Customer Reviews

Rice Paddy Grunt: Unfading Memories of the Vietnam Generation

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John M.G. Brown's book is one of the most useful works to come out of the Vietnam era because it simply relates the soldier's experience and thoughts with minimal evangelizing for one political revisionist view or another. It may not be the "finest", and may not enjoy popularity among those whose opinions seem to count in these sorts of things, but it is an excellent capsule - from a grunt's view - of the Vietnam war. The dirt, tedium and terror of the rice paddies, the elephant grass, the jungles and the treacherous villages are brought to life in simple but powerful images.

Brown [no relation to this reviewer] fought with the real grunts. More famous authors or film-makers, such as Oliver Stone, who also fought with the grunts and did so with distinction, chose to sensationalize the actions of their fellow grunts and paint them as larger or worse than real life just to sell books or movies. This is not one of those books; it is the simple story of how life as a grunt really worked. Those who aspire to be leaders of such men should read this book - twice; many will come away rightly concerned that the demands are too great, and they should indeed find other lines of work before they get anyone killed.

This review is not the place to revisit the argument as to who lost the war and how. Suffice it to say that there is no shortage of books about how someone would have won the war if only he had been in charge (although, oddly, most of those writers WERE in charge). Again, however, this is not one of those books. Brown was not involved in the air-conditioned palace versions of the war conducted in Saigon or Washington. He was a private soldier on the ground.

Fortunately for the reader, he was like many draftees in that he had enough education to record his memoirs effectively, understand where he was and what he was doing, and render cogent opinions on the tactical wisdom of his efforts - and was unusual enough that he didn't bother trying to get into a safer line of work. In a counter-guerrilla war, he figured out early on that there was no grand strategy other than the sum of tactical-level actions. He is promoted almost as a matter of course, as others are killed or evacuated; but he is modest to the extreme in relating his role in that success. He was no company clerk; he started as a regular line grunt, advanced to the reconnaissance platoon, and later became a tunnel rat. These are occupations where simple survival of his assigned duties should have earned high recognition; but as a dirt-eating soldier far removed from Saigon, his list of decorations is shorter by far than it deserved to be (of course his court-martial for drug use played a role in that also).

Every war is of course different from every other war. However, despite the political claims that Iraq is not another Vietnam, in fact there are a number of very good lessons to take from it. The most important include the depiction of the effort to interact with a population that is convinced that their lot is to be subservient to a corrupt or despotic government, regardless of any glossy cover that might be placed on it; the insignificance of self-actualization in an environment where simple survival is the primary challenge; the poor policies that result in a war that relies on frequent rotations rather than being "over till it's over, over there"; and, as a corollary, the near-impossibility of building useful popular support with limited understanding of the local culture and language at the individual soldier level. A common theme throughout the book, unintentional but just an inherent part of the war effort, is the endless cycle of patrols, receiving fire from "pacified" areas, receiving fire from political "no-fire" areas, and dealing with an enemy that does not respect uniforms or the rules of war and uses civilians as human shields. As he points out, it is not a strange thing that unfortunate events sometimes occur; the truly remarkable thing is that they are so rare that when they do occur it is big news. He does not miss the fact that recurs in today's anti-American US media: enemy war crimes and American victories are not news, but friendly losses and rare possibly-criminal actions are big news, and in the absence of bad news the media will cheerfully make some up.

The one thing that strikes the reader a little strangely is that the author is clearly literate; yet, apparently as a means of fitting into an environment where people walk around on drugs and armed, he adopts, and the dialogue portions of the book are written almost exclusively in, the ebonic version of English that did indeed emerge from the Vietnam era. Even in today's better-educated and whiter military, traces of this argot remain in use, as can be seen in almost any semi-candid scenes of soldiers going about their business in Iraq. Another review point is that the maps, while providing a general orientation at the strategic level, are not very helpful even at the battalion action level; since he has apparently used unit logs to obtain precise grid coordinates, access to more detailed maps may be useful.

Although the book is first and foremost a diary of the life of a grunt, issues of the day cannot avoid creeping in. He is there when MLK is gunned down, forever changing the racial interactions within the military which after all (and despite its best efforts to do better) can only mirror the general society. And, yes, there is some drug-related content; it is not glorified, and it is not condemned except when on watch or on patrol, but it is Vietnam, and there it is - all over the place.

He also records the general despair across all ranks, even those who thought the war itself was pretty pointless, that resulted from the activities of the anti-war crowd at home. Of course, the virulence of the anti-Iraq tumult today has been identical to that of the anti-Vietnam crowd in the 1970s, not coincidentally since these are almost exactly the same people, now operating from positions of national power and prominence, trying to legitimize now their despicable behavior then. The courts and public opinion may have ruled that these actions are not treasonous, but this book makes it clear that even cynical grunts did consider it to be treasonous at that time. It is no different now. Brown's theme, without having heard the term itself, is that you cannot be "for the troops but against the war", especially without acting to end the war.