“I’m crazy now, I’m fucked up. I can think it, but I can’t say it out loud and hear myself say it.”

Albert French, Patches of Fire
I've just realised there was a serious ommission from my list of Vietnam books. The US Army desegregated in 1951 so Vietnam was the first war with intergrated units and mass conscription of black men. Given this ( Read more... )

Inspired by the previous post I was thinking of putting together a list of great Vietnam War novels. I quickly realised it would be a list of books rather than novels ( Read more... )

I am fifty pages into The Fearless Man by Donald Pfarrer and I am starting to think I've made a mistake. Perhaps my quest to read all Vietnam war novels has met its match. The book is covered in glowing quotes from respectable sources but if I didn't know it was published last year I would never have guessed. This is very old fashioned stuff, ( Read more... )

Just finished We Pierce by Andrew Heuber on the train into work this morning. It's not a bad book but it's a hard one to get excited about. It is the story about two brothers: one serving in Desert Storm and one a junkie in New York. I bought it because it is a Gulf War novel but actually the best sections are the New York ones and even those are ( Read more... )

One reason the Hopkins study did not generate sustained outrage is that the researchers did not explain how the occupation had managed to kill so many people so quickly -- about 1,000 each week in the first 14 months of the war. This may reflect our sense that carnage at such elevated levels requires a series of barbaric acts of mass slaughter and/ ( Read more... )