Jim Morris was in-country from early on, before the first conventional troops were deployed, until after the Tet Offensive. As an officer in Special Forces, he bounced around quite a bit in South Vietnam, able to put both the forest and the trees of that conflict into a perspective that your average lowly grunt (or a REMF in Saigon, for that matter) could not--at least without years of investigative journalism afterwards, I'd bet.
War Story is about a man whose chief aspiration in life was to be a soldier. While other young men were dragged to Vietnam kicking and screaming, or dodged the draft altogether, Jim Morris and other members of the Special Forces volunteered for Vietnam. Against his wishes, Morris was assigned jobs either in the rear or on Okinawa--jobs other men would have killed for. Still, he clawed and scratched his way back to the periphery of the conflict. Sometimes right into the hot thick of it--you can be certain that, unlike some who've attempted to parlay their service into political success, Morris earned his Purple Hearts. In fact, Morris actually feared promotion beyond 0-3 (Captain), because it would nix his chances to command an A-Team.
Had there been more officers like this in my time, I might have held to my original plan of being a 30-Year-Man. Or at least 20. Morris was a soldier who cared about the mission, and wanted to make a difference, armed with ideas which could have done so. He worked within the system, but (and this is one thing I love about SF) wasn't obsessed with following counterproductive protocols, or eating cheese. He wanted to fight, and to win, while the average career officer just wants to brown-nose, shuffle paperwork, and admire rows of spit-shined boots and starched uniforms all perfectly dress-right-dressed.
But not only was victory not an objective for the US chain-of-command, the South Vietnamese weren't much interested in it, either. The ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) was infamous for its corruption and incompetence. It would be hard to name a military organization more rife with cowards, crooks, traitors and fools. Whatever good soldiers fought for the South were buried under bureaucratic BS.
Morris relates the story of how some loyal villagers reported six VC (Viet Cong) sighted in a certain ARVN officer's district. "Only one weapon between them." That ARVN commander could have captured them quickly and easily, possibly getting some valuable intelligence into the bargain. Instead, he sent the report up his ponderous chain of command. Three days after the VC left the village, an airstrike leveled it. That's how loyalty was rewarded. Any wonder why most of the Vietnamese citizens turned a blind eye to VC activity?
As Morris hops around South Vietnam in War Story, you might want to follow along on a map. Having never been there myself, I was unfamiliar with the geography and sometimes grew confused about where he was and when he had been there before. The command structure on both the American and South Vietnamese sides were equally cumbersome. Heck, it was a convoluted mess by WWII and has only gotten worse every decade since then.
Other Amazon reviewers complain about the structure of the narrative--that there are too many flashbacks, sidetracks and personal reflections, and they make it difficult to keep a grip on the main thrust of the memoir. I say the style perfectly fits an account of the Vietnam War. If you have trouble tracking the story in this book, you'll probably have much more difficulty ever fully understanding that conflict. To me, it was worth keeping a map handy and taking notes on the people who weaved in and out of the story.
Morris himself says: "There is only one way to fight a guerilla war and that is to outguerilla the guerilla. You have to steal his political issues and his social issues and his tactics; and if you do that he has nothing left to sell and the war is won. It was so easy. Why couldn't the bastards see it? Maybe that was what made me not one of the boys: the fact that I moved around so much as a kid that I was highly sensitive to new social situations. That was what made me not one of the boys. Maybe I knew what I was doing and 'The Boys' didn't."
And Morris could certainly adapt to new social situations. He didn't just work with the 'Yards (Montagnards--ostracized mountain tribes of Vietnam), but made friends with them. He could make sense of their military and social network, and knew who could get the job done unclouded by the "all Dinks are the same" attitude held by some of the more condescending officers on our side of the fence. One such 'Yard comrade, nicknamed "Cowboy," is a fascinating enough character to warrant his own biography.
I could go on at great length about this book and what I learned from it. I recommend that you just read it and let Morris' narrative speak for itself.
For a more detailed review, you can read my post about this book on the Two-Fisted Blog.
Henry Brown, author of
Hell and Gone
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