Taking Fire! by David L. Porter

David L. Porter served twenty-seven years in the U.S. Army, retiring as as a colonel in 1995. The most memorable time of his career occurred when, immediately after he received his wings as a helicopter pilot, he flew the Hughes Cayuse OH-6 Scout LOH as an Aerial Scout Section Leader with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (known as the Thunderhorse) from Quan Loi, Vietnam in 1969-70. 

Porter recalls those days in Taking Fire!: Memoir of an Aerial Scout in Vietnam (McFarland, 182 pp. $29.95, paper; $9.99, Kindle). Porter tells his story with “no surnames” and “no attempt to identify any themes nor to draw any conclusions.” He leaves those tasks to readers, he says, and claims to offer only his “description of events.”

The memoir revolves around Hunter-Killer operations, which died with the war. The tactic could not have been simpler: An OH-6 LOH (Light Observation Helicopter or “Loach”) flew around Viet Cong- and NVA-controlled territory at or below treetop level until it drew fire, then marked the spot with a smoke grenade. Instantly, an AH-1G Cobra waiting overhead would attack the area.

These encounters quickly escalated as Cobra pilots directed artillery onto enemy positions. Ideally, an Air Force OV-10 Bronco forward air controller then brought in F-4 Phantoms to finish the job. 

American ground forces requested these missions, which were known as VR (visual reconnaissance) to try to find the elusive enemy. The ballsiest part of the operation fell to the LOH pilot—Porter’s role. An observer—called OSCAR—accompanied him and provided the primary set of eyes for locating the enemy. LOH pilots and OSCARs refused to consider themselves as bait.

Porter flew Thunderhorse Hunter-Killer strikes from October 1969 through February 1970. His recollection of facts during that time is astounding. The details of his physical and mental states often made me feel as if I were in his body or mind.

He brings everything to life, on the ground and in the air, on-duty and off. Although Porter uses no surnames, he gives us memorable personalities and dissects the idiosyncrasies of men of all ranks. For him as a lieutenant, watching and listening to experienced people was akin to attending school.

He examines LOH tactics in depth by analyzing missions and after-action discussions about arbitrary maneuvers such as which way to break over a target. His reflections on the morality of machine-gunning three VC—men he had initially attempted to capture—puts a heartrending slant on death, even in combat.

David L. Porter

One might read Taking Fire! as a coming-of-age story. Frequent turnovers in commanders allowed Porter to analyze leadership techniques from aggressive and violent, to careful and deliberate and, I believe, establish his own criteria for how best to command troops. Furthermore, the losses and injuries of many close friends had a strong impact on Porter’s appreciation for life. That said, these conclusions are merely mine.

Without intending to do so, David Porter also convinced me (for at least my tenth time) that flying helicopters is the toughest aviation job in warfare.

—Henry Zeybel

Vietnam What? by Gianni Ruffo

Gianni Ruffo, the auther of Vietnam What? The True Story of Fictional Characters and Real People (190 pp., $7.99, paper; $4.99, e book), lives in Campobasso, Italy, and works for a bank. He has no military background, but has always been “keen on military history,” he says, particularly World War II and the Vietnam War. He tells us he has a collection of more than 300 documentary items about those wars.

The promise made in the book’s subtitle is kept in the body. We encounter many fictional characters, including Johnny, the protagonist, and we also find that the author has put to good use many of his reference artifacts, especially the books. We get potted encounters and dialogue from such Vietnam War icons as the sniper Carlos Hathcock, Lt. Col. Hal (We Were Soldiers Once) Moore, and a surprise from Dieter Dengler, the German-born Navy pilot who was shot down in Laos, taken prisoner, and later escaped from his Viet Cong captors.

This reader encountered too many clichés, and soon got sick of phrases such as “ready in a wink,” “saving their bacon,” and “straight from the horse’s mouth.” Johnny is a totally unbelievable CIA agent. His frequent use of words and phrases such as “knackered,” “car bonnet,” “rookies” for newbies, and “stinks like a polecat” did not help bring him to life. When he noshed on meatballs, I was tempted to quit reading. But I persisted.

The book gets us to the 1968 Tet Offensive, and Johnny goes on and on about how we could have won the war if we’d only used A bombs. “A couple of atomic bombs,” he says, “could do the job.”  I did hear that said from time to time when I was in Vietnam, but most folks didn’t want it to happen. Or so they said.

Dieter Dengler after his release

Spoiler alert:  At the end of this little book we find out that it was all a dream. I was relieved.

If you are going to read only one novel or memoir about the Vietnam War, you’d do better to go elsewhere. The book did amuse, but I believe Dieter Dengler’s Escape from Laos would be a better place to start reading.

—David Willson

My Other Life by Richard Alexander

In 1967-68, Richard Alexander served with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam. Memories of what he did and saw have stuck with him ever since. As a result, after nearly half a century, he wrote My Other Life: A Combat Soldier in Vietnam (Darwin Press, 266 pp.; $34.95).

Upon opening his book, I thought, “What makes his story different from others who shared similar experiences?” I must admit to one fault: I usually bypass prefaces, forwards, acknowledgements, and anything else that delays the opening of a memoir. I want the story first.

Nevertheless, for no particular reason, I read Alexander’s preface. In it, he projects a why-the-fuck-not-talk-about-everything style that immediately had me nodding and laughing in sync with his tirade of honesty. The preface says it all. Yet, at the same time, it makes the reader feel as if some heavy stuff will follow. And it does.

Alexander jumps into the Vietnam War through a series of flashbacks. After bombing out of college, he volunteered for the draft. Alexander says he felt obligated to help to prevent the Domino Theory from becoming a reality. Or did he, he wondered.

In Vietnam Alexander manned a gun on an armored personnel carrier, got promoted to track commander, and then demoted back to gunner after complaining about the progress of the war within hearing range of his commander. His regiment worked near Xuan Loc in the south and on the Batangan Peninsula in the north.

The story line sounds familiar, but Alexander’s irreverent presentation knocks it beyond ordinary memoir boundaries. He hopscotches from scene to scene with prose overflowing with doubt, sarcasm, fear, love, hate, cynicism, and exaggeration. He raises questions about most phases of the war while producing laughs and anger. His amped-up writing style seldom wavers in its intensity portraying war as a menace to mankind.

At times he displays near-psychopathic rushes of ambivalence, hating the war but hating with equal ferocity those who protested against it. As a corollary to that hate, he constantly wanted to go home despite knowing that Americans no longer loved warriors.

“The first patrol I went out on,” Alexander writes, “set the tone for my whole tour.” Much of what he saw on that patrol, such as the murder of a prisoner, might be familiar to readers of Vietnam War memoirs, but the trauma Alexander felt further verifies the horrors of war.

Descriptions of his eight months in the field are what you expect to read—days of intense heat or rain in overgrown jungle or on dusty or muddy terrain, with interruptions of death and destruction from unseen forces until helicopter gunfire and Phantom napalm blasts incinerate everything in his unit’s path, soon followed by another similar day. Alexander, though, describes the routine in a spellbinding manner.

Shortly after Alexander survived a case of malaria and got out of the hospital with three months left in his tour and was assigned to rear-echelon duty, he agreed to a one-time courier trip to his former unit on the Cambodian border near Loc Ninh. He arrived on the day the Tet Offensive kicked off and once more became an APC gunner (until six days before rotating home), continually wondering “why” as mines and rockets destroyed men and tracks around him.

Richard Alexander

Alexander remembers a lot of guys he enjoyed knowing in Vietnam but never saw again. For a long time, he refused to search for their names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial so that he could continue to hope they survived the fighting. He still feels guilty for being “spared,” as he calls his it.

“We were nothing but bait, going out each day,” he says. He developed a phobia of being ambushed and overrun, a situation American tactics set the stage for eventually encountering, he believes.

He rails against the enthusiasm of young people enticed by military propaganda that glorifies war”It’s a good thing we don’t know what awaits us, isn’t it?,” he writes. “What’s in store for us?”

Alexander repeatedly addresses the emotional toll that his war service took on his closely knit family, particularly on his parents. He examines every angle regarding his younger brother’s decision to move to Europe to avoid the draft, giving his brother a voice in the argument.

I found many similarities between Alexander’s My Other Life and Bruce McDaniel’s recently-published Walk Through the Valley: The Spiritual Journey of a Vietnam War Medic. The war significantly disillusioned both authors. Alexander’s book also made me dig Brian Esher’s Rolling Coffins: Experiences of a Mechanical Infantry Soldier in the Bloodiest Year of the Vietnam War, 1968 from my bookshelf. Combined, Alexander and Esher present a full-scale picture of life among APC crewmen.

Esher, too, found disenchantment with his nation but pride in his service. As he put it: “I was a simple soldier who did his duty when called upon by his country.”

To me, these three authors speak for the masses.

—Henry Zeybel