Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is possibly the most dishonest book ever written."You don't know what it was like over there. You don't understand. I do. Let me tell you." We kicked corpses, shot dogs, destroyed wells, cut off thumbs, blew up puppies, fished using "a crate load of hand grenades," painted our bodies and wore scary masks, played catch with smoke grenades, took a half hour to shoot up a buffalo, had Buddhist monks clean our weapons, we drowned in mud, and sang "Lemon Tree" while we took a GI's body parts down from a tree. A teen-age cheerleader from the heart of America sneaks into VN, gets to the field somehow where she joins a Green Beret unit untrained and ends up wearing a necklace of enemy tongues. Had enough nonsense? In a "platoon sized" ambush, he kills a solitary soldier with a hand grenade. Some ambush. His 9 year old school girl crush dies of a brain tumor after being mocked by other students. ( How did this get in here!?) A unbelievably elaborate and juvenile revenge plan is somehow worked out in the field. And a dumb old lady just doesn't understand what they've been through. He's probably still wearing a LRRP hat and wearing fatigues. This book is an insult to what VN veterans went through at times. Atrocities? Yes. But this exploits the traumas. Here is false poignancy, false sadness, false nobility, false guilt and false stories. The writing - despite awards and the press - is incredibly thin. Read Xenophon's The March Up Country, The Iliad (Pope's trans.),J. Caesar's Gallic Wars, Thucydides, Herodotus, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, Johnny Got His Gun. This is very weak Hemingway. My DROS date was 6/22/68. VN Combat Veteran.