to help other veterans.

The book is a compilation of stories about what happened after folks returned home from the Vietnam War. McCabe writes that “no one came home whole,” no matter what we may have initially thought. He recognizes two important aspects of Vietnam veterans: That we hid and tried to bury those times within without seeking out our brothers for many years, and that the war changed everyone who went there, no matter the job—cook, mechanic, pilot, or rifleman.

There are many stories in the book, all of them personal and important. The book broadens the mosaic of the story of the Vietnam War veteran.

In his interviews McCabe—a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America—followed a three-part formula, a short account of the veteran’s time in country, then tales of coming home and being home. He includes a range of servicemen and women, being careful to give them all a full and respectful opportunity to tell of their experiences.

One of the more poignant voices is that of Glenn Knight, a 1st Cav veteran trained to be a Huey repairman whose job in country morphed into being a gunner on hunter killer Huey team along the Cambodian border.

Upon his return, Knight realized he didn’t fit in despite his military experience. Marriage, followed by kids, soon turned into bouncing around in many jobs. The toll of raising a family and other pressures of life turned him to drink and bouts of anger. He admits the “guy who went to war is a KIA and he never returned.”

The courage Knight shows as he reveals his story is typical of the hidden courage of the men and women who went to war in Vietnam but did not know how to deal with the ghosts they brought home with them. It took many years, but Glenn Knight finally was able to get help with his PTSD at the VA.

One of McCabe’s lighter stories is that of former Red Cross Donut Dolly Rene Johnson, who decided she needed to go to Vietnam to see for herself stories she was hearing from friends and family before entering nursing school. During her first tour Johnson spent time with the 25th Infantry Division, the 9th Infantry Division, and the First Cav.

Johnson recalls stopping in Hawaii on her way home and spending hours just watching TV commercials. But after getting home, she realized something was missing. Depression set in, along with a feeling of failure that she somehow did not have a home per se. So she re-upped for another tour. It was not until 2012 that Johnson found help for her PTSD.

Jack McCabe

The importance of this book is the voice it gives to Vietnam War veterans. It validates our service and puts the black and white honesty of what we did in print for all to see.

The courage of all the men and women in this book is raw, naked, awesome, and an encouragement to all who served to stand tall and be proud of what we did.

Jack McCabe has done a marvelous job of interviewing and telling these stories. This is a book that scholars of war and politicians would do well to read to see that war is not just a “tour” and learn about how the trauma taking part in a war causes can last a lifetime.

The author’s web site is jackmccabe.net

—Bud Alley

 

A Lifetime in A Year by Lynda Ebanks Harrison

A Lifetime In a Year: Remembrances by Vietnam and Vietnam-Era Veterans in Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War 2015 (Sparrows2, 86 pp., paper) book contains thirty stories from veterans who responded to a questionnaire from the Daughters of the American Revolution Star of Destiny Chapter in Katy, Texas.

The chapter’s Historical Preservation Committee chaired by Harrison edited the responses, which primarily came from Texas Vietnam War veterans, both men and women. These short reminiscences reflect pride in wartime service, whether in combat or support units.

Alfred Landon Peterson writes: “On my first tour at the 45th Surgical Hospital on the Tay Ninh base camp for three months, we got hit with rockets and mortars every hour on the hour. We would look at our watches and at five minutes to each hour, we would lie down on the ground and wait until all the rockets came in and hit the base.”

Helicopter pilot Gerald (Jerry) L. Ericsson recalls: “Jim Malek was a favorite aircraft commander. He would drink a little too much the night before and the more he trusted me, the more he would let me do before I was instructed to wake him up. So as he slept, I learned a lot.”

Nurse Judy)Hooper Davis says: “I worked twelve hour shifts, at time six days a week. Because it was intensive care and recovery room, the work was non-stop. It was very stressful. So many things I’d never seen before and we did whatever was needed to save lives. Before Vietnam, I had little over one year of nursing experience. After leaving Vietnam, I had a lifetime of nursing experience in one year. My roommate in Vietnam was so devastated by the tour that she never nursed again.”

Some of the veterans note that this is the first time they publically shared their Vietnam War experiences. John B. Boyd best summed up their feelings: “I was a nineteen year old Army NCO. I did a tough, demanding job in combat conditions and did it well. I was proud of my accomplishments. This is something I never shared because no one cared.”

The DAR cares. In this book they have given a few more Vietnam War veterans the recognition they have earned.

For ordering info, email StarOfDestinyDAR@gmail.com

—Henry Zeybel

Swift Boats at War in Vietnam edited by Guy Gugliotta, John Yeoman, and Neva Sullaway

Vietnam War Swift Boats exemplified a one-of-a-kind weapons system from 1965-70. They were designed and built for intercepting North Vietnamese trawlers that supplied NVA and VC troops in South Vietnam. In late 1968, their mission expanded to patrolling rivers, streams, and canals, which greatly increased their contact with the enemy.

The fifty-foot-long Swift Boats’ main strength was an ability to “outrun anything they couldn’t outfight,” the crewmen said.

On Swift Boats, an Officer in Charge commanded five crewmen and enjoyed virtually total independence of operation. Only 116 Swift Boats took part in the Vietnam War, manned by about 600 officers and some 3,000 enlisted men. Nearly all the men were in their early to mid-twenties. Fifty Swift Boat sailors were killed in Vietnam, and 400 wounded.

Guy Gugliotta, John Yeoman, and Neva Sullaway have combined their experience and knowledge to put together Swift Boats at War in Vietnam (Stackpole, 328 pp., $29.95, hardcover; $15.65, Kindle), an oral history. Gugliotta, a former journalist, and Yeoman earned three Bronze Stars each while commanding Swift Boats. Sullaway’s expertise centered on peaceful maritime activities.

Their book’s chapters tell the Swift Boat story chronologically from 1965-70—the life of the American operation. Thereafter, the boats were turned over to the South Vietnamese. Each chapter begins with a review of official monthly Operations Summaries for a given year. Then comes a series of oral histories from crewmen who served on Swift Boats during that year.

A large number of Swift Boat veterans responded to the editors’ requests for stories about their war experiences. Those selected for the book strike many emotional notes: humorous, sad, bitter, sardonic, enlightened. Their testimony reflects the pride of the crews and provides a vivid view of Swift Boats and their crews at war and at rest in Vietnam.

The book’s photographs are significantly enhanced by captions that explain the pictures, such as one showing a boat’s 81-mm mortar, aimed like a cannon, which “could accurately hit targets 4,000 meters away. In the horizontal mode, accuracy was good to about 1,000 yards.”

Swift Boats at War in Vietnam is an ideal place to begin reading for anyone unfamiliar with the subject. Those who know about the boats should be entertained by the range of feelings displayed in the short war-time stories.

—Henry Zeybel

Women Vietnam Veterans by Donna A. Lowery

This encyclopedic volume is a valuable in-depth  history told in the words of women who served in the Vietnam War from 1962-1972. A book team of twenty members collaborated in producing  Women Vietnam Veterans: Our Untold Stories (AuthorHouse, 733 pp., $36.99, hardcover;  $25.95, paper; $9.99, Kindle) by Donna A. Lowrey, who served in Vietnam in 1967-69. 

The book contains the words of enlisted women and officers—other than nurses—who served in Vietnam during the war. The extensive databases and indices in this work are guides to this historical cornucopia containing the contributions of hundreds of female veterans.

The Army, Air Force, Marine, and Navy are all represented. I recommend a close look at the lists prior to reading the oral histories and biographical sketches, which are arranged chronologically according to when the veterans served in Vietnam. The entries would have been better had they included the homes of record of the veterans. I found connections to my own service in the extensive lists.

Readers will discover a wide spectrum of jobs and combat zone tales,  from humorous to tragic. Women served as physical therapists, switchboard operators, clerk typists, journalists, nutritionists, comptrollers, and staff Judge Advocates, among many other jobs. Many of the accounts recall the same February 18, 1968, night attack when the Viet Cong blew up the ammo dump at Long Binh.

Spec. 5 Sonia Gonzalez, a clerk typist, was new in-country when the attack woke her and she scrambled to the safety of the first floor of her barracks. “I managed to get my issue [clothes] on,” she said. “We stayed there until the next morning. A formation was called and as roll was being taken, everyone started laughing. My pants were on backwards; my uncomfortable boots pointed outward with the left boot on the right and the right boot on my left.”

Several veterans share other memories of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Some marked their arrival in Vietnam by the length of time until Bob Hope’s Christmas Show. Maj. Betty Jean Stallings recalled the Hope show being broadcast on Armed Forces Vietnam Television: “Once when I had to walk down the hall, I realized the same TV show was coming out of every office. The next day, it was easy to see who had seen the show in person and who had watched on TV. Those who had watched in person were quite sunburned.” I might add that I was there photographing the show that hot day.

 

Donna Lowery

 

Geckos, bats, cockroaches, rats, and mosquitoes are described by many of the contributors—along with hot, wet, and humid weather, hygiene matters, living quarters, clubs, and Post Exchanges.

 

Morale is  the subject of many of these recollections. Spec. 5 Ida Colford wrote to the governor of Maine in November 1967 asking for a fresh Christmas tree. A month later, a Pan Am jet delivered a nine-foot Maine Balsam to Saigon. “It lifted the spirits of all of us so far from home,” Colford said.

So did the formation of a quintet in 1966 called “The Bootleggers of Old Long Binh.” The group wrote songs and performed at their base. There was also a 27-member Women’s Army Corps Drill Team that performed at the WAC Detachment.

Today’s parlance could be used to describe the typical women’s work schedule as 24/7. After their twelve-hour days, many volunteered at jobs such as visiting children in orphanages. Marine Sgt. Ermelinda Salazar worked at St. Vincent de Paul Orphanage, home to 75 children.”This whole orphanage is taken care of by two Catholic sisters,” she said. “The two sisters are Vietnamese who speak no English at all.”

 

Many of the reports describe combat situations such as what the late Mary Van Ette Bender experienced. She served as an Army Chief Warrant Officer and found herself guarding her hotel billet during the 1968 Tet offensive in Saigon. “The MPs guarding the building had been killed almost immediately,” she said. “I was then asked by a male officer to guard the stairwell to the third floor. He then gave me grenades and instructed me to blow up the stairwell in the event that the Viet Cong were able to take the bottom two floors.” CWO Bender was awarded two Bronze Stars for  defending her billet and the women inside. 

 

There are too many poems, songs, letters, and opinions pro and con on the Vietnam War to include here. I found a veteran who worked in the same Engineer Command building where I served at Long Binh in 1970. Sgt. Maryna Misiewicz served as Administrative NCO/ Attache Specialist to Gen. A.B. Dillard, our commander. 

Tragically, he and serveral others were  killed in a helicopter crash. When Sgt. Misiewicz returned home she attended Gen. Dillard’s funeral.

 

—Curt Nelson

The Soldiers’ Story By Ron Steinman

First published in 1999 in conjunction with a six-hour Learning Channel documentary series, Ron Steinman’s The Soldiers’ Story: An Illustrated Edition: Vietnam in Their Own Words has been republished in a new, large-format, expanded edition (Wellfleet Press, 400 pp., $28).

Steinman served as the NBC News bureau chief in Saigon “through much of 1966, all of 1967, and most of 1968,” he tells us in the book’s Introduction. Steinman also tells us that his “mandate” for the TV show (and the previous editions of this book) was to tell the stories of men “in battle” through their own words. The result here is a long, profusely illustrated book that, indeed, concentrates heavily on first-person testimony from American soldiers and Marines who saw battle action in the war.

There are six chapters—on The Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, The Siege of Khe Sanh, The Tet Offensive, The Secret War (mostly in Laos and Cambodia), The Air War, and The Fall of Saigon. Steinman provides context, and seventy-seven men provide the voices of combat.

The book is handsomely produced. And the stories told by the former combatants ring true. We are given many riveting descriptions of all forms of combat.

Reading this book would give the uninformed the idea that the American war in Vietnam was one long series of battle action. That’s because the voices of the overwhelming majority of men and women who served in support roles in the Vietnam War are absent. Still, that was not Steinman’s mission, and he delivers what he promises: real-life stories of men in the trenches in the Vietnam War.

—Marc Leepson

 

There and Back by Lisa A. Lark

Lisa A. Lark, the author of There and Back: The Vietnam War Through the Eyes of Those Who Lived It (M.T. Publishing Company, Inc., 136 pp., $39.95), also has written All They Left Behind: Legacies of the Men and Women on The Wall, which was published in 2012 in commemoration of the 30^th anniversary of the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Lark is an English teacher at Edsel Ford High School in Dearborn, Michigan, and teaches writing at Henry Ford Community College. Her new commemorative book is dedicated to the 58,300 men and women who gave their lives in the Vietnam War. The contributors to There and Back include more than a hundred Vietnam veterans, along with members of the families of a dozen who did not make it home—families that donated their memories and photographs to this timeline of the war.

Beautifully designed and prepared, this coffee-table-sized book contains more than 300 photos, many in color. Through these photos and accounts the reader is guided through the day-to-day lives of veterans involved in nearly every aspect of the war from 1959-75.

The text contains three main sections:

“Getting There” takes the reader back to the first inkling that the draft board may be calling, or the decision to volunteer, and then what the journey was like once inducted into military service.

“Getting Through” covers being part of America’s involvement in the war.

“Getting Back” shares the memories of veterans as they marked the days off on their short-timer calendars awaiting the Freedom Bird flight back to The World.

No matter where, when, or how one served during the Vietnam War, this book will surely evoke the reader’s own memories. For those who did not serve in that war, this compilation of veteran memories and quality photographs will paint a vivid picture of what that experience was like.

—James P. Coan

Tours of Duty Edited by Michael Lee Lanning

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Michael Lee Lanning is one of the most prolific Vietnam veteran writers. Many of his twenty-one military-themed nonfiction books deal with the Vietnam War.

That includes the well-received memoirs he wrote about his tour of duty in the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam (1987) and Vietnam 1969-1970: A Company Commander’s Journal (1988), as well as Inside the LRRPs: Rangers in Vietnam (1988), Inside the VC and NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces (1992), and Inside the Crosshairs: Snipers in Vietnam (1998). He also wrote a comprehensive guide to Vietnam War films called Vietnam at the Movies (1994).

 

Lee Lanning

Lanning’s latest book is Tours of Duty: Vietnam War Stories (Stackpole, 288 pp., $18.95, paper), a collection of tales from some forty other Vietnam War veterans that Lanning collected and edited.

Virtually all are told by men who served combat-heavy tours of duty. Don’t therefore look between these covers for the voices of cooks, clerks, truck drivers, or other support personnel. Many of the tale tellers—like Lanning—served with the 199th.

Lanning chose not to put names with these first-person stories. But, he says, he can “personally testify to the veracity of some because ‘I was there.’ Others were related to me over the years by soldiers whom I hold in high regard. Names have been left out to protect both the guilty and innocent.”

The author’s website is www.michaelleelanning.com

—Marc Leepson