Sergeant Dickinson [Hardcover]

Jerome Gold (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1999

Sergeant Dickinson is the 05-Bravo-the radioman-of a Special Forces A Team in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in the mid-sixties.

The camp is encircled and attacked for nine days by the North Vietnamese Army, anxious to lure large American forces into combat for the first time. He survives, just. The remnants of the team are broken up, the soldiers scattered among other commands. A unit that battered, goes the thinking, can't be put back together. Can he?

The war grows ever larger and darker, but Dickinson has the clarity of a person who has been shot at, "the almost dying and then not dying. Afterwards is the best thing there is."

There are a handful of them-Men Without Women, A Walk in the Sun-small, stunning books about men and war. Sergeant Dickinson, says Nelson DeMille, is one of those "classics."

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Green Beret Sergeant Ray "Dixie' Dickinson is under fire at a remote outpost in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. His unit has been decimated by the North Vietnamese, and his friends are dropping like flies. Near the end of the battle, he challenges a sniper to kill him, giving him 11 frustrating shots to do it. He survives the siege unbloodied, only to be severely injured in a training accident. Shipped home to recuperate, he tries to re-establish his relationship with his girlfriend, but the nightmares and the ghosts won't let him rest. He re-enlists and ends up back in Vietnam. Gold has shaped a powerful, merciless novel from this raw material. He captures the exhaustion and waste of war from the point of view of the noncommissioned officer, who cares for his men and wants to keep them alive, all the while questioning the judgment and even the sanity of his commanding officers. The political issues of the war are never discussed; only the reality of the moment matters. A natural for readers of Tim O'Brien. George Needham

From Kirkus Reviews

The grim resignation that replaces fear in the psyches of combat soldiers under fire is vividly dramatized in this latest from Russell (The Prisoners Son, 1996, etc.): an in-your-face character study of an American radioman assigned to a Special Forces unit based in Pleiku in central Viet Nam at the height of the late war. Eponymous protagonist Ray Dickinson is an understandably embittered veteran in a story that begins with his unsparing description of the job of sorting out and disposing of dead bodies; that embraces standard-issue vilification of military myopia, doublespeak, and vainglory (a ``Group Commander . . . [is accompanied by] the master sergeant whose job it was to light his cigars''); and that varies its war-weary tone with sardonic pictures of butchery and devastation on and off the battlefield. All the expected things happen. Soldiers woolgather, swap outrageous tall tales, bicker endlessly, bet on how long it will take critically wounded ``personnel'' to die. Disturbingly irrational images surface in phlegmatic barracks-room conversation (``an elephant bombed and strafed by six sorties of American aircraft'')and even penetrates back home, where Sgt. Dickinson recuperates after a severe hand wound and hears of a fellow soldier blinded when a war protestor threw acid in his face. A stab at reuniting with his ex-wife (who's afraid of him) inevitably fails, and he's soon back in Pleiku (for a ``third tour''), just in time for a climactic North Vietnamese attack (exacerbated by misdirected ``friendly fire'') on his unit's camp, which ends the novel on an appropriately inconclusive note. Sergeant Dickinson in fact hits every note quite convincingly: the books hard to take, but it's harder to look away from it. One must ask if there's anything here that we haven't already seen in such classic Viet Nam texts as Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers and Michael Herr's Dispatches. Even so, this brief, swift tales relentless fatalism and narrative momentum identify it as an authentic member of their company. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Soho; 1ST edition (August 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569471622
• ISBN-13: 978-1569471623
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,924,358 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Going back to Nam?, December 9, 2000

By 

Jim Bernhardt (Arlington, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sergeant Dickinson (Hardcover)

The war in Vietnam has been over for 25 years. The US embassy in Saigon has been torn down and the city renamed. Vietnam's young capitalists are running battlefield tours for aging veterans. Jerome Gold's Sergeant Dickinson (first published in 1988 as The Negligence of Death and republished in 1999 under the current title) brings it back with stunning immediacy. This book is the perfect cure for nostalgia. Whether you are a young reader new to Vietnam or one who has been there and read that, Sergeant Dickinson is a must.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Being There in three pages, August 17, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Middleton,wi) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sergeant Dickinson (Hardcover)

This book says it all with perfect pitch. It captures the visual imagery, dialogue, and complex psychology of the combat experience in a way that is unlikely to be equalled. The radio operator is the perfect observation post for a vietnam novel and Gold clearly knows that role. The sit reps from other outposts are simply brilliant. The elephant bombing, unkown americans entering the perimeter etc. These things really happen. They are not, as I read in a literary journal review, simply a metaphorical device through which the author describes the absurdity of war. The creative reach presented here in a short work is incredible. The wounding and hospital scenes, the inevitable stateside disconnection with civilians followed by the death wish return to the people and circumstances you know. I thought that Micheal Herr's Dispatches had realistic dialogue but he was a journalist not a soldier. If you could leave on any heliocopter, you could never tell the whole story. I have always hoped that someone who fought in the war would get it right. This is it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, June 2, 2005

By 

E. A. Senn (Delaware) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sergeant Dickinson (Hardcover)

This book is a must-read if you are interested in the inside-the-head experience of a soldier in Vietnam. It is a fantastic, stunning, awe-inspiring and troubling book. I could not put it down once I started and I suspect I will read it again soon.