Customer Reviews

Nam-A-Rama

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The story is set in motion by a president who greatly resembles Lyndon Johnson. We probably know too much about LBJ for wild satirical riffs: For all his faults, he didn't launch the Vietnam War at a pizza party. Still, the novel's early scenes set the tone. "Nam-a-Rama" soon takes flight, its plot veering wildly, darkly and amusingly as we follow the exploits of the narrator, Almost Capt. Jack Armstrong, and his mad buddy, Almost Capt. Gearheardt.

At one point, Armstrong is assigned as air officer to a Marine infantry company in Vietnam, calling in bombs and shells to keep the grunts from being overrun. For a chapter or two, we're persuaded that ground combat -- with its death, fear, heroism, profanity and stink -- is a weird joke played upon humans by the immortals. God, in Mr. Jennings's telling, wears a cashmere sweater and loud pants and is in a hurry to get on with his golf game.

Portraying the absurdity and grotesque oddity of war, Mr. Jennings rivals his hero, Joseph Heller, to whose World War II novel "Nam-a-Rama" clearly pays tribute. (Like Heller, Mr. Jennings mines his personal experience -- he was a U.S. Marine and Air America helicopter pilot in Southeast Asia.) The story eventually moves from battle to back channels: At the behest of President Larry Bob, the two almost-captains go to Hanoi to strike a deal with Ho Chi Minh, or perhaps to kill him. They might even accomplish their mission -- whatever it is -- were it not for Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who has been studying "Catch-22" in the belief that it represents America's strategic guide for the Vietnam War.

"Nam-a-Rama" culminates -- as real life often does -- in a confusion of motives, misdeeds and unintended consequences. But all to wonderful comedic effect. Then, at the last, Mr. Jennings limns his japes with a tribute to the men who fought in Vietnam, especially to the Marines, in words so beautiful that they brought tears to my eyes. Rarely does a novelist storm the emotional ramparts so decisively.

Buy it. Read it. Keep it in your library. It's the Great Vietnam War Novel.

-- Dan Ford

While I do not read much fiction anymore, I do enjoy certain types of stories. This is a comic romp that is based in Vietnam (or Viet Nam, if you prefer) during the Johnson years, but it takes enough liberties with reality that the clear parody of Johnson is only referred to as President or Larry Bob. Nixon is called by name, but McNamara is referred to by his characteristic slicked back hair.

The story is told by Jack Armstrong (the character is well aware of the ironic use of his name) and tells the tale of his adventures with his friend Gearheardt (did that name start is Gearhead?). Gearheardt is a CIA pilot who was, at one time the CIA pizza delivery guy to the Whitehouse. He ends up, on a secret mission that will take place is some unspecified future with cloudy goals in Hanoi. Jack is a Marine helicopter pilot who befriends Gearheardt and they head off on their adventure together. One thing that you have to pay attention to is that the story is told by Armstrong and you have to wonder how he would know some of the things about Gearheardt. And you will also note that Gearheardt's reality gets awfully foggy at times.

While waiting for the signal that it is time to head north, they are involved in actual combat and rescue operations In Country that are told with breath taking clarity. The author, Philip Jennings, was much like Jack Armstrong in being a Marine helicopter pilot and doing work for Air America. I don't know if he actually knew guys like Gearheardt, but I am sure he did, because there were crazed heroes (hard to tell which at times) like him in higher quantity than one might suspect. Read any book on SOG or special forces operations in Vietnam and you will find the pages full of them.

This book has some tremendously funny scenes. One I can talk about without ruining the plot for you is a scene where a skipper is trying to synchronize watches for his team, but can't remember what his watch is synchronized with because he has a second watch synchronized with the artillery that is set to a slightly different time. It turns out that none of the other team members even bothered to bring their watch to the briefing.

Jennings writes wonderfully well. He writes adventure with sharpness and with great humor. In talking about night flying operations on a carrier Armstrong notes, "Baxter used to say the only good thing about night flying off the boat was that it gave him a chance to s**t his pants and not get teased about it." Note, that the language of the book is, well, frank. No asterisks to be found anywhere. And several, well, many scenes, involve bars with the kinds of inhabitants that one might expect that soldiers would seek out including women who don't bother with clothes for obvious reasons.

I loved this sentence, it captured the horror of the situation with the kind of detachment war demands, "A nice friendly kid who would later make the fatal mistake of flying a burning helicopter upside down with bullets in his body."

In another place, Jack says, "I hadn't had butterflies in my stomach for a long time, but when the choppers carrying the company that I was attached to fell toward the strike zone at 0730 the next morning, the butterflies were giant fanged bats fighting each other." Beautifully put.

The book has a pretty cynical view of the war overall, but not of the men who fought it. It involves the protagonists in bizarre situations that are either harrowing or delightfully nuts. The author shows us the ambiguity that seems to be the reality of life as a spy, and some of the awful things these folks suffer (as well as what they do).

I enjoyed this book a great deal. If you enjoy funny adventures with some bite to them, you will enjoy this, too.

I thought Nam-A-Rama was hilarious - though quite tragic. I thoroughly enjoyed following the story of the hapless lead and his pal on a series of misadventures, taking them through Vietnam and introducing them to a variety of crazy characters that either help them - or don't - along the way. Consequently, Nam-A-Rama is an interesting look at the motivations for war and the effect that it has on those involved. I would recommend this book to anyone - any generation, men or women...I think its a great read, very entertaining and will certainly lend some perspective to many current events.

The dominant cultural tendency is to place satire squarely in the nihilistic genre. Since there is no meaning or purpose the only thing left for us to do is laugh.

I doubt that's what Jennings had in mind in writing Nam-A-Rama. I have no idea if Jennings is "religious," in the conventional sense or otherwise. But he has written a religious novel par excellence.

If there is one thing more deadening than the war itself, it is all the drivel that has been written about it that claims to have found the true meaning of the war, usually hidden in some heretofore secret document, or in the mindset of the primary decision-makers, or the fact that McCarthy had purged all of the experts on Communism from the Defense and State Departments (McNamara's personal excuse).

Jennings is not saying there is no hidden meaning. Only that it is not to be found on the psychiatrist's couch or in submitting to the conventional ideological pandering that takes place in academe and in most of the other textual post mortems on Vietnam. In particular, he has absolutely no use for the leftist crap that masquerades as moral high mindedness. No. Jennings' satire discloses that it does not require an evil conspiracy to cause a monumental screw-up. It only requires human nature, something which you and I share. And what is that nature, and the political reality that it spawns? We are actors in a play that we did not write in which the script is a phenomenology that is in a continuing state of approximation. And what kind of God would create a world of screw-ups that requires salvation? Only God knows, but Jennings has approximated the paradoxical answer: we are in no position to demand an answer. And therein lies the beginning of redemption.

Many reviewers seem to be a little too caught up in whether or not this Marine helicopter pilot's debut novel is a ripoff of, or homage to, Heller's classic Catch-22. While it certainly borrows some of the stylistic devices, and has a similar antic absurdist sensibility, it's way over the top in its own way and deserves to be read on its own merits. Sure, Catch-22 stands as such a towering achievement in the genre, but does that mean no anti-war novels should ever be written again? In any event, the book kicks off with probably the best first sentence I've read all year: "Gearheardt and I were having lunch next to a pile of dead Laotians when he came up with his scheme to redeem ourselves with the Marine Corps and settle the score with the Cubans." If that alone doesn't grab and interest you, move on to the next book on your reading pile.

The two antiheroes of the story are Marine helicopter pilot buddies Armstrong and Gearheardt. They embody two sides of the American psyche: Armstrong is the introspective one, always trying to understand why things need to be done and what the end result is supposed to be, while Gearheadt is the brash, crazy, testosterone addled, take action guy. Things commence when Armstrong is present (mistaken for a pizza delivery man) at the White House meeting in which a very, very LBJish president and the Joint Chiefs decide to cook up a war in Vietnam to boost the economy and poll ratings. The ongoing satirization of president "Larry Bob" is pretty rote stuff, and not so effective in our own time, when the president is a walking self-satire. Later, when it is realized that the war is out of control, the duo is taken from combat and tasked with a secret mission to either kill Ho Chi Minh or negotiate with him for peace. If that sounds bizarre, well, that's the kind of book it is. The story proceeds in picaresque fashion, as they make their way to Hanoi, and meet up with sex-kitten movie star Barbonella (standing in for Jane Fonda), whom the president has sent to help them.

It's a hard book to try and explain, since the story veers all over the place, including some vivid scenes of actual combat, a sergeant who may be about to kill the heroes, a bevy of hookers, military intelligence turf wars in the White House bathrooms, and a man code named Whiffenpoof who may be a British or Cuban spy (or both), a Mustang vs. Corvette car chase between Ho Chi Minh and General Giap, and heartfelt warmth to the soldiers who served. It's all pretty out of control and rollicking, populated entirely with outsize characters and tempered with levity-ending moments of awful combat violence. It's a schizophrenic sort of novel that kind of works in its own bizarre way but not really, the satire is sometimes not as focused as one might like, and the surrealism of it gets a bit out of hand. There are gems sprinkled throughout it, but it's best read by those with a taste for the absurd.

Having grown up during the '60's, I had a rather distorted view of the Vietnam War - and this book screws it up even more! I couldn't put it down. At times laugh out loud funny; and in other places poignant scenes that bring unwanted tears gushing up - and all the while threading a clever storyline and interweaving dramatic battle scenes - this book breaks all the rules and gives enjoyable storytelling a whole new meaning. I'm not sure I can make it any plainer - you've missed out on the next Catch-22 of the Vietnam War if you don't read this book.

I laughed from the first page on, and couldn't put it down. It's a captivating, surreal, hilarious take on the deadly foibles of foreign wars. And despite the open humor, this book communicates on many levels. It's almost as if Mr. Jennings had divined the way to reach many different kinds of readers at whatever level they are prepared to understand his complex views on courage, friendship, duty, honor, humanity, leadership, capitalism and sanity.

It's a fun novel for the beach. But I expect generations of students to spend time analyzing this book, and details of Jennings' life to determine whether he was simply proposiing a light take on Vietnam, or offering a far more nuanced set of commentaries that could only be palatably delivered to a mass audience in the guise of humor. Personally, I suspect the latter. I'm glad that I read it, and recommend it unequivocally.

Steve Lefkovits, Emeryville, CA

Yes, this book is absurd, and yes it's surreal, but dear reader, this is a rare glimpse into a very unique mind of man. Through his characters, Jennings reveals to us a way of thinking, a view of the world, that I've never seen before. And it's facinating. Read it and enjoy it not because it resembles something else, but because it stands alone as an example of just how creative, inside out, upside down, and entertaining the human mind can be.

War is extreme--extreme boredom to some, extreme danger to a few, extreme loneliness to most, and extreme bitterness to the majority of the Vietnam vets I know. We were given a crappy war to fight, did the best we could with what we had, and went home to protests and girls who would not date us if they found out where we'd spent a year of our young lives. Most of us learned to pretend we'd been somewhere else, and put a lid on our memories.

And then comes Phil Jennings. His book is as absurd as the reality of Vietnam truly was, and is like Heller's "Catch 22" but far better. I literally cried from laughing, and cannot remember any book effecting me that way before. I have recommended it to other veterans and non-veterans, and both have enthusiastically told me how much they enjoyed it. Perhaps it is more appreciated by the first group, as the veterans of a crappy war need to be able to laugh about it. Laughter truly is the best medicine, and Jennings makes it possible for a whole generation that previously had begun to think there was no joy in Mudville.

I gotta admit to some nervousness in the opening section, as we're introduced to the exasperated Armstrong and exasperating Gearheardt toward the end of their hyperkinetic war-&-spy hijinks, and they discuss the dense plot we've not yet experienced. In these first conversations I felt seriously burdened by the weight of the "wacky." But then Part I closed with a glimmer of hope (a crazed and ineffectual yet wonderfully committed "therapist") and we shift into Part II, a flashback to trickster Gearheardt delivering pizza to a meeting of the Joint Chiefs with President Larry Bob ... and this section is one of two astonishing bits of writing in a generally fine novel.

It is hard to be funny, and even harder to write funny: the strain so often shows, and you see the flopsweat and the physical exertion of the writer crafting her or his joke. I suppose it's akin to reading about magic tricks: interesting, but usually not the same as seeing the lady sawed in half. But Jenkins is good with the saw; his LBJ is a glorious achievement. Part II was all presto-digito, an extended glorious performance of Jennings' Strangelovian skill with the seriously silly.

In a very different register, the novel's war imagery impressed, but sometimes did not fully immerse, was a little too reminiscent of its great ancestors. But chapter 12, in and around the silly and the bleak and the absurd, turns to combat in the air, and it's as strong, stirring, shattering as any of the greats.

The graft between such heart-stopping and eye-poking doesn't always take, and the junctions of horror and low comedy on occasion dislocate the reader rather than complement (or at the best of moments complicate) one another. But it's a very good novel, not to mention a very good first novel, not to mention a very funny novel (rare indeed). I'll be reading the second.