This book was not what I expected. It’s about soldiers fighting in the war in Vietnam. That’s a conflict I want to learn more about. The very begining is literally about the things they carried, and how much they weighed. I imagined humping through the jungle with pounds of gear weighing me down. I was excited about where the book would lead. Unfortuantely, the realism took a dip from there.
About half way through, I turned to the back cover to see if there was a classification snuck on there. There was: fiction. Not history, fiction. A little after that the author wrote about how some war stories are true, and others are entirely made up. Reading that, the floor fell out on realism and reliability.
The book was much more like Slaughterhouse-Five than Chickenhawk or The Long Gray Line. Which is okay. I liked Slaughterhouse-Vie. I just didn’t want to read a book like it on the war in Vietnam.
Tags: Book
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