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Books In review
Reviews By Marc Leepson
Many Vietnam War POW/MIA activists are convinced that the
Vietnamese held back live POWs in 1973. Some believe that
hundreds of those men are alive and being held against
their will today in Vietnam and Laos. And some believe
that Nixon administration higher-ups knew that the Vietnamese
kept American prisoners in 1973 and that every presidential
administration since then has known this and has engaged
in a cover-up of that knowledge.
At the top of this list
of true believers in all of the above is former North Carolina
Republican Congressman Bill Hendon, who served in the House
for two terms during the Reagan administration. Hendon
became intensely interested in the live-prisoner issue in
1981. His interest has only increased in the last 26 years.
That
fact is made abundantly clear in Hendon’s decades-in-the-making
book, An Enormous Crime: The Definitive
Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia (Thomas Dunne Books, 640
pp., $29.95), which he wrote with Elizabeth Stewart, a lawyer
whose brother is listed as missing in action in Vietnam.
The
book gained a good deal of attention when it was published
in June. It is a massively detailed account of the post-1973
Vietnam War POW saga, replete with oceans of excerpts from
intelligence data of live-sighting reports in Vietnam and
Laos. It also contains Hendon’s account of his own
role in the story.
Hendon offers evidence that officials in
the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush
II administrations have worked systematically to cast doubt
on virtually every live-sighting POW report that came their
way. The conspiracy, Hendon claims, reaches into the CIA,
the Pentagon’s
POW/MIA Affairs Office, the DIA, Congress, and the White
House.
Hendon is not shy about naming names of those he holds
responsible for what he believes is a thirty-year cover-up.
Among those high on his list: Henry Kissinger, Sens. John
McCain and John Kerry, Paul Wolfowitz (when he was Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State for Asian and Pacific Affairs
in the Reagan years), Anne Mills Griffith (after she went
to work for the Pentagon), George H.W. Bush (particularly
when he was Vice President under Reagan), Reagan’s
National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, Richard Childress
(when he was in charge of POW/MIA affairs on the National
Security Council), Reagan Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger,
Colin Powell (when he was Weinberger’s senior military
assistant), and Dick Cheney (when he was George H.W. Bush’s
secretary of defense).
Does Hendon prove his main points?
It’s difficult to
say. What can be said with certainty is that his book has
proven to be red meat for the true believers in the live-POW
conspiracy theory. And it has given Hendon’s detractors—and
there are many of them—more ammunition buttressing
their contention that his main point is, at best, far-fetched.
Hendon
himself lists four crucial points that cast doubts on his
arguments. To wit: “Not one of these POWs has
ever (author’s italics) been released.” And “not
one has ever been rescued.” And even though “perhaps
a dozen or so are reported to have escaped” from POW
camps after the war, “not one has ever made it to freedom.” And
the “absurd charge” that “a thirty-year
bipartisan cover-up spanning seven presidential administrations
has kept the truth about these prisoners secret.”
Does
anyone, Hendon asks, “really believe that such
a cover-up could succeed in Washington, D.C., where it is
well known that one cannot keep something secret for thirty
minutes, much less thirty years?” The book never definitively
answers any of these pivotal questions.
LONG LOST DIARIES
The publishing history of Last Night
I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram (Harmony Books, 225 pp., $25)
falls into the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category. It
involves Vietnam veteran Fred Whitehurst, who saved the diaries
and smuggled them out of Vietnam just before he was going
to burn them in 1970 in Duc Tho where he was serving as an
Army MI lawyer. It involves his brother, Rob Whitehurst,
also a Vietnam veteran, whose Vietnamese wife translated
the diary three decades later. And it involves the return
of the diary two years ago by the Whitehursts to the family
of Dang Thuy Tram, a doctor who served with the Viet Cong
and who perished in the war.
The diary was published in Vietnam
in 2005 and became an immediate popular success, selling
430,000 copies and creating a minor sensation. People began
flocking to the diarist’s
grave near Hanoi; ground was broken for a new hospital in
Duc Pho bearing her name; and a memorial erected on the spot
where she died. “She had become a folk hero,” author
Frances (Fire in the Lake) FitzGerald notes in her illuminating
introduction to the new book in English, which has been translated
by Andrew X. Pham.
That’s the good news about this heartfelt
diary that exposes a young woman doctor’s deepest emotions
from April of 1968 when she was the 25-year-old chief physician
at a VC field hospital in the Central Highlands, until her
death by a bullet wound in June of 1970 at a clinic in the
Nai Sang Mountains. The diaries give an illuminating picture
of what life was like among the enemy guerrillas, especially
in the medical community. That said, the diaries make for
less-than-gripping reading. The entries veer from one topic
to another, dwelling too much on Thuy’s thoughts about
her significant other.
ROBICHEAUX XVI
James Lee Burke’s latest Dave Robicheaux detective,
The Tin Roof Blowdown (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $26),
is another masterpiece of the genre. In this, the 16th Robicheaux,
Burke again concocts a riveting tale centering on his flawed
but quietly heroic Cajun sheriff’s deputy and Dave’s
runaway-truck buddy, disgraced ex-New Orleans cop Clete Boyer,
whom Dave describes as “a beer-soaked, blue-collar
knight errant.” Burke spins out a page-turner filled
with memorable characters (many of them super sleazes) as
Dave and Clete risk life and limb (and their sanity) to solve
a nasty series of crimes in and around the Big Easy and New
Iberia Parish where Dave lives and works. This one’s
set just before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.
As usual,
Dave and Clete’s service in the Vietnam War
is a constant theme. As he navigates his way through the
murky waters of Katrina’s aftermath, Dave constantly
is reminded of his dangerous tour of duty as an infantry
LT in the worst of the Vietnam War. The book, in fact, opens
with two pages of Dave talking about his dreams that “always
contained images of brown water and fields of elephant grass
and the downdraft of helicopter blades.”
Burke’s
best work has been called Faulknerian. This tale, redolent
with the cries and whispers of the southern Louisiana landscape
in extremis and the deeds of a series of good and bad characters,
fits that bill. It’s a
great read and a great piece of fiction.
FICTION IN BRIEF
The much-praised literary novelist Jane Smiley, who won the
Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, sets
her newest book, Ten Days in the Hills (Knopf, 449 pp., $26), among the Hills
of Beverly in 2003. The book, which the critics loved, centers
on a 58-year-old Hollywood director named Max and nine other
characters, including his new wife, ex-wife, daughter, stepson,
and agent. They spend ten days together endlessly talking
politics, movies, books, health regimens, and relationships.
They also engage in lots of sexual activity.
What’s
the point? The critics said it was satire and a send-up of
Hollywood fatuousness, self-indulgence, and just plain idiocy.
This critic found it difficult to stay focused on these mostly
unlikable characters as the novel goes on and on and on and
on. Oh, Max is a Vietnam veteran, having served as a company
clerk in a rear area. The war, though, hardly comes up.
NONFICTION
IN BRIEF
Prolific aviation historian Walter J. Boyne, who commanded
a USAF Squadron
in Thailand during the Vietnam War, has updated his 1997
book, Beyond the Wild Blue: A History
of the United States Air Force (Thomas Dunne Books/St.
Martin’s 544 pp.,
$35), with a second edition that includes three new chapters
on post-1997 matters. Boyne’s 40th book includes his
particularly harsh assessment of Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara’s strategy of not unleashing the “total
application of air power in North Vietnam.” Had that
been applied from the beginning, Boyne says, it would have
led to “quick military victory” and “the
lives of millions of people would have been spared, hundreds
of billions of dollars would have been saved, South Vietnam
would not have been ravaged, Cambodia would not have had
to endure the Khmer Rouge, and the United States would not
have had the ugly experience of the disaffected 1960s and
1970s.”
MEMOIRS & BIOS IN BRIEF
Whenever someone stereotypes those of us who served in Vietnam
as a bunch of undereducated societal bottom feeders, I think
of people like VVA member Thomas F. Bayard. Tim Bayard, as
his friends call him, joined the Army as the draft was breathing
down his neck in 1966 after he’d graduated from Stanford,
studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and was about to begin
a career as an architect. Instead, he served his country
for three years, including a not-uneventful tour in Vietnam
with the 66th Engineer Company. Bayard tells his life story
very well in No Cats in Vietnam: The
Memoir of a Straightleg Engineer (Xlibris, 265 pp.,
$28.79, hardcover; $18.69, paper), a thoughtful book that
is a fine addition to the Vietnam War memoir canon. For more
info, go to www.nocatsinvietnam.com
Kenny Wayne Fields’ memoir,
The Rescue of Streetcar 304: A Navy
Pilot’s Forty Hours
on the Run in Laos (Naval Institute, 352 pp., $29.95)
focuses on the author’s
singular experience after he was shot down on his first mission
on May 31, 1968, flying a Navy A-7 Cosair 2 jet in central
Laos off the aircraft carrier USS America.
Fields uses many
reconstructed quotes to replay his harrowing time on the
ground, during which he was wounded by friendly aerial ordinance.
He survived and went back to flying combat missions four
months later and during a second tour.
Retired Marine Col.
Donald L. Price’s The First Marine
Captured in Vietnam: A Biography of Donald G. Cook (McFarland,
334 pp., $35, paper) tells the story of Cook, a Marine Corps
Colonel who was captured on December 31, 1964, while serving
as an ARVN adviser and who died in captivity three years
later, having endured abysmal conditions in a series of tortuous
POW camps. For his courageous leadership in the camps he
was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Price is donating
all royalties from the book’s sales to Cook’s
grandchildren. For more info, go to www.mcfarlandpub.com or call 800-253-2187.
Kenneth Michael Kays was a young 101st
Airborne Division PFC medic who received the Medal of Honor
for his actions on May 7, 1970. Kays, a conscientious objector
who allowed himself to be drafted but carried no weapons,
braved intense enemy fire to help his fallen comrades, losing
the lower portion of his leg in the process. As Randy K.
Mills shows in Troubled Hero: A Medal
of Honor, Vietnam, and the War at Home (Indiana University,
192 pp., $24.95), Kay’s
life after the war was a downward spiral that included mental
illness and drug abuse and ended in 1991 when he took his
own life.
Melissa B. Robinson and Maureen Dunn’s The
Search for Canasta 404: Love, Loss, and the POW/MIA Movement (Northeastern
University, 233 pp., $24.95) is the story of Navy Lt. Joe
Dunn and what happened when his A-1H Skyraider was shot down
after he strayed over Chinese air space on February 14, 1968.
Robinson,
an Associated Press reporter, and Maureen Dunn, Joe Dunn’s
wife, focus on the aftermath of that day, mainly Maureen
Dunn’s quest to find out
what happened to her husband, a quest that involved her being
one of the founders of the National League of Families of
American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.
New in paper:
Reprints of 2005’s Tempered Steel:
The Three Wars of Triple Air Force Cross Winner Jim Kasler (Potomac
Books, 271 pp., $18.95), in which authors (and USAF Vietnam
veterans) Perry D. Luckett and Charles L. Byler tell Kasler’s
story, including his six long, brutal years as a POW in the
Hanoi Hilton; and last year’s Spymaster:
My Life in the CIA (Potomac Books, 309 pp., $19.95)
by legendary CIA spy Theodore “Ted” (aka “The
Blond Ghost”)
Shackley and Richard A. Finney. The late Shackley ran the
so-called secret war in Laos from 1966-68 and then in 1968-72
served as The Company’s Saigon station chief.
Robert
C. Ankony relies heavily on reconstructed quotes in his memoir,
LURPS: A Ranger’s Diary of Tet, Khe Sanh,
A Shau, and Quang Tri (University Press of America,
306 pp., $37). The author served as a LRRP with Company E,
52nd Infantry, 75th Ranger Detachment, during his 1967-68
Vietnam War tour, and he took part in 22 long-range recon
patrols.
August Jean’s Combat to Compensation:
A Vietnam Veteran’s
Battle for Compensation (AuthorHouse, 181 pp., $21.99, paper)
is an account of the author’s late husband Marshall
Mason’s battles with the VA and his severe mental problems
after his return from the Vietnam War, where he served a
1969-70 tour with the 5th Special Forces. For more info,
go to www.combattocompensation.com
Richard Chamberlin joined the Navy in 1966 after his draft
board gave him the choice of joining the military or being
conscripted. He served in a rear-echelon job in Vietnam in
1967-68 at the Mobile Construction Battalion 58 near Danang.
His memoir, Hitchhiking from Vietnam:
Seeking the Ox (Spinoza,
235 pp., $14.95, paper), concentrates on his travels and
adventures after he came home from the war.
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