Boot delivers…

War is crazy, grizzly, obscene, and fatal but you will never get a vision of it like Charles Templeton tells his story of the Viet Nam War. The main character George Orwell Hill, travels through this nasty semi-biographical war (because you can’t make this stuff up) with buddies like Bugman, Bear, Locker, Gallo, Gerber Baby and Duck. Even the helicopters have clever names like Groundz for Divorce and Pandora’s Box. Curiously, there is a one-eyed cockroach called Lomax with his own voice, an anthropomorphic literary device that sometimes serves as a North Star for G.O.

Reading Boot I laughed so hard at times I forgot I was reading about the gruesome war I grew up watching on television every night. Where the enemy traveled in tunnels and crept up on American soldiers like killer lice. In Templeton’s war of honorable marines, some of them following in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers. There are stories of a helicopter that falls off the Aircraft carrier, but all survive. There is the story of G.O. who falls out of a helicopter—we must assume at low altitude—and must find his way back to base alone in the jungle at night. And here’s the kicker: in doing so he comes across two Viet Cong he has met in a whore house and they spare him, even returning his zippo lighter. When all of the stories are woven together in this masterful literary adventure, your compassion for the young men who fought the war, on both sides, will be brought to new and endearing level. But you will also ask yourself, can justice and compassion coexist?
Templeton climbs into the minds of two Viet Cong, Xin Loi and Hung Dong, giving the book depth and not just hilarious, knee slapping humor. We see “Charlie” as human, and you get the feeling that if the soldiers could just sit down and connect with each other, they’d have the war sorted out in minutes, but as we know that was not meant to be.

In another wild story the Viet Cong run into a tiger that nabs one of them by the backpack, but when she tries to drag him under a fallen tree, the soldier lives because the tiger decides to let go. All of this is done under the discipline of a silence order so the Viet Cong would not be discovered. But perhaps the best story of all is the grunt named Hud who gets separated from his recon team because he was pinned under the helicopter and no one can hear him yelling. He too survives.

A good book changes you and reading Boot let me be a fly on the wall in this most horrific of wars in a way I could see the humanity of survival in a hellish series of situations called combat. You too will be rewarded if you pick up this debut read. — Ruth Mitchell, author of White Oak