Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #324889 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

Customer Reviews

I found the writing excellent and the language authentic.
I am a former Marine who was at Parris Island, Platoon 364; M Co, 3rd Bn, 6th Marines, 2nd Marine Division and in Viet Nam at the same time as Ed Kugler.

I find his writing excellent, the language and slang used by Marines authentic. It brought chills to my spine when I read this book. I was not a sniper, but I was a grunt Sgt with K Co, 3rd Bn, 7th Marines, 1st Marine division in Viet Nam from Jun 1967 to Jun 1968. I can assure you that his accounts of ambushes and routine life in Viet Nam are all too real.

A worm's eye view of the Vietnam war in barrack room style
A poorly educated, inarticulate small town boy joins the Marines for glory, adventure and the chance to kill people. He volunteers for sniper duty in Vietnam and spends two years alternately crawling around the mud "wasting gooks" or inflicting severe alcohol poisoning upon himself on R&R. Written in blue barrack room language in a stream of consciousness style that is as tedious as it is inarticulate, this adds nothing to our understanding of the infantryman's war in Vietnam beyond the conclusions that jungle warfare is dirty and unpleasant in the extreme and that most of the US ground forces there hadn't the remotest idea why they were there.

There are far better and far more literate accounts of what the war was like for the front line infantryman (try "once a Warrior King" by David Donovan or "FNG" by Donald Bodey), far better specialist studies of sniping in Vietnam (try Michael Lee Lanning's "Inside the Crosshairs") and many more insightful accounts of the American experience in Vietnam. If you only read one Vietnam book, make it "Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan. This is strictly a book for those who like their military memoirs served raw with plenty of muck, foul language and alcohol.

Interesting shading to tiresome
In the introduction, the author, Ed Kugler, claims "it's the best damned Nam book you'll ever read!" Well, maybe. But even the "best damned" of anything gets tiresome after awhile. Admittedly, Ed tells a good tale of his coming of age in Nam as a Marine sniper while learning to lead the "good guys" of his side, and kill the "bad guys" of the other side. It's told with the unflagging energy and Weltanschauung of a 20-year old. But that's the problem. The book was published in 1999, presumably recently written by the author while in his early 50's. Until the epilogue, I didn't see any evidence of wisdom accumulated in the three decades since Nam that might have otherwise tempered his narrative. Too bad, since Ed has been at the top management levels of both PepsiCo and Compaq Computer Corporation. I mean, he must have grown up just a little since the 60's, right? I'm in my 50's too, and Ed's book left me none the wiser from his experience.