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REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON
Of the thousands of books written about the Vietnam War,
few come close to Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway’s
We Were Soldiers Once…And Young, the 1992 memoir
extraordinaire of the Battle of the Ia Drang. It would
be a monumental task for retired Army general Moore and
recently retired journalist Galloway—1999 recipients
of VVA Excellence in the Arts Awards—to top that
classic piece of reporting and analysis.
But Moore and Galloway
come close in We Are Soldiers Still:
A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (HarperCollins, 256 pp., $24.95).
This sterling sequel tells the back story of the battle,
of their 1992 book, and the 1993 ABC-TV documentary that
brought them back to the battlefield. Told in Moore’s
strong first-person voice, this readable narrative goes over
the basics of the November 1965 actions at Landing Zones
X-Ray and Albany, the fiercest components of the 34-day Battle
of the Ia Drang Valley.
Moore, then a lieutenant colonel,
showed exceptional courage and leadership as he saved his
under-strength battalion from certain obliteration under
a withering attack from a 2,000-man North Vietnamese Army
regiment. Galloway, a UPI reporter, had a front-row seat
for the vicious fight that lasted almost three days.
In
their new book, Moore and Galloway present revealing portraits
of two former enemy commanders, Gens. Nguyen Huu An and Chu
Huy Man, whom the authors met—and bonded with—in
Vietnam nearly three decades after the battle. This book
(along with its prequel and the Randall Wallace Hollywood
film We Were Soldiers) proves that Hal Moore is an exceptionally
thoughtful, compassionate, intelligent, and courageous leader
of men. He was one of a handful of Army officers who studied
the history of the Vietnam wars before he arrived. Since
the war, he has been a strong voice for reconciliation and
for honoring the sacrifices of the men with whom he served.
THE
DEFINITIVE NGOK TAVAK
Many VVA members are familiar with the disastrous doings
in May of 1968 at the Special Forces camp on a hill called
Ngok Tavak south of Kham Duc in the I Corps jungle near the
Laotian border. That’s when
the enemy overran the camp and 43 Marines and a Navy Corpsman
were killed, twenty wounded, and only eleven escaped. Twelve
men were reported missing, presumed dead.
VVA, through our
Veterans Initiative, got heavily involved in the accounting
for the missing of Ngok Tavak in the early and mid 1990s.
After years of effort, five of the missing were definitively
identified and enough evidence accumulated at the site to
provide proof of the demise of the additional seven. In 2005,
a military funeral took place at Arlington National Cemetery
for the missing men of Ngok Tavak.
Bruce Davies, who served
multiple tours with the Australian Infantry in Vietnam, does
a smashing job telling the complete story of this important
part of the Vietnam War in The Battle
of Ngok Tavak: A Bloody Defeat in South Vietnam, 1968 (Allen & Unwin
[Australia], 242 pp., paperback).
Davies gives a detailed
accounting of the battle, based on extensive research and
interviews with the survivors. He also presents a full account
of the long, long battle that VVA waged to account for the
missing, including revealing details of the trips made by
VVA’s Veterans Initiative Task Force to Vietnam and
the important work done by Tim Brown, Bill Duker, Donnie
Waak, Tom Corey, and other VVA members. For ordering info,
go to www.allenandunwin.com
THE FIGHTING SEVENTH
John C. McManus, who teaches military history at Missouri
University of Science and Technology, has done a tremendous
job putting together the history of one of the U.S. Army’s
oldest fighting units in The 7th Infantry
Regiment: Combat in an Age of Terror: The Korean War Through
the Present (Forge,
415 pp., $27.95). McManus did his homework and writes engagingly
in this, the first of a projected two-volume series. His
section on the Vietnam War, in which the men of the 7th Infantry
(known as the “Cottonbalers”) served in the 3rd
Battalion of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade (known as the “Redcatchers”),
is engrossing and enlightening.
McManus includes a vivid depiction
of one of the unit’s
low points—a “living nightmare,” as he
puts it—that took place on March 1, 1970, when an inexperienced
captain took his men into a lethal ambush. One of the survivors
was VVA’s National Chaplain, Father Phil Salois, then
a young PFC who made a vow that if he escaped the fighting
alive, he would lead a religious life. The depiction of that
scene is not easy to read, but it is must reading.
CLETE AND
DAVE
My wife asked me if I was reading the new James Lee Burke
novel, Swan Peak (402 pp., Simon & Schuster,
$25.95) to review or for pleasure. I was pleased to say that
I was reading it for both. One of the highlights of my job
is reading one of my favorite novelists, the prolific Burke,
just about every summer when he produces his latest Dave
Robicheaux. Every one of these detective thrillers is as
good as the genre gets.
The new book is no exception. Burke
follows his Robicheaux formula, but keeps things fresh and
compelling. This time—the
17th in the series—Burke moves the action from New
Orleans to the Montana Rockies, where Dave and his fellow
Vietnam veteran and old crime-fighting buddy Clete Purcell
(the defrocked detective) are on an extended vacation. It
doesn’t take long for the boys to get into big trouble
with a gang of violent sociopaths. There are murders aplenty;
Dave and Clete get in trouble with the feds and the local
cops; and they solve a giant mystery in the last pages of
the fast-moving narrative.
Dave and Clete’s service
in the Vietnam War is a constant theme. In fact, the book
opens with former Marine Clete’s
recurring war-induced nightmare. Burke’s muscular,
evocative writing style is evident throughout this violence-filled,
often dark book.
In his dream, Clete “saw a hootch with
a mamasan in the doorway suddenly engulfed in an arc of liquid
flame sprayed from a Zippo-track,” Burke writes. “He
saw a seventeen-year-old door gunner go ape shit on a wedding
party in a free-fire zone, the brass cartridges jacking from
an M60 suspended from a bungee cord. He saw a Navy corpsman
with rubber spiders on his steel pot try to stuff the entrails
of a black Marine inside his abdomen with his bare hand.
He saw himself inside a battalion aid station, his neck beaded
with dirt rings, his body dehydrated from blood expander,
his flak jacket glued to the wound in his chest.”
FICTION
IN BRIEF
Intercourse (Chronicle Books, 216 pp., $22.95),
the latest effort from Robert Olen Butler, is a unique one:
fifty very short stories, each told in the first person by
two people in the act of making love. Butler, the much-honored
literary novelist who served as an Army intelligence specialist
in Vietnam, imagines the coital thoughts of, among many others,
Marc Anthony and Cleopatra, Louis XV and Marie Antoinette,
Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker,
Robert F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, and George W. and Laura
Bush.
Few of them, in Butler’s imagining, have their
minds on what is going on in bed; and that includes the encounter
that happens on August 11, 2007, between “Robert Olen
Butler, 62, writer, Vietnam veteran,” and “Miss
X, 36, hotel desk clerk, daughter of a North Vietnamese soldier” in
room 1503 of the Sheraton Saigon Hotel and Towers.
The ultra-prolific
Stephen Coonts, the former Navy Vietnam War A-6 pilot who
made his literary reputation with Flight of the Intruder
(1986), his first techno-thriller, has two new fast-paced
thrillers: Deep Black: Conspiracy (St. Martin’s,
468 pp., $7.99, paper), which he co-wrote with Jim DeFelice,
and part of which is set in present-day Vietnam, and The
Assassin (St. Martin’s, 352 pp., $26.95), in which
Admiral Jake Grafton of Intruder fame gets involved in an
international terrorist plot.
HERRING ON FOREIGN POLICY
It’s hard to be brief about George Herring’s
massive From Colony to Superpower:
U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University
Press, 995 pp., $35). Part of the renowned Oxford History
of the United States, this impeccably written and deeply
researched volume contains two in-depth chapters dealing
with the Vietnam War, one on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,
and one on the Nixon-Kissinger era. Herring, Alumni Professor
of History Emeritus at the University of Kentucky, is perhaps
best known for America’s
Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, which
was published in 1979, is still in print, and stands as the
best short, comprehensive history of the American War in
Vietnam.
In his new book, Herring weaves Vietnam War policy
into a narrative that covers nearly every aspect of foreign
policy during the war. He calls the war Kennedy’s “greatest
foreign policy failure.” He gives Johnson only slightly
better marks, noting that the “war he took on with
grave misgivings and struggled at great cost to end dominated
his presidency and eventually drove him from office.” As
for Nixon and Kissinger, they “underestimated their
adversaries and overestimated their ability to control events.”
Herring
gives Nixon and Kissinger marks for their “important
achievements” in foreign policy, including the start
of détente with the Soviet Union and opening up relations
with China. Those accomplishments, though, “must be
weighed against huge and glaring failures,” Herring
notes, in Latin America, India and Pakistan, and “above
all” in Vietnam. They “developed Vietnam policies
from badly flawed assumptions and with means entirely inadequate
to the ends they sought. The height of realism is recognizing
when to cut one’s losses. They did that only grudgingly
and after four more years of war, with more than twenty thousand
American lives lost, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.”
David
L. Anderson and John Ernst, the editors of the anthology
The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives
on the Vietnam War (University of Kentucky, 376 pp.,
$35), dedicate this worthy volume to George Herring, who
contributes an excellent essay, “The
War That Never Seems to Go Away,” dealing with how
the lessons and experiences of that war become part of the
debate whenever the United States gets involved, or thinks
about getting involved, in military action around the globe.
Other contributors include Vietnam War historians Marilyn
Young, Robert K. Brigham, Sandra Taylor, Robert Buzzanco,
and Anderson and Ernst.
NONFICTION IN BRIEF
James E. Westheider’s The Vietnam
War (Greenwood, 248
pp., $65) is part of the publisher’s “American
Soldiers’ Lives” series. As such, Westheider,
a University of Cincinnati history prof, gives plenty of
details on daily life in the war zone for American troops,
making good use of oral histories.
Mark Atwood Lawrence’s
The Vietnam War: A Concise International
History (Oxford
University, 208 pp., $18.95) lives up to its subtitle. Lawrence,
a University of Texas history prof who has written widely
on the Vietnam War, provides a well-researched and succinct
account of the war, never straying far from its international
geopolitical implications.
Peter S. Gaytan and Marian Edelman
Borden’s For Service
to Your Country: The Insider’s Guide to Veterans’ Benefits (Citadel Press, 480 pp., $10.95, paper) also lives up to
its subtitle. In very readable prose the authors offer step-by-step
advice on dealing with virtually every aspect of the VA.
Among the book’s appendices is a state-by-state listing
of the addresses and phone numbers of all the nation’s
Vet Centers.
You can find similar information in the newly
published, revised and updated second edition of John D.
Roche’s
The Veteran’s Survival Guide: How to File and Collect
on VA Claims (Potomac Books, 336 pp., $17.95, paper). Roche,
a retired USAF Major, also is the author of The
Veteran’s
PTSD Handbook: How to File and Collect on Claims for Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (Potomac Books, 231 pp., $17.95, paper).
Photographer Robert C. Knudsen’s A
Living Treasure: Seasonal Photographs of Arlington National
Cemetery (Potomac
Books, 200 pp., $29.95) is a coffee-table affair with more
than two hundred evocative color photos, including one of
a Gold Stars Mothers event featuring a VVA Color Guard.
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