Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #203994 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 368 pages

Customer Reviews

The best first person account of Vietnam I have ever read!
This book not only was accurate in it's detail of what American Marines faced in Vietnam, it brought every emotion that the American Marine felt. The descriptions of the battles was more captivating than anything hollywood could ever create. This story will bring you back or it will it educate you on the perils on the Vietnam marine.

Good read, but reservations noted here
There is no doubt that this is a good read, although to be really picky, some of the grammar could have done with better editing. As a first-person narrative it is better than some of the existing accounts, but not as good as others. I do have some major reservations though that are not reflected in other reviews here. First - and here the book shares a problem with most first person accounts of the Vietnam war - the book lacks all perspective. There is hardly any comment on the context in which the war was fought. Where there is (the author maintains that Tet was a victory for the US, and that a war properly waged against North Vietnam would have brought success) the author is often wrong. Tet was not, as recent work makes clear, a victory. Yes, the US 'won', but the price of victory was unbearable. If the US had gone into North Vietnam, so would the Chinese - Korea all over again. Second the view is very simplistic. The marines are 'God's marines'; Jane Fonda is 'a traitor' etc. Third, and this is my biggest problem, the text presents a very distorted view of life in the war. It flows as a continuous narrative (ie, each chapter starts where the other one ends, each event follows the one before) yet it very clearly is not. For example there is a discussion of a letter sent about Tet to one of the grunts many chapters before we get to Tet. Events are conflated, timelines changed, compressed, etc. This is fine, if acknowledged, but it is not acknowledged here. The impression given is that the author is in combat almost daily, which would be a very unusual Vietnam experience. The most affecting, and best, part of this book is the catch up piece written at the end. Read this first, then read the book. And for far better perspectives (with their fair share of combat descriptions) try, as others have suggested, 'Dispatches', or the more recent (and I think even better) 'The Cat from Hue'.

Moving
This is probably the most moving book about Vietnam written in the first person I have read. I enjoyed Masons 'Chickenhawk' hugely but this author I can relate to. You know the feeling when you are experiencing anothers world first hand?
Not since reading 'Stephen Kings' Christine when i was 16 have i felt such empathy for an author, outstanding!!!