“A woman sees war differently.”

The Lotus Eaters
by Tatjana Soli
Published by St. Martin's Press
4 Out of 5 Stars

Initially set against the fall of Saigon and then flashing back to the early 1960's, Tatjana Soli's The Lotus Eaters evokes the hypnotic horrors of war set against a lush, culturally rich landscape that lured many photojournalists during the Vietnam War. Falling victim to the intoxicating mix of adrenaline, fear, curiosity, and self-righteousness, they--just as the lotus eaters of Homer's The Odyssey--forsake their homelands as war becomes their passion and their comfort.

The novel focuses on Helen Adams, a naive, uninitiated field photographer whose desire to connect with the military life of her father and her brother leads her to Saigon. A born tomboy, Helen has always resented being shut out of the masculine pursuits she longed to be a part of and quickly finds her experience in Vietnam is to be no exception. As a woman in war, she's viewed as a curiosity, a sexual object, a harbinger of bad luck, an inconvenience. However, her tenacity and her willingness to stoically endure the soldiers' hardships begins to earn her a grudging respect. It also helps that she's willing to understand and experience Vietnam in a way other Americans aren't--to look beyond the headlines and the government shading of events; to know its people and its culture: "That was the experience in Vietnam: things in plain view, their meaning visible only to the initiated" (7).

Soli's characterization of Helen is presented as a woman who is constantly evolving, growing as she tests herself in the ultimate masculine sphere and as she confronts her own hypocrisies in pursuing one iconic image that will capture all the horror, all the waste, and all the courage of war. Helen knows the power of photographs to change the hearts and minds that really matter, those of the Americans back home, and, as such, "Pictures could not be accessories to the story--evidence--they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame" (118). At the same time, she knows her craving for such a photograph is that of an addict's and will never be sated; as soon as she has a photograph that seems to define everything she wants to communicate, she knows she'll take increasingly dangerous risks as she tries to top previous successes. 

The novel also presents the stories of two men who will help define Helen's life in Vietnam: Sam Darrow, a veteran war photographer whose only home is in conflict, and his aide, Linh, a photographer and translator who has belonged to and been damaged by both Vietnamese armies. Through these two men, Helen learns the toll war takes on those tasked with documenting its reality. While not equal to the burden of the young men in battle, the weight of being the one behind the lens, bearing witness to atrocity after atrocity, comes with its own spiritual price.

As lovely as the cover is, it's also deceiving. It's clearly marketed to a female historical fiction audience, so I feared it would be a torrid love story set against a Vietnam that was as authentic as a 1940's sound stage, with maybe a water buffalo roaming through for a dash of "authenticity." While there is a realistic romantic element involved, the real love story is between the photographers and the war. Soli has done her research and the Vietnam in her novel is fully realized: its beauty, its filth, its people, its cities, and its jungles. Her war scenes are harrowing, brutal and realistic, and seeing them through the eyes of a female photojournalist is a uniquely satisfying point of view for a war novel. 

Villain or Unfairly Vilified?

Finding the Dragon Lady:  The Mystery of Madame Nhu
by Monique Brinson Demery
Published by PublicAffairs
4 Out of 5 Stars

"Another focus of the article was on Madame Nhu--a woman who seemed to be a fascinating character to the journalists of the time as I found several references to her in more than one Newsweek article, and as many pictures of her in fashionable dress. It's reported that Diem is little more than the puppet of Madame Nhu and her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu. She's portrayed as an almost comic book like villain--an Asian femme fatale known as 'the dragon lady' by journalists in Saigon. She is described as being 'imperious and iron-willed,' 'a devious, chain-smoking intellectual with a low, rasping voice,' and 'molded into her . . . dress like a dagger in its sheath.' While she's acknowledged to be a serious threat to the United States, much focus is placed on insignificant details about her life. I found it unbelievable that the author of this article made constant reference to how dangerous she was, yet never bolstered these statements with any concrete fact. More time was devoted to her romanticized childhood and her couture clothing than her politics. It made me curious--was the lack of information because she was simply a woman and her dress was more interesting than her politics, or was there a lack of specific information about her involvement in the crimes being committed by the government?"

So, yes, I've quoted myself here. This is from a paper I wrote in response to a Newsweek article entitled Getting to Know the Nhus from September 9, 1963. One of my favorite assignments in my Literature of the Vietnam War class was the personal reaction papers that sent us scurrying to the library and pulling the old bound periodicals from the shelves and reading articles from magazines like Time and Newsweek. Others would simply grab a book, photocopy the first Vietnam article they came to, and trot off to write their paper. Me? I spent hours flipping through the yellowed pages and photographs before I settled on one for my article. And that was how I first encountered the petite dynamo that was Madame Nhu.

While she certainly piqued my curiosity, it quickly became obvious that learning about the real Madame Nhu was virtually impossible due to the obvious negative bias of the press, as well as Madame Nhu's own role in crafting her own image. So when Monique Brinson Demery's book about her personal relationship with Madame Nhu was released, I was excited by the prospect of finally meeting the "real" Madame Nhu.

And did I? Well, yes and no.

This is not a criticism of the book, but rather a reflection of the fact that Madame Nhu was the product of endless contradictions. Born in another time, another culture, another economic class, she certainly could have been a shrewd and intelligent politician. However, her arrival as an unwanted and unloved middle daughter (her mother always suspected she had been "switched" with a common child while she was left in the care of her paternal grandmother) created a keen sense of inferiority that she railed against her entire life (a defiant streak nurtured by a fortune-teller's prediction that "Her star is unsurpassable" and that the young girl was destined for greatness). Her upper-class family had both royal and colonial ties, leaving her oblivious to her Marie Antoinette-like disconnect from the common people (even commenting that she would she would clap her hands as Buddhist monks "barbecued" themselves). Raised in a Buddhist and Confucian household, her later conversion to Catholicism was embraced with a zealot's fervor--and a hurried convert's misapplication of principles (her morality laws banning contraception, polygamy, dancing, gambling, and, of course, the evils of the underwire bra quickly turned her people against her, despite her belief that she was protecting women in particular with many of these edicts).

It's no wonder that the girl who should have been a boy, the Vietnamese woman who couldn't understand the Vietnamese people, the Buddhist who became the dogmatic Catholic, the very embodiment of the collision of East and West, would become such a polarizing and often confusing historical figure.

Demery embraces these contradictions and presents Madame Nhu as a flawed woman with extraordinary potential--a woman desperate to blaze her own trail, yet restricted by her time, her gender, and her own misconceptions about the world. Demery's portrait does not shy away from the vain, arrogant, and manipulative aspects of Madame Nhu's personality. Indeed, we see Madame Nhu baiting Demery with promises that she will release her memoirs to her, as well as controlling and dictating the terms of their relationship. Demery becomes exasperated with Madame Nhu's machinations, but holds out in the hope that their continued exchanges will reveal something genuine about the woman history has both fairly and unfairly maligned. And she succeeds in this. While Madame Nhu is never exonerated by Demery's story, Demery does succeed in creating some sympathy for a woman who, behind closed doors, was pained by the failure of her marriage, desperate for love and approval, and denied the ability to help her husband and her brother-in-law, President Diem, sidestep some of their more foolhardy missteps.

Compelling and readable, Finding the Dragon Lady does not attempt to put Madame Nhu on a pedestal, but rather to dust away some of the misconceptions that have settled over the years on the legacy of the dragon lady.

Going Down the Rabbit Hole in Vietnam

Going After Cacciato
by Tim O'Brien
Published by Broadway/Crown Publishing Group
4 Out of 5 Stars

This book is not for everyone. If you have trouble suspending disbelief or issues with magical realism, walk away now or read O'Brien's The Things They Carried. However, if you can just sit back and enjoy the ride as a master storyteller blurs the lines between reality and fantasy in such a way that there are no hard and fast truths (which is the point in most of O'Brien work), then you will most likely enjoy the experience. Going After Cacciato is less accessible than The Things They Carried because trying to discern the truth of what happens when Cacciato, a young soldier in Vietnam, chooses to go AWOL and walk all the way to Paris is difficult at best. A unit is dispatched to hunt Cacciato down, but encounters a number of bizarre twists and turns along the way (think Catch-22 meets Alice in Wonderland). 

The narrative is split into three distinct time periods and told from the point of view of Paul Berlin. These distinct narratives focus on Berlin's first few months in the war, the hunt for Cacciato, and one night after the hunt for Cacciato is over (this occurs while Berlin is on night watch and thinking back to the hunt for Cacciato). The problem with making sense of the narrative comes from Paul Berlin himself--a young soldier ill-equipped to deal with the violence and atrocity of war, he uses his imagination to while away the tedious hours, as well as to re-create traumatic events with which he's not ready to cope. The point, however, is not what actually happens to Cacciato (in fact, upon a second reading, I found myself questioning the conclusion I came to after reading it for the first time), but how Berlin wisely or unwisely chooses to deal with events that are beyond his ability to control.

Drug Deal Gone Wrong in a Novel Done Right

Dog Soldiers
by Robert Stone
Published by Mariner Books
4 Out of 5 Stars

I began this book thinking it would be about the Vietnam War told from the perspective of an in-country reporter named John Converse. I came to find that, while a few early scenes were set in Vietnam and Converse did occasionally reflect on his time spent there, the focus of the book is a drug deal that goes wrong--horribly, horribly wrong. However, I still loved the book. It has a bit of a Pulp Fiction or Guy Ritchie film feel to it. None of the characters are likable people and they have the moral sensibilities of a gnat, but they're entertaining and a reflection of the shifting values embodied by the time period (when asked why he tried to move heroin from Vietnam to the U.S., Converse replies, "You hear stories over there. They say everybody does it. Being there fucks up your perspective"). Like most Vietnam novels, Dog Soldiers is liberally sprinkled with black humor for those who can find and appreciate it. I would read the novel all over again just for Converse's remembrance of being fragmentation-bombed in Cambodia--a particularly harrowing and well-written scene of self-realization. 

A Broken Family Tries to Regain What Was Lost

Then Came the Evening
by Brian Hart
Published by Bloomsbury USA
5 Out of 5 Stars

Despite not being the focal point of the narrative, all of the events in Brian Hart's Then Came the Evening can be traced back to one defining moment: Bandy Dorner enlisted for Vietnam. We never know what Bandy experienced during his tour of duty because the novel begins after his return home, but we know it had a profound effect. He returns a changed man and, after learning that his home has burnt down and believing his young wife, Iona, to have been inside, a drunk, grief-stricken Bandy turns to the familiarity of violence, shooting and killing the officer trying to subdue him. Little does Bandy know that his pain will only beget pain as his wife, Iona, has left him for another man but is pregnant with Bandy's child--a child who will later be marked and judged by his father's actions.

Now before you chastise me for spoilers, all of this happens in the first few pages of the novel. Then Came the Evening picks up nearly two decades later, as Bandy's son, Tracy, decides to reconnect with the father who never knew of his existence. Bandy's release from prison is imminent and, hoping to mend the shattered family, Tracy sets about reclaiming the abandoned family ranch, restoring the gutted house in anticipation of Bandy's return home. As his wayward parents are drawn back to the hometown and the past they left behind, Tracy, Iona, and Bandy tentatively attempt to recapture a sense of family despite old wounds and fresh betrayals, learning the futility of trying to recapture what never was. 

Then Came the Evening is about people who are broken beyond repair, who have been shaped by proximity to violence and live in a world with sharp teeth. The narrative moves at a slow, unhurried pace and may frustrate readers who crave more external action, but I enjoyed Hart's refusal to rush a story that should unfold for us as it unfolds for the characters. There shouldn't be a race to the finish line here as Hart is writing about life as it is lived, exploring how people are marked by choices made in mundane circumstances. I also enjoyed lingering over the novel's brutally poetic descriptions of the physical landscape that reflects and explores the internal landscape of the characters--especially in the case of Iona and Bandy as they struggle to reconnect with a time and a place and a version of themselves that was, but is no more. These are not characters who are keenly in touch with their emotions, for whom words come easily. Told in vignettes adrift in time and from varying perspectives, the novel allows the stories of each character to jostle against the other like pieces of a puzzle trying to find a way of fitting together.

While Hart does a fine job of depicting the depths to which Iona has sunk after Tracy initially leaves her to find Bandy, it's his portrayal of Bandy that is the real genius of the novel. A man who has been in prison for the last 20 years, Bandy's return home is painful and raw as Bandy's fear and disorientation are palpable. While his crime was admittedly a heinous one, there's also a realization that this Bandy Dorner is not the same one who pulled the trigger years ago. There's something heartbreaking about his cautious hope that maybe something can still be salvaged from the wreck he made of his family; he knows he doesn't deserve it, but it doesn't stop him from wanting it. However, the novel is not interested in making a case for justifying the circumstances of the crime (as Bandy's mother says, "Everybody blames the war for everything. I'm sick of it" [13]), but more interested in making a case for Bandy as a human being--one still capable of brutality, but one who has not forgotten how to feel. 

While the characters in Hart's novel aren't necessarily likable, I admire how they try--with varying levels of success--to make something better of themselves and of each other. While the reader knows the odds are against these shattered people being able to mend one another, there's an inherent nobility in the attempt.

Emotionally Brave, But Underwhelming

A Question of Manhood

by Robin Reardon

Published by Kensington

2 1/2 Out of 5 Stars

This is a tough one, but I'm going to go with 2 1/2 stars. It's tough because I admire any young adult author who is willing to tackle the issue of homosexuality in a way that teaches the need for acceptance and understanding, but doesn't do so in a way that fails to acknowledge the powerful social stigmas and gender stereotypes that still hold sway over pre-teens and teens grappling with what it means to be gay. However, in terms of plot and timeliness, the novel just didn't deliver for me.

The novel is set in 1972 and Paul Landon's brother, Chris, is serving in Vietnam. The novel opens as Chris, the family's golden child who voluntarily enlisted to serve, is home on leave before the Thanksgiving holiday. (In the interest of full disclosure, let me state that much of my disappointment stems from the fact that I thought this novel was going to have a lot more to do with the Vietnam War and with the experience of a gay soldier. If it hadn't been for the Vietnam reference, I would have never picked up the book.) Chris is there long enough to basically set up the time period: he tells some war stories, he throws around some Vietnam military jargon, and brings his brother a pair of Ho Chi Minh sandals. These obligatory Vietnam narrative motifs are basically all we get in the way of setting; if it hadn't been for this early scene, the rest of the book could have just as well taken place in the present day. The night before he leaves, Chris finds out that his boyfriend, Mason, was killed in Vietnam. Paul hears Chris crying in the room next door and when he goes to check on his brother, Chris reveals that he's gay, makes him promise not to tell mom and dad, and tells him that he's going back to Vietnam to die because he has nothing to live for. A few pages later, the family learns that Chris died a hero's death shortly after returning to Vietnam. Talk about a wham, bam, thank you m'am set up. It's not subtle and a bit too contrived for my tastes.

This moves us into the part of the novel with which I was impressed. The aftermath of Chris's death is handled well and with attention to emotional truth. Paul's mother walks around in a catatonic state, his father responds with stoic bravado and advises Paul to be a man and be strong for his mother, and Paul doesn't know what the hell that means. As if the transition between child and adult isn't hard enough, Paul's coming of age is compounded by the burden of carrying his brother's secret, being denied his own guilt and right to grieve by his father, and wanting to break away from Chris's shadow as it's impossible to live up to a brother who was idolized in life and is now revered in death. Paul also grapples with his own questions about homosexuality: can it be cured? does one "choose" to be gay? is it a sin? if not, why is it illegal? what exactly does being gay with another man mean? It's easy for adults to brush these aside as stupid questions, but they only remain stupid and a breeding ground for prejudice if they aren't answered, and I'm guessing in the 1970's there weren't many open and honest answers that a suburban teenager could expect. In typical teenage fashion, Paul internally deals with all of this and makes some poor choices along the way and, in typical parent-of-a-teenager fashion, his father always misinterprets Paul's intent and motivation.

As punishment for his sins (little Paul visited a prostitute and got caught. Stupid Paul. First rule of visiting a prostitute when you're a teenager: don't get caught because you sure as shit don't want your mom to know about that), Paul loses all privileges and is forced to work in his dad's pet shop with J.J., a college student working there for the summer and--guess what?--J.J. is gay. Now Paul has the opportunity to work through the anger and the disgust he feels toward his brother, as well as his grief, since J.J. can be a stand-in substitute for Chris and guide Paul through the labyrinthine questions, prejudices, and stereotypes he has built up in his mind. And it's the pet shop section where the novel lost it for me again. You see, J.J. is the 1970's answer to the Dog Whisperer. He trains dogs who have been abused or neglected by their owners. And apparently every dog in the tri-state area has an issue because this part of the novel lapses into J.J. working his canine magic on dog, after dog, after dog, after dog. Believe it or not, this gets old after a while. By the time he made his 57th speech on dogs being pack animals, establishing his presence as an Alpha male in the dog's eyes, and hitching some sort of little chain around the dog's head, I was ready to hang myself with a leash. And I get what Reardon was trying to do here; J.J.'s amazing calm and ability with dogs comes from learning how to deal with prejudice and bullies. I just think we could have gotten that message after 3 dog training sessions and shortened this sucker up by about 50 pages.

So, here's my beef with the novel: this is clearly a didactic novel for teens, so why is this set during the 1970's against the backdrop of Vietnam? This is Vietnam-Lite and I know Reardon didn't necessarily mean this to be a Vietnam novel, but it seems to date and undermine the novel's message. It's a bit like reading Uncle Tom's Cabin; it's relevant for a particular time and place, but the message that slavery is wrong isn't one I particularly need to hear as I knew that to be a truth before reading the novel. Living in the rural South, I know there are still some vehemently held prejudices out there. However, I don't know that reading a novel about a brother grappling with his brother's sexuality in the 1970's is particularly relevant to a contemporary teenager. I think this could have been more powerful and timelier if Paul had lost a brother to the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, allowing for more of a contemporary connection with the character. However, I respect and admire Reardon's message and handling of the subject matter in a way that acknowledges the complexity of the issues involved.

A Soldier's Tale of Cowardice and Bravery

If I Die in a Combat Zone (Box Me Up and Ship Me Home)

by Tim O'Brien

Published by Broadway

4 Out of 5 Stars

For me, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is the most powerful book that I have every read and it's the standard against which I judge all things O'Brien. In The Things They Carried, O'Brien utilizes a nonlinear and fragmented narrative structure, magical realism, and the power of storytelling to capture the visceral truth that telling the real story can't quite capture. For O'Brien, we must sometimes turn to fiction to capture what is "emotionally true" and, in doing so, be less concerned with an objective reality. In a way, If I Die in a Combat Zone makes this point for him. Written 15 years before Things, If I Die is a memoir of Tim O'Brien's experience in the Vietnam War. There is no metafiction razzle-dazzle, but rather a straight-forward, linear narrative that begins when O'Brien is drafted and ends as he boards the Freedom Bird headed toward home. It's powerful stuff, but not nearly as powerful as his fiction work. Despite that, anything by Tim O'Brien is better than almost anything else out there--fiction or non-fiction.

Having grown up in the post-World War II glow of American military might, O'Brien was raised in the ask-no-questions patriotic culture of the Midwest. Real men were expected to fight. Real men were supposed to look forward to war. Real men craved the opportunity to serve their country and protect their families. O'Brien doesn't reject these values, but these views are complicated by his own philosophical inclinations. He questions the nature of bravery, as well as how American intervention in Vietnam is protecting the average American's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the aftermath, he's left with no certain answers: "Now, war ended, all I am left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is. Dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry . . . Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme? . . . Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."

And that's what O'Brien does in the novel--he tells war stories. He tells of the tedious days of repetition, punctuated by brief bursts of action; he tells of military incompetence and the frustration of not knowing who the enemy is in a land where farmers by day picked up guns at night; he tells of how cruel being sent on R&R was, knowing the brief return to normality would not last. And he does all of this without being preachy; he simply shows us what life was like for the average soldier and leaves us to draw our own conclusions. His language is at once poetic and precise, getting to the heart of all things. No one can capture the peculiar mix of fear, adrenaline fed excitement, and remorse of a soldier's most introspective moments like O'Brien.

At one point, O'Brien ruminates on Ernest Hemingway's fascination with war: "Some say Ernest Hemingway was obsessed by the need to show bravery in battle. It started, they say, somewhere in World War I and ended when he passed his final test in Idaho. If the man was obsessed with the notion of courage, that was a fault. But, reading Hemingway's war journalism and his war stories, you get the sense that he was simply concerned about bravery, hence about cowardice, and that seems a virtue, a sublime and profound concern that few men have." It's a concern that permeates all of O'Brien's work and his treatment of it is indeed sublime.

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

Published by Mariner Books

5 Out of 5 Stars

Awestruck may be the best way to describe how I felt upon reading this book the first time. So how did I feel upon reading it the second time?  The third?  The fourth?  I just want to bow at Tim O'Brien's feet while muttering a Wayne's World style "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy." 

Using non-linear narrative and stringing together seemingly unrelated stories into one ultimately cohesive work, O'Brien achieves something that traditional narrative never could:  his work reflects the emotional truth of what it was like to be a soldier in Vietnam and to be a veteran still living with memories that, when triggered, seem as real and visceral as if they were happening in the present.  This is memoir, metafiction, magical realism, and a whole grab bag of other literary genres rolled into one.  O'Brien himself admits that we as readers may not know which of the stories are "happening-truth" (what objectively happened) and which of the stories are "story-truth" (stories that may not have happened but because they strike the right emotional chord are more valid than what really happened).  However, the reader should not feel manipulated by this storytelling technique as it seeks to forge a connection between those who were there and those who were not; it does not seek to tell what happened, but to make you feel what it was like to be there.  The book is nothing short of a masterpiece. 

There Are Wounds That Time Will Not Heal

Dirty Work

by Larry Brown

Published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

5 Out of 5 Stars

This is one of those books that I use to size up other people.  If you've read Dirty Work and you didn't love it, I wish you well but I doubt I want to know you.  This was the first Larry Brown book that I ever read and, after re-reading it, it is still as powerful and haunting the second time around. 

The novel focuses on two Vietnam veterans in the VA hospital two decades after the war has ended.  Braiden, a black quadraplegic, has spent this entire time in the hospital and his imagination is his only means of escape.  When Walter arrives under mysterious circumstances, Braiden thinks he's found his salvation.  Walter's face was horribly mutilated and shell fragments lodged in his brain cause him to have uncontrollable "blackouts" from which he awakens with no memory.  As these two men talk about their lives as they were and as they are, they revisit the painful landscape of Vietnam and Brown reveals how the war took much more from them than their bodies.  The damage is emotional, spiritual, and mental (as Braiden says at one point, "It do something to you to kill another person.  It ain't no dog lying there.  Somebody.  A person, talk like you, eat like you, got a mind like you.  Got a soul like you . . . You look in somebody's eyes, then kill him, you remember them eyes.  You remember that you was the last thing he seen.") The novel also reflects how it was the poor and, in particular, the black soldiers who were asked to give the most and expect nothing in return--not even valid reasons for fighting. 

Brown's writing is simple, direct, and often bitingly funny when you least expect it.  He knew how to capture the cadences and culture of working class Americans always one paycheck away from the brink of poverty and he always did so with the utmost respect, never denigrating or lessening their value to American society.  When Brown died, we lost one of the finest writers of the American South and this novel is a testament to his gifts.

Confronting the Horror

Kill Anything That Moves

by Nick Turse 

Published by Metropolitan Books

5 Out of 5 Stars

In his famous chapter How to Tell a True War Story from the Vietnam classic The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien says, "True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe" (78).

Kill Anything That Moves is not a pleasure to read. It's not an entertainment. It's a rote account of atrocity after atrocity that gives names and faces to the abstraction created by numbers and statistics. And I felt it in my stomach with every turn of the page. This is war at its most foul, most hellish, most base and brutish. In other words, it's war without the veneer of romanticism; it's war that is not cloaked in nobility and honor and valor. It's about what men can and will do to a people they feel are inferior, labeled as "Other." It's an important book because it confronts us with the truth of what war is and the toll it takes on the land on which it's fought and its civilian populace. And it reminds us of the moral corrosion it sometimes inflicts upon the boys--little more than children--who fight it.

Countless novels and non-fictions have been written about the horror of the Vietnam War and the impact it had on a generation, and rightly so. It is important to acknowledge the service and sacrifice of those who fought, regardless of how one feels about the policies of the U.S. in Vietnam. However, those accounts have mostly focused on the American cost in the war. Turse's account is different in that its purpose is to explore the war atrocities committed by American forces as a result of military policies that reinforced a "kill anything that moves" mentality. The book also reveals that My Lai was not an aberration, but only seemed one after the military used intimidation and cover-ups to keep other atrocities quiet and out of the media. This was especially true of Operation Speedy Express in the Mekong Delta, which led to approximately 5,000 civilian deaths (250).

Because Vietnam was not traditional Western warfare where troops met on a battlefield, the notion of "body count" as a means of determining who was winning was instituted. The results were disastrous. War became a machine with a quantifiable output, leading to increasing pressure to produce high body counts as a sign of American victory. From this, the "Mere Gook Rule" mentality was born--if it's Vietnamese, it must be VC. Kill boards were sometimes erected, keeping tally of how many kills a unit had. Because troops were told that anyone who ran in the presence of U.S. military must be a VC and could therefore by justifiably killed as an enemy, civilians were often purposefully frightened so that they would run. Women, children, and old men who clearly were not enemies were tortured and killed with little or no effort given to ensuring they were, in fact, the enemy. Weapons were planted on some of the bodies so they could be called in as enemy kills. For example, Operation Speedy Express yielded results such as "During the week of April 19 . . . 699 guerillas had been added to the division's body count (at the cost of a single American life), but only nine weapons were captured" (250). Such discrepancies should have raised suspicions--and, in fact, often did--but the whistle blowers were often threatened into keeping quiet. Turse chronicles these harrowing events, both from the perspective of the Vietnamese survivors and from interviews conducted with American veterans.

Turse clearly points the finger of blame at a military establishment more concerned with sweeping everything under the rug than confronting the demons it created with its both spoken and unspoken policies. He's not without sympathy, however, on the part of the average soldier in Vietnam and he doesn't generalize. Not every American in Vietnam is portrayed as a ruthless killer. Many of the soldiers, fresh out of high school, were placed in a war where not knowing who the enemy was, seeing the gruesome and tragic deaths of their comrades, and spending endless days humping through the boonies while worrying about a seemingly phantom enemy created a sense of disorientation, fear, and anger. Combined with fear of retribution should they disobey orders, many would do as they were told without second guessing command. The book is also not without its heroes. Men like Jamie Henry, Ron Ridenhour, and the 100 Vietnam veterans who testified at the Winter Soldier Investigations refused to remain silent about what they had seen, and participated in (both willingly and unwillingly), in Vietnam. The Winter Soldier Investigations themselves "put the lie to any notion of bad apples and isolated incidents . . . the Winter Soldiers explicitly pointed to superior officers and command policies as the ultimate sources of the war crimes they had seen or committed" (239). It took tremendous courage to stand up to the military establishment and these men should be praised for their refusal to keep silent on behalf of a people who seemed a world away to the average American.

I'm not naive enough to think that war is completely unavoidable. However, books like Turse's remind us of what war really is and how it can warp the morality and finer points of human nature. It's also a reminder that when we send our men and women in uniform to fight on behalf of our country, we better make certain it is for a justifiable cause--because the costs are just too high and the sacrifice too great, for both sides, when it's not.