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Books In review
REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON
Michael Connelly has hit it big.
His detective novels—including
the latest excellent Harry Bosch, Echo
Park (Little, Brown,
405 pp., $26.99)—get rave reviews from picky critics,
zoom to the top of the best-seller lists, and fly off the
shelves by the hundreds of thousands.
We’ve been big
fans of Connelly since he and Bosch, a former Vietnam War
Army tunnel rat and iconoclastic LAPD homicide detective,
made their debuts in The Black Echo in 1992. Connelly
follows a formula in the Bosch novels, but he’s such
a master craftsman that the books feel fresh and read well. Echo
Park is another good one, and one
that echoes the first novel, in that Harry uses his tunnel
rat experience to trap a very bad guy. As usual, Harry single-
mindedly goes after a murderer, runs into big-time problems
with police higher-ups, has a rocky romantic affair, and
eventually uses his brains and intuition to solve a complicated
case.
We’ve been big Robert Olen Butler fans since we
were blown away by his first published novel, Alleys
of Eden,
in 1981. Butler, who served in Army intelligence in Vietnam,
used the war as the centerpiece of that book and as an important
theme in much of his subsequent fiction, including his Pulitzer-Prize-winning
group of short stories, A Good Scent
from a Strange Mountain.
Butler’s
latest, Severance (Chronicle Books, 264 pp., $22.95), consists
of dozens of richly imagined glimpses into the mind of a
person who had been decapitated. The 240-word prose poems
look into the (severed) heads of many, including John the
Baptist, Walter Raleigh, Marie Antoinette, Jayne Mansfield,
and Nicole Brown Simpson. Butler includes two Vietnamese:
a Viet Minh guerrilla guillotined by the French in 1952 and
a South Vietnamese official decapitated by NVA troops in
Hue in 1968.
FICTION IN BRIEF
Dick Stanley’s Leaving the Alamo:
Texas Stories After Vietnam (Cavalry Scout Books, 184 pp.,
$8.36, paper) is a first-rate collection of 16 short stories,
all of which center on Vietnam veterans. Stanley, a VVA life
member, commanded a U.S. Army light-infantry advisory team
in Vietnam in 1969. For more info, go to
http: //www.lulu.com/content/398715
Geronimo
G. Tagatac’s The Weight of the
Sun (Ooligan
Press, 175 pp., $14.95, paper) is an excellent collection
of short stories, most of which deal with members of a fictional
Filipino-American family. The Vietnam War and its legacy
are two themes. Tagatac served a year’s tour of duty
in Vietnam as a Special Forces A Team demolition specialist.
VVA
member Frank Grzyb’s Ain’t Much of a War:
Reverent and Irreverent Stories About the Vietnam Conflict (Pocol Press, 186 pp., $14.95, paper) is a worthy collection
of short fiction. Much of it is set in country and taken
from events that transpired or ideas Grzyb had during his
1970-71 tour of duty with the USARV’s 1st Log in Qui
Nhon.
E.B. Parrots’ first novel, Killing
Woodstock (Blue
Note, 303 pp., $14.95, paper), is a fast-moving thriller
involving a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran who runs into a
world of hurt after a war buddy is murdered in 1998. Parrots
did a Semper Fi tour of duty in the Vietnam War.
Jay Hatch’s
Turtle Trap (DreamCatcher, 7 Disc CD, $24.95) is a very listenable
thriller (read by Brady Vance) that deals with murder and
blackmail in a remote area of the Texas Hill Country. Hatch,
who served two years as a Mobile Team commander in Vietnam
where he was twice wounded, is donating 100 percent of his
royalties to the Wounded Warrior Project. For more info,
go to www.turtletrap.net
Dao Strom’s The Gentle Order
of Girls and Boys: Four Stories (Counterpoint, 341 pp., $24)
is a group of four loosely connected novellas, all dealing
with young Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American women living
in Texas and California. These well-observed tales are told
by the 33-year-old author who was born in Saigon and came
to this country as a baby with her mother.
The hero of former
Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen’s cleverly
plotted thriller Dragon Fire (Forge, 383 pp., $24.95) is
a former Vietnam War POW and former U.S. Senator who is called
to counter an attack upon this country by a sinister international
force after the secretary of defense dies of anthrax poisoning.
ONE
OF A KIND
“Great writers reveal a world we’ve
never seen but instantly recognize as authentic. Maxine Hong
Kingston is such a writer.” Those were the words President
Bill Clinton used in presenting the author of the groundbreaking
book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of
Girlhood Among Ghosts,
with the National Humanities Medal in 1997. Among her other
accomplishments, Maxine Hong Kinston has, since 1993, directed
an ongoing program in which she works with veterans—including
many Vietnam veterans—helping them create worlds through
fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and prose. Informally known
as the Veteran Writer Group, the men and women meet under
Kingston’s tutelage four times a year.
Among the fruit
of that endeavor is Veterans of War,
Veterans of Peace (Koa
Books, 613 pp., paper, $20), an excellent, one-of-a-kind
collection of work by Kingston’s writers,
which she edited. The contributors include George Evans,
Dan Fahey, Larry Heinemann, Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, John
Mulligan, and Barbara Sonneborn. “If there is one thing
the writers in this book have in common,” Kingston
says, “it is that they are rebels.… Their stories
and poems are immense in scope, and in heart, and—amazingly—full
of life and laughter. They carried out our motto: Tell the
truth.”
Eighty percent of the royalties from sales of
the book are going to charities, including the Vinh Son Orphanage
in Vietnam. To learn more about the writers’ group,
the book, and the charities, go to www.vowvop.org
AUSSIE NONFICTION
More than 58,000 Royal Australian Army,
Air Force, and Navy personnel served in the Vietnam War.
That nation’s
501 casualties in Vietnam break down to: 326 killed in action,
25 accidental deaths, 68 who died of wounds, 6 missing in
action, and 76 non-battle deaths. We don’t often get
to read about our Aussie friends’ role in the Vietnam
War, but two books recently published in Australia have helped
remedy that situation.
Graeme Mann gives the details of his
unique and amazing Vietnam War experiences in The
Vietnam War on a Tourist Visa (Mini-Publishing, 310 pp., $24.95,
paper). “Through circumstances which,
to this day, I still do not fully understand,” Mann
says, “I had found myself, an Australian civilian,
being dropped on 7th December 1967, unprepared and unsuspecting,
into the middle of the war in Vietnam, indentured to the
United States Air Force as a computer specialist.” Mann
goes on to tell of his adventures during the next seven months
in a breezy, readable style punctuated with many reconstructed
quotes. For ordering info, write Mann at: P.O. Box 97, Sussex
Inlet 2540 in Aussieland.
R.J. (Bob) Nash’s Ordnance
at the Sharp End: Ordnance Field Park Nui Dat South Vietnam,
1966-72: Historical Accounts and Experiences from Men Who
Served With the OFP (Shannon Books Australia, 324 pp.), published
with the help of the Australian Government’s Department
of Veterans’ Affairs,
is a history of, and a tribute to, the men of the Ordnance
Field Park, a unit of the Royal Australian Army Ordnance
Corps. The OFP was part of the Task Force Maintenance Area
and operated for six years at the 1st Australian Task Force
Base at Nui Dat in Phuoc Tuy Province, inland from Vung Tao
in South Vietnam. For more on the book, go to www.ofpvietnam.com
REVISITATION
Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land:
The Vietnam War Revisited (Osprey, 336 pp., $32.95) is a worthy compilation
of essays by historians, journalists, and participants in
the Vietnam War that aims, as its editor Andrew Weist notes, “to
place the Vietnam War in proper context.” The essays
offer in-depth looks at many of the war’s Big Questions.
Weist, a University of Southern Mississippi history professor
who co-directs that institution’s Vietnam Studies Program
and its Center for the Study of War and Society, gives room
to voices from all sides of the political spectrum.
That includes
Bui Tin, the former North Vietnamese officer who has turned
against the Vietnamese communists; Lewis Sorley, who has
argued that the United States and South Vietnam had the war
won under President Nixon (“a courageous war
president”) until North Vietnam violated the terms
of the Paris Peace Accords and Congress “defaulted” on
its financial commitment to South Vietnam; and Arnold Isaacs,
who argues against the “enduring myth [that] scores
or hundreds of American prisoners” were held by North
Vietnam “long after the end of the war.”
The collection
includes a comprehensive look at the Ho Chi Minh Trail by
VVA Veteran contributor John Prados and an excellent examination
of the experience of American Vietnam veterans by VVA’s
Bernard Edelman, based on illuminating interviews he has
conducted over many years. Edelman also concisely and accurately
covers the postwar experiences of Vietnam veterans.
NONFICTION IN BRIEF
As just about every Vietnam veteran knows,
people spontaneously began leaving all manner of tributes
and remembrances at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial soon after
it was dedicated in 1982. The latest commemoration of that
amazing, continuing rite is the sterling Letters
on the Wall: Offerings and Remembrances from the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial (Smithsonian Books, 198 pp., $24.95), in which graphic designer
Michael Sofarelli (the son of a Vietnam veteran) offers an
evocative photographic selection of what’s been left
at The Wall. This worthy book also includes a preface by
Maya Lin and a foreword by Jan Scuggs. For more info, go
to www.lettersonthewall.com
Bruce O. Solheim has taught the
history of the Vietnam War for a dozen years. In his latest
book, The Vietnam War Era: A Personal
Journey (Praeger, 216
pp., $49.95), Solheim, an Army veteran and a history professor
at Citrus College in California, has come up with a unique
and insightful look at that period. The first three-fourths
of the book is an excellent summary of the history of the
Vietnam War with enlightening sidebars on many people who
were involved in it—from Gen. Earle Wheeler to Oliver
Stone. Solheim completes the book with a riveting account
of his personal story, including details of his older brother’s
Vietnam War experiences and his two Army tours of duty after
the Vietnam War.
Robert F. Dorr devotes four chapters to the
Vietnam War in his Air Combat: An Oral
History of Fighter Pilots (Berkley Caliber, 343 pp., $24.95). Dorr offers brief
chapter introductions in which he sets the scenes, then turns
the book over to the voices of the pilots who describe in
human terms what it was like flying the not-so-friendly skies
over North and South Vietnam.
Robert L. Beisner’s excellent,
in-depth biography, Dean Acheson: A
Life in the Cold War (Oxford University, 800 pp., $35), contains a concise, on-the-mark
account of the Truman administration Secretary of State’s
biggest mistakes: committing the United States in 1950 to
France’s
doomed policy of reclaiming its Indochinese colonies. Beisner,
a retired history professor, characterizes Acheson’s
handling of post-World War II matters in Indochina as “incoherent
improvisations,” which led directly to the misbegotten
Vietnam War policies in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson,
and Nixon administrations.
In AK-47: The Weapon that Changed
the Face of War (Wiley, 258 pp., $25.95), Larry Kahaner’s
cleanly written and well-researched history of the enemy’s
main weapon in the Vietnam War, the veteran journalist and
author also offers an illuminating history of the development
of the M-16 and does a good job of comparing and contrasting
those weapons’ crucial role in the outcome of the war.
The United States, Kanaher notes, “did not have an
infantry weapon that could stand up to the AK,” before
the war began, “especially in close-proximity jungle
combat.” One
lesson of the war, Kanaher maintains, “is that determined
soldiers with simple, reliable arms can beat a well-trained
military force despites its sophisticated weapons like the
M-16.”
James G. Thompson’s The Complete
Guide to United States Marine Corps Medals, Badges and
Insignia, World War II to Present (Medals of America., 131 pp., $29.95,
hardcover; $24.95, paper) lives up completely to its title.
The book has information about, and illustrations of, every
Marine Corps medal, beginning with the Badge of Military
Merit, the forerunner of the Purple Heart, which George Washington
created in 1782, and including, of course, the Republic of
Vietnam Campaign Medal and the Vietnam Service Medal, with
its 17 Navy and Marine campaign designations. For more info,
go to www.usmedals.com
Kevin Dockery includes a brief chapter
that covers the Vietnam War in Stalkers
and Shooters: An Oral History of Snipers (Berkley Caliber, 372 pp., $24.95).
The book’s subtitle
notwithstanding, Dockery’s VN chapter contains his
third-person descriptions of Marine and Army snipers in the
war, along with an appreciation of the noted Marine scout-sniper
Gunnery Sgt. Carlos N. Hathcock.
The two most famous engagements
of the Indochina War—the
1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1968 Tet Offensive—are
among the hundreds of battles included in Battlefield:
Decisive Conflicts in History (Oxford University, 376 pp., $30) edited
by British military historian Richard Holmes.
Charles W. Sasser’s
excellent Raider, the stirring story of Army Green Beret
Galen “Pappy” Kittleson
and the November 1970 Army-Air Force raid on the Son Tay
prison camp outside Hanoi, first published in 2002, is out
in a new paperback edition (St. Martin’s Griffin, 319
pp., $14.95).
FOR CHILDREN
Natalie M. Rosinksy’s Vietnam
Veterans Memorial (Compass Point, 48 pp., $18.95) provides a concise
and accurate look at the history and meaning of The Wall,
designed for fourth-to-sixth graders. The book, which the
publisher asked your books columnist to read before publication,
includes a great color photo of several VVA members, including
Judith McCombs and Linda Schwartz, holding a big VVA banner,
taken at the 1993 dedication of the Vietnam Women’s
Memorial.
Audrey Shafer’s The Mailbox is a tenderly
written novel aimed at the young adult market that deals
with the death of a Vietnam veteran in a rural Virginia town
and the impact of the death on the veteran’s 12-year-old
nephew. Shafer is an anesthesiologist at the VA’s Palo
Alto (California) Heath Care System and a professor at Stanford
University School of Medicine, and—judging by this
book—a
talented writer of fiction with a good feel for the life
and times of pre-adolescents.
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