Customer Reviews

Sergeant Dickinson

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I could not put Sergeant Dickinson down. This from a guy who has a house full of partially read books. This is a book for those who were there. And especially a book for those in Special Forces. Jerome Gold's first two sentences took me back to Vietnam. To the grinding of latterite dust in my teeth. To the stench of the dead. To the fear as I had known it. This is a miracle of hard work done by a tough but sensitive man. Gold has captured the raw edges of those things that will be with us forever.

Originally self-published in 1984 under the title The Negligence of Death, this short work of fiction from a former Special Forces Sergeant who served in Vietnam carries the full authority of one who has been there. I hesitate to use this term, both because its overused, and because it can have a negative connotation, but the story is hallucinatory. And by that, I mean that it flits around from scene to scene with little sense of standard narrative, but is full of mood and tone that places the reader firmly on the shoulder of the title character.

Dickinson is a Special Forces radioman in the Central Highlands, where his small units work closely with the "Yards" (Montagnards, a French term for the various minority ethnic groups in the Highlands, such as the Bru, Jarai, Jeh, Nung, and Rhadé people), and are often ignored or forgotten about by the regular U.S. forces. The few battle scenes are typical wartime madness, bleak resignation, and absurdity. Scenes at HQ and in the hospital revolve around the stories told by other soldiers, which reveal a certain element of addiction to the rush of battle. Indeed, many finish their tours only to re-enlist over and over, not because they have a death-wish, but because once there's nothing in civilian life that can match that high, and no one back home can hope to understand that. It's both awful and gripping at the same time, all written in a simple but fluid style that can only come from having lived it.

There are hundreds of works of fiction about the Vietnam War, but this has to be one of the rawest and more important.

This is one of the very best novels to come out of Vietnam. Its combination of humor and horror makes an acid trip look like a polite cocktail party.