Terrell Reagan calls his book, The Lawless Side of War: Making Millions in the Vietnam Black Market (BookLocker.com, 259 pp., $16.95, paper; $2.99, Kindle), a “fictional memoir.” He says that the book is loosely based on actual events, explaining that he “has taken creative liberties with many details to enhance the reader’s experience. Names, locations, and other details have been changed and fictional details and characters have been added.”
Reagan goes on to tell us that this is a story of beating the draft, as well as one about “black market transactions that I created, some that I managed and others that I witnessed firsthand.”
This book is not malarkey. I worked for the Inspector General in Vietnam and we investigated many black market schemes, including some like the ones Reagan describes in this book. In other words, I believe this author knows what he’s talking about.
He has nothing good to say about the “long-haired hippies protesting the war.” As if the University of Texas where he went to school had many of those. The author had, he tells us, 254 hours of undergrad work in math and physics in college, and tried to get into the National Guard only to discover that the Texas units were all full with guys like George W. Bush and football players. Reagan didn’t want to take his chances with the draft the way many of us did.
“Every family in the U. S. that had a draft eligible loved one, which totaled in the millions, anxiously monitored the call-ups,” he writes. Well, not every family. Mine, for one, showed no interest in my draft eligibility. Their attitude was: What’s there to worry about? My father was drafted into the Marines in World War II and served on Iwo Jima. His father served in the Philippines and his father served in the Civil War. It’s what you did. You wore a uniform and went to some place where you got shot at. I guess that notion is not universal to all Americans.
So Reagan cut himself a sweet deal and that’s what this book is about. The Inspector General chased guys like him the entire year I was in Vietnam—guys who figured out angles to beat the system. We called them black marketeers and criminals.
Terrell Reagan
This book delineates black market operations from the inside out. When I was on a team chasing these guys, I found the details boring. Reading this book is no different. The author spices up the narrative a bit with dragon ladies and the like, but to no avail. Changing greenbacks to MPC then to piasters and back again is just not fun to read about. The author claims this is the only book that tells how the currency laundering and black market really worked in Vietnam during the war, and he may be right.
This book confirmed my suspicions about how some sons of the rich and entitled avoided the draft and spent the war wearing civilian clothes, drinking champagne, and eating fish eggs on toast points at soirees hosted by the ambassador. So it goes.
Reagan tells us that with the money he made in Vietnam as “a civilian project engineer,” he came back to the States and “built a large financially diversified company.” During the late eighties all of his assets were confiscated by the U.S. government, so he moved to London where he created an investment banking company. Today Reagan lives in Dallas.
—David Willson
Books in Review II 