Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought and read this book with a great deal of interest because I was a combat infantry soldier in Vietnam from March 1969 to January 1970 with the 4th Infantry Division. I also read many of the reviews which were all great and talked about the authors writing style being one of the best. I will agree the author has an excellent writing style that holds the readers interest and makes the book interesting. That said I think the fiction in this book really doesn’t depict the life of an Infantry Soldier in Vietnam very well and certainly didn’t depict what I went through. We did 30 day search and destroy missions along the Cambodian and Laotian borders and we fought exclusively NVA soldiers. So yes our wars were a little different but there were parts of this book where the description of what was going on indicated a lack of military discipline that I never saw while I was in Vietnam. On a mission no one would play games like throwing a live smoke grenade back and forth to see who chickened out first because it would have given your units position away which is stupid. We fought a lot of battles and killed lots of enemy soldiers and we never sat around talking to dead so0ldiers and making stupid statements to them. We went about our business and moved out when the battle was over after getting our killed and wounded taken care of. I’m sure some percentage of US combat soldiers didn’t like the thought of killing people and maybe had problems accepting that it was part of their life. I have a problem with his premise that soldiers couldn’t deal with the killing and kept having problems dealing with it. You were in a situation where the enemy was doing their best to kill you so it’s hard for me to envision why I would have a problem hunting and killing them. I was a Sargent and a Squad leader and then a Platoon staff Sargent and the soldiers discipline to following our field Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) was easy to sell because it saved lives and the men knew that. What we carried was really heavy and it took a while to get into full Vietnam combat shape but you needed it all if you were to survive in Vietnam.