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Books In review
Reviews by Marc Leepson
When the great journalist Wallace Terry died in May of 2003,
VVA and Vietnam veterans lost a good friend. Wally, as
everyone who knew him called him, covered the Vietnam War
for Time magazine, and even though his journalism and teaching
careers ranged far and wide after that, he had a special
place in his heart (and his work) for the war and for its
veterans. And, of course, he was the author of Bloods,
the book about African-Americans and their service in the
Vietnam War. Bloods was published in 1984 and still is
in print, a remarkable feat.
When he died of a rare vascular
disease at age 65, Wally Terry was working on a projected
two-volume oral history of the experiences of African-American
journalists, himself included. Terry’s widow, Janice,
who had acted as his editorial assistant during their 40-year
marriage, recovered the manuscript soon after his death.
And, now with the help of Wally Terry’s close friend
Zalin Grant, the book has been published. And that’s
very good news.
Missing Pages: Black Journalists of
Modern America: An Oral History (Carroll & Graf, 375 pp.,
$16.95, paper) does exactly what its subtitle indicates:
Using the first-person stories of nineteen journalists
whose experiences began in World War II and ran through
the 1980s, Terry shines light on their working lives in
the worlds of print and broadcast journalism. The book,
Terry says in the introduction, helps “fill
the missing pages in the history of modern American journalism” as
it offers up “major events in American history as seen
through the eyes of a special breed of professional observers.”
Many
of those observers covered the Civil Rights movement, and
several covered the Vietnam War. That includes the syndicated
columnist Carl Rowan, Ethel Payne of the Chicago Defender,
Tom Johnson of The New York Times, and CBS’s Ed Bradley.
All tell their Vietnam War stories in the book.
The late Ed
Bradley, who died last year of leukemia at age 65, witnessed
a good deal of action late in the war in Vietnam and in Cambodia,
and he conveys those experiences evocatively. Bradley tells
of a harrowing incident in which he and his cameraman, Norman
Lloyd, were peppered with shrapnel on Easter Sunday of 1973
while covering a firefight between the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian
government forces. And he provides a clear picture of what
it was like to be among the last Americans to leave Saigon
two years later. Bradley witnessed the chaotic evacuation
scene at the U.S. Embassy and was among those who escaped
on one of the last helicopters from the building’s
roof.
Wally Terry offers his own amazing Vietnam War story
in the book’s final chapter, one that he related in
these pages. It centers on a horrendous incident he and Grant
were directly involved in in Saigon on May 5, 1968. It makes
for riveting reading.
So do virtually all the other first-person
stories here. Wally Terry knew how to do oral history and
do it well. Janice Terry’s extensive endnotes complete
the picture. My only regret is that Wally is no longer with
us to celebrate the publication of his book.
THE IMAGE
I hereby nominate Rodney Falk, a featured character in the
acclaimed Spanish novelist Javier Cercas’ The
Speed of Light (Bloomsbury, 278 pp., $14.95, paper), for a spot
in the Top Ten Most Clichéd Vietnam veteran characters
in literature. Falk gets drafted, volunteers for action after
his brother is killed in country, then gets swallowed up
in more horrific battle action than a company of real infantrymen
sweated through.
To wit: Falk and his buddies spend just about
every day of their tours “squelching through rice paddies
and scouring the jungle inch by inch, asphyxiated by the
heat and humidity and mosquitoes, enduring biblical downpours,
covered in mud up to their eyebrows, devoured by leeches,
eating canned food, always sweating, exhausted, their bodies
aching all over,” et cetera.
Falk (of course) takes
part in a My-Lai-like massacre (uncreatively called “My
Khe”) and later is a willing member
of a renegade platoon (uncreatively called Tiger Force) that
goes on a long, violent rampage, committing “innumerable
barbarities” against innocent civilians over a period
of months. Of course, Rodney loses his mind over there and
comes home an emotional basket case. You can predict his
ultimate postwar fate.
I also nominate Cercas, who evidently
based this book on experiences he had teaching Spanish lit
at the University of Illinois in the eighties, as the biggest
stereotyper of Vietnam veterans since David Morrell, the
creator of the despicable cartoon character, John Rambo.
Cercas has this, among other things, to say about those of
us who served in that war. “Some” of us “were
delinquents,” others were “unfortunates,” and “the
immense majority” were “uneducated workers.” That’s
just for starters.
Here’s Cercas describing the postwar
fate of Falk’s
Tiger Force comrades: Some “were begging on the streets,” others “languished
in jail; others spent long periods in psychiatric hospitals;
only a few had managed to stay afloat and were leading normal
lives, at least apparently normal.” As with all clichés,
there are hints of the truth in there. But wrenched out of
context, Cercas presents the stereotype as the norm, further
perpetuating the myth of the pathetic, screwed-up Vietnam
veteran.
Blame it perhaps on the translator, but this book
which tells the story of a Spanish novelist (and one-time
colleague of Falk) whose life is ruined by success, but the
writing is awkward at times and the book contains silly inaccuracies,
including Cercas referring to the VA as the “Veterans’ Association,” and
the VFW as “the Association of Veterans of Foreign
Wars.” The entire effort is alien and alienating.
BOSCH,
BACK
If you want a fully rounded, realistic portrayal of a Vietnam
veteran, check out Harry Bosch, the former tunnel rat who
is the flawed but principled hero of a dozen best-selling
detective novels dating back to the early nineties written
by Michael Connelly. Connelly’s latest terrific Bosch
book, The Overlook (Little Brown, 225 pp., $21.99), is like
its predecessors: a cleverly told, extremely readable tale.
It differs slightly from the other Bosch books, though, in
that it originated as a 16-part serial in The New York Times
Magazine and that it takes place in a very short 12-hour
period.
Connelly is at his best. The story begins, as most
Bosch tales do, with a murder in L.A. that Bosch is called
out to investigate. Bosch promptly gets enmeshed in a territorial
battle with the FBI because the murder has serious terrorism
implications. As the tale gets more complicated, Bosch gets
into his usual deep kim chi with his superiors and with the
feds. Along the way, he has a gripping two-page flashback
to a particular tunnel rat mission.
It all feels real, primarily
because Bosch is so well sketched. He has a temper; he is
set in his ways; he has made some big mistakes in his life;
he is emotionally scarred by a hardscrabble childhood and
a rough tour in Vietnam. But he is very smart, is an ace
detective, has learned (by and large) from his experiences,
and he is dedicated to bringing murderers to justice. Plus,
he doesn’t take any crap from anyone.
Oh and he’s usually right about everything. That’s
the kind of fictional Vietnam veteran we need more of.
MEMORIALIZING
PHOTOGRAPHS
You can count on a photography-heavy book published by the
National Geographic Society to be filled with great images
and illuminating text. Where Valor
Rests: Arlington National Cemetery (192 pp., $30) is a commemorative book that offers
dozens of evocative images of the iconic national cemetery
on the grounds of Robert E. Lee’s old plantation across
the Potomac from Washington, D.C. The book contains 175 images
of gravestones, memorials, the amphitheater, and other structures
at Arlington, as well as portraits of the people who work
there, the military men and women who are on duty there,
visitors, and mourners at military funerals.
There is an excellent
introduction by Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author
Rick Atkinson on the history of the cemetery, complete with
fascinating old photos. The book’s
new photos—the work of more than a dozen Washington
photographers, including several active-duty military folks—are
interspersed with a half-dozen essays. National Geographic
is giving 5,000 copies of the book to families of newly interred
military personnel. Each book given to the families also
will include a DVD of National Geographic’s one-hour
television special on the cemetery.
Just about all of the
memorials showcased in Larry Bond and F-Stop Fitzgerald’s
coffee-table book, The Mighty Fallen:
Our Nation’s
Greatest War Memorials (Smithsonian/Collins, 144 pp., $29.95),
actually are dedicated to veterans, rather than wars, and
several are in Canada. Author Bond and photographer Fitzgerald
include first-rate color photos and brief comments about
four Vietnam veterans memorials: the 82nd Airborne Memorial
at Fort Bragg, the North Carolina Vietnam Veterans Memorial
in Raleigh, The Wall in Washington, and the nearby Vietnam
Women’s
Memorial.
ON GUARD
Every man who was of draft age during the Vietnam War does
not have to be reminded that one almost surefire way out
of going to the war zone was to join the National Guard if
you could get in. Only those with luck or with connections
succeeded in getting into the Guard during the Vietnam War
era. You won’t find those facts in Michael D. Doubler
and John W. Listman, Jr.’s The
National Guard: An Illustrated History of America’s
Citizen-Soldiers (Potomac Books,
224 pp., $19.95, paper), which provides a concise history,
with plenty of illustrations, of National Guard activities
going back to before the Revolutionary War.
Doubler, a retired
Army colonel, and Listman, a retired Army warrant officer
who served as a medic in Vietnam, include a brief section
on the Vietnam War, in which they provide the following facts:
Although President Johnson refused to call up the National
Guard and Reserves when he drastically escalated the war
in 1965, some 6,000 Army National Guardsmen volunteered to
serve in Vietnam and 23
of them were killed in action. Johnson was forced to call
some 24,500 National Guardsmen and reservists to active duty
in April of 1968 in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. Thirty-one
units served on Army posts around the world for extended
periods of time; eight of those units went to Vietnam, including
Company D (Ranger) of the 151st Infantry from Indiana, the
only Guard combat unit sent to the war.
As for the Air Force
National Guard, the authors note that several units flew
aero-medical evac flights from Vietnam beginning in August
1965 and that volunteer crews flew Christmas gifts and mail
into the combat zone. Later in the war, from May 1968 to
April 1969, four fighter Air National Guard squadrons were
deployed to Vietnam. They flew some 30,000 sorties. Seven
AFNG pilots and one intelligence office were killed, and
three were MIA.
NONFICTION IN BRIEF
Washington Post military reporter Steve Vogel’s The
Pentagon: The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the
Pentagon and to Restore It Sixty Years Later (Random House,
626 pp., $32.95) is an engagingly written anecdotal history
of the Pentagon—the building, not the Department of
Defense as an institution. That’s why his one chapter
about the Vietnam War is made up primarily of a long, journalistic
account of the huge October 1967 antiwar demonstration that
took place there; a recounting of Robert S. McNamara’s
last day on the job, on February 29, 1968; and the details
of the May 19, 1972, bombing of a toilet in a Pentagon women’s
restroom by antiwar radicals.
Jeff Lee Manthos’s Steel
Beach: My Life as a Naval Aircrewman, 1972-1976 (Inkwater
Press, 310 pp., $17.95, paper) is a smooth memoir of the
author’s
military experiences, which began when he joined the Navy
in September of 1972 after getting the worst possible draft
number, one. His tour of duty included serving as a crewman
aboard Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King helicopters in various parts
of the globe, including in the South China Sea in Vietnamese
coastal waters in 1973 and 1974. The book’s title comes
from what sailors called the flight deck of aircraft carriers.
David
L. Schalk’s intriguing War and
the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam, first published in 1991, is now out
in a new paperback edition (University of Nebraska Press,
258 pp., $19.95). The book looks closely at intellectuals’ reactions
to both of those controversial wars, and the new edition
contains a preface by noted Vietnam War scholar George Herring,
the author of, among other books, America’s Longest
War, and a new introduction by the author, an emeritus history
professor at Vassar College.
The title of noted Cornell University
historian Walter LaFeber’s
The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam and the
1968 Election (Rowman & Littlefield,
240 pp., $24.95) refers to what the author calls “a
life-or-death bet” made by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson,
and Nixon “that Americans could fight a long war against
a determined foe, and at the same time, maintain order and
protect constitutional rights in their own society.” All
three presidents, LaFeber maintains, lost the bet, and none
more than LBJ, who bore the brunt of the blame for the social
upheavals of the late sixties, and paid for his mistakes
by bowing out of the 1968 presidential race. The book is
well written, well researched, and well argued. One nitpick:
LaFeber refers to South Vietnamese communist forces in 1968
as the “Viet Minh.”
Clinical psychotherapist Ed
Tick’s War and the Soul:
Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress
Disorder (Quest Books, 305 pp., $19.95, paper) is a distillation
of the author’s work with Vietnam War and other veterans
over the last three decades. In it, Tick uses case studies
to illustrate his theory of the importance of how deep-rooted
psychological and spiritual issues influence the cause and
treatment of PTSD. This is a valuable addition to the literature
of war mental trauma and how to come to grips with it.
Michelle
D. Sherman and DeAnne M. Sherman’s Finding
My Way: A Teen’s Guide To Living with a Parent Who
Has Experienced Trauma (Seeds of Hope Books, 130 pp., $20,
paper) is a practical and helpful guidebook for sons and
daughters of a parent with PTSD. Michelle Sherman is a clinical
psychologist who directs the Mental Health Program at the
Oklahoma City VA Medical Center.
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