Customer Reviews

War Boys

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All the reviews have not mentioned one aspect of the book "War Boys", which is the coming of age by military brats. This story could have been about me as I travelled from one end of the world to another, following my father. No mention is made of Mr. Shaffner's background, but he is right on the mark. You arrive at a new assignment, you make friends with whomever is available, and you watch them come and go. Kudos to Mr. Schaffner for revealing a population that is often misunderstood by civilians. Hopefully he can produce another novel of a similar genre in the near future.

I enjoyed the book and was surprised it was a first novel. I agree with the other reviewers (including comments re the jarring nature of the profanity and some of the rough spots in the book), so I will be brief. For anyone interested in a view of the Philippines during World War II, I recommend James Webb's superb "The Emperor's General." For an immensely readable nonfiction account of U.S.-Philippines relations I recommend the award-winning "In Our Image."

M.A. Schaffner's novel "War Boys" is on its surface the straightforward story of Charles Barker, a boy during the Vietnam War, spending his early teen years on the Naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines where his father is stationed. In clear and finely detailed prose, Schaffner relates the adventures of Charles and his buddies in Boy Scout Explorer Troop 360, putting themselves through various hair-raising rites of passage in the Philippine jungle, groping toward manhood in an atmosphere in which being a man means constantly having to prove yourself. It is only in the last quarter of the book that Schaffner's real purpose becomes plain. By slow degrees, Charles and his friends discover that the Navy--which represents all they know of life and the future to which they aspire--regards them not as potential recruits, but potential enemies. Schaffner is a poet as well as a novelist, and his first novel demonstrates the subtle art of a poet. It was a master stroke to show the upheavals wrought by the Vietnam War and the rise of the Youth Culture thrrough the eyes of a young boy caught between the two extremes; the resulting indirection gives the poignancy of innocence betrayed a tremendous impact at novel's end. Schaffner is an author who never raises his voice; most of the major tragedies in "War Boys" occur offstage, but are all the more powerful for that. "War Boys" is a novel that reads and feels like the ebb and flow of life; there is not a single character or event in it that feels contrived, and above all Schaffner paints a bracingly accurate portrait of what boys in their early teens actually say, do, and think. "War Boys" lacks the fireworks that would make it a bestseller, but one can see a small, devoted cult gathered round it in future years, in appreciation of its subtle artistry.

I lived in the PI, Subic Bay, on base in Binictican early '60s. I found Schaffner's depiction fascinating. As a military brat (Navy) you typically lose touch with everyone once relocating to a new duty station. It was fun to read about things and places I had also done and been to so many years ago. I was not familiar with Shaffner's other work but felt a "bond" with him from his story.
Donna Y.

I've just finished WAR BOYS by M.A. Schaffner. The protagonist is Charles Barker, just 14 as the novel begins and I guess going on 16 as it ends. The setting is Subic Bay in 1968-70. It begins as Charles arrives at Subic Bay where his father will be the Admin Officer at the Base Hospital and ends as he leaves to return to Arlington.
It's a strange book.
Part of it shouts "brat author" to the masthead. Other parts dispute it. The author is a published poet and his use of words shows his poetic power. His descriptions are wonderful - if he hasn't been in the Phillipines, he's looked at more pictures than I'd ever want to! He even records the smells and odors of the Orient very well.
The story line is fairly simple. Charles arrives after spending six years in Arlington - not one of the upper crust among teens and knowing it. He joins the local Explorer post which has not done much lately. Later he also meets a girl who arrives after he does - who turns out to be a year older than he is and the daughter of a civilian employee. The post finally gets an adult advisor who runs what is later called the SS Riding Stables.
During the course of the novel Charles becomes more sure of himself as a person, less sure of his future in the Navy, but still not out of character with the boy we meet in the beginning.
The book is 325 pages long and I read it in two days. Despite all the adventure it seemed to drag in many places, maybe because the chapters seemed over long to me. It also had too many characters, imho. Not as bad as a Russian novel, but too many. Some were almost thrown in as stereotypes - the two black brothers, both sons of a CPO, as well as the two Chinese brothers - same rank for dad, iirc.
Schaffner wants us to drown in teenage boy language. Every profane or vulgar word or word group in the English language appears at least once. Most of them appear repeatidly with some poetic variations, but mostly straight from a high school corridor. It really got tiring. The insults were the same.
Another thing that bothered me were things that didn't quite ring true - these compounded by all the things that did - like the mother dressing and going out the first day to case the joint as the wife of the hospital A/O. We have them leaving at 700 and not 0700. We have a reference to the hate felt towards Jane Fonda in 1968 or 1969 when I think her infamous trip was a bit later. We have "racism," "there for me," and a few other phrases which seemed to come after 1966/70.
All in all I enjoyed it. Take a look at it.

War Boys is an impressive first novel. Like many first novels, it's a coming of age story, but it has a special character that transcends that category. The coming of age story is now so ubiquitous in American fiction that it's on it's way to becoming its own genre with a set of cliches and conventions peculiar to it. One of the most important conventions of the story is that, despite some sentimental local color and lovably quirky characters, anyone should be able to identify with the main character as he or she goes through big life changes. This is the point at which Schaffner's novel diverges- instead of universality, his story is grounded in a specific time and place, and a situation, kids growing up on a naval base in The Phillipines, that's so unusual, very few of us will identify. Also, the novel becomes, not just the story of one person's leavetaking of childhood, but an examination of the parts of American culture that create our love of war, and our warriors. Though the novel is set during the Viet Nam War, we hear little about it, instead, the terror of war is implied by the games the boys play as they eagerly and ignorantly train themselves to enter the fray for real. The novel's characters are flesh and blood, complicated, well drawn, and the language is beautiful, (but this is no surprise, since Schaffner has published a great deal of poetry prior to this novel). American fiction seems now in the thrall of, on the one hand, the Pynchonesque, on the other the Carveresque. If you're tired of these trends, pick up War Boys and get a reminder of what academic fiction is missing.