Review by Dan Morris, Artist & Writer

Reading Boot: A Sorta Novel of Vietnam, by Charles Templeton, took me back to the 60s, to the neighborhoods. The language, delivered with that cocky, wide-stanced attitude which pervades sports, Rock and Roll and the Marine Corp, rolled film clips in my mind.

It’s all there in the conversations, the barked orders and curses, the scuttlebutt, the raunchy jokes commonly heard at drive-in theaters on Friday night.

Templeton tells his stories through the eyes and ears of George Orwell Hill, known as G.O., a crew chief of a Marine helicopter squad, taking orders from a bulldog gunnery sergeant, known as Gunny. It’s fiction, but it’s fiction based on experience and observation.

G.O. has a way of slipping easily into trouble with his racially mixed crew seemingly plucked from the steaming carcass of one of America’s big mid-century cities: Detroit, New York, Miami, Houston, L.A. They’re stuck in a nightmare with little time to dream.

The soundtrack is classic rock, and the pace is quick. From the teen streets of America to the teeming jungle of Southeast Asia in a flash, the war is on. Bombs exploding, men dying, napalm in the wind, and the game for G.O. - to survive - is on.

The stories are like the ones our big brothers told us about war, told in a voice at once singular and pluralistic. It’s the southern dialect, Texas region, but many other American dialects are heard along the way.

It’s a fun, wise and poignant trip through the war that made America modern, told from the heart of one who was there. Recommended reading. Dan Morris — Artist & Writer, Eureka Springs, Arkansas