A deeply thoughtful remembrance of a soldier’s experience in war.
O’Meara recounts his perilous service in the Vietnam War—and his inhospitable reception when he returned home—in this memoir.
In 1968, the author was a sophomore in college and thereby protected from the draft, but his grades dipped low enough to render him fair game. In 1969, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. Despite training to become a mortar crew chief, a specialization that would have conferred considerable benefits, he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Infantry. A “shorn hippy college boy, reluctantly masquerading as a real soldier,” he was deployed to Vietnam’s Highlands just below the DMZ, an area swarming with enemy troops; his mission was to disrupt their supply chains. His introduction to the war was not gentle—by his second day in the field, he had experienced combat. Danger was everywhere: Snipers, booby traps, and land mines demanded “hyper vigilance,” a tense state of expectancy artfully described by O’Meara. Unmoved and even disgusted by the ideology behind the war, he did his best to stay alive and suffered the “soul crushingly slow” passage of time until his manumission from duty. When he finally made it home, only to be met with “scorn and derision” from a populous that had grown sour on the war, he felt an ache he had difficulty fully identifying or describing. He affectingly articulates the experience: “I wasn’t sure at what point I would feel like I was back home again, but I knew I wasn’t anywhere near it. I had a nagging sense of unrecoverable loss, which seemed odd at the time. After all, I was still a young man, alive, in one piece, and apparently, invulnerable.” The world has an inexhaustible supply of Vietnam War memoirs, and while O’Meara’s doesn’t break any new ground, it is notable for its impressive blend of candor and eloquence. His writing combines the unpretentious informality of personal anecdote with a rhetorical gracefulness that often flirts with the poetic. This is a profoundly moving work, intelligently rendered and heartbreaking.
A deeply thoughtful remembrance of a soldier’s experience in war.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9798871914571
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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