Review by Kirkus: “madness of the Vietnam War via the perspective of a helicopter squadron Marine”
A debut postmodern literary novel explores the madness of the Vietnam War via the perspective of a helicopter squadron Marine.
George Orwell “G.O.” Hill of South Texas comes from a long line of Marines, which is why he decides to enlist in the corps during the height of the Vietnam War. He spends his last night in America attempting—unsuccessfully—to lose his virginity to the girl he’s had a crush on since elementary school. He arrives in-country at Hue-Phu Bai Airport, where he is assigned to Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 265. There, he receives his first injury moments later when he zips his fly too quickly. He soon hooks up with a buddy from flight training, Locker Gallo, who gives him a quick tour of the base, where he meets characters like Gunny G., a blustery gunnery sergeant highly concerned with the condition of the squadron’s coffee pot, and Daniell “Pogo” Nadal, a hapless Frenchman drafted six months after he moved to the United States. G.O. and Gallo start flying missions together, though when they aren’t taking incoming fire, they’re scheming about how to sneak off to a local brothel or searching the body bags of recently deceased soldiers for souvenir binoculars. Their analogs on the other side are the People’s Army of Vietnam scouts Xin Loi and Hung, who put up with the same combination of boredom, absurdity, and terror (while sustaining many more casualties). Unlike G.O., Xin is actively trying to win the war. “They will dance on our graves, Xin thought. So far Hung was the only one Xin had met who had an original idea about how the Americans might be defeated. ‘We just keep killing them until they leave.’ ” As the flights get hairier, will G.O. get as serious as the war demands? Or is his chaotic and ridiculous personality already the perfect pairing for this pointless conflict?
Templeton’s novel is highly episodic and lacks a strong narrative arc. It is reminiscent at times of James Joyce’s Ulysses, following G.O. through mundane moments in his military life, such as playing poker and visiting the latrine. The narration is stream-of-consciousness, with many dreamlike digressions into the various characters’ memories or flights of fancy. The tale’s greatest selling point is the enthusiasm with which it replicates and riffs on the Vietnam era’s jargon and invented slang: “Danny D. was on a roll. War at its most glorious. Fought around the foam of rusty Ballantines. G.O. glanced around at the other tables. Same stories. Told by different salts to different boots. Would G.O. live to tell the FNGs how to survive in the land of Boom-boom?” There are the requisite soldier nicknames—Sugar Bear, Scrotum, Duck Butter, Barf—and a prodigious amount of scatological humor. The mix of the surreal, the violent, the tedious, and the profane says something vague but perhaps appropriate about the war and the era. Even so, the work is probably too demanding a read for general fans of war novels. The story will appeal most to those who enjoy the dense postmodern fiction of the 1960s and ’70s and to students particularly dedicated to literary portrayals of Vietnam.
An ambitious, confounding, and partially successful tale that stews in the madness of modern warfare.
