This is a bad book. There is next to nothing about the battle for the Central Highlands (10 pages tops). The writing style is annoying; the author writes as if he is floating through (and slightly above) the events he relates. There is zero humanity. For instance, about halfway through the book, the author "gets his family settled" at a new duty station. The book started with him at 15 years of age. When and where he acquired a family is, and will remain, a mystery.

The book is also in serious need of an editor. There are numerous examples of the same sentence groups appearing from 1 to 3 times as a given topic is explored again. It's like copy and paste was overused on the word processor.

Finally, the oft repeated praise of Ed Sprauge goes far beyond admiration or even hero worship. It's absolutely cloying. Enough already.

Save your money for a better purchase.

I have read this book three times. It should go into every history library there is about the Vietnam War. I am a Special Forces Veteran and knew a couple of the guys mentioned. The book is all facts and no fiction.

A very thoughtful and detailed look at a difficult and historically miligned period. The book doesn't pull any punches and presents an honest and frank view the war. Dooley has a excellent command of the facts and presents a point-of-view that is both compassionate and understanding.

If you are looking to read, forget this one. 100 pages( 50 of which illustrations) of under sized print, not to mention its inordane shape left this book without a chance from the moment I opened it...

Capt McGrath captures the essence of human depravity in a manner that makes humanity ashamed of its cruelty and proud of its resilience. A book such as this is a great thing to have on one's desk to look at when times get tough - a quick look at it will serve as a definitive reminder of how good one really has it! I have the utmost respect for Capt McGrath and his fellow POWs who served their country honorably and admirably. If you want further insight into Capt McGrath and his fellow POW's plight, I HIGHLY recommend the documentary "The American Experience - Return With Honor."

I have read this book many times and each time I get chills at the thought that a human being suffered through this. Mike McGrath and the other POW's are our nations guardians of liberty and freedom. There time spent in the cells in Hanoi stand as a testament to the human will. They emerged bruised and battered but they returned with Honor.

Just finished reading this book and found the portion
debunking JFK idolators' revisionist history to be well done,
although rather long winded. The rest of the book is pure paranoia - I was alive during the Vietnam buildup and well remember the motives that led to intervention. Surprisingly,
Chomsky attributes dark motives to practically everything
the US did during those times, and virtually never touches on the motives most often at play - the defeat and containment of Communism, which at times looked as though it was going to win.
Chomsky seems to think that Communism was essentially just a sort of ultra socialism. That is his biggest error in the book:
a severe naivete about what Communism was and why much was sacrificed to ensure that it didn't envelope the planet. In other words, he displays an extreme case of tunnel vision.

What is missing from Chomsky's book is the notion that if anyone told JFK right to his face precisely what the United States was going to do in Nam for the following ten years (I think George Ball tried to do this), the president himself wouldn't have believed it, and could have told him, "You're crazy . . . " (as I remember this, the president expressed himself with an expletive) and really meant it. Anyone who thinks that American policy in Vietnam ever made sense is underestimating the ability of the government to lie whenever it is trying to picture what its national honor adds up to in evens and odds. I knew that something was crazy when I read in Rethinking Camelot that John Newman had written a letter to "The Nation" in which he said, "Let's get serious." Actually, the policy always begged to be compared with some outrageous joke, and "The Nation" has been great at coming up with jokes (I have even read the admission by Calvin Trillin that he used jokes in his column) to match such situations. Possibly the funniest thing that I ever read just showed up again in the April 10, 2000 issue of "The Nation," in a book review by John Leonard. "It's worth recalling that when Freud finally got permission to leave Vienna in 1938, the Gestapo obliged him to sign a certificate saying that he had been well treated by the authorities. He added a sentence of his own: 'I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.'" (p. 26) American policy in Vietnam was always a dream of imposing that kind of order in a country in which a majority of the people were not Americans, and might even try to kill Americans, if you want to know the truth. I can name one Kennedy adviser who was willing to tell LBJ in November, 1965, that the odds were about even that things were getting worse in Vietnam, and were going to get a lot worse as the plans at that stage were implemented, but he wouldn't have even been keeping his job if he told everybody what he thought. I'm actually glad McNamara didn't resign in protest, because he knew that other people could do his job worse than he could, and he was willing to sacrifice himself to save the country from the kind of stupidity that was assumed for anyone in his position, of which he was highly aware.

Excellent overview of the relationship between American political/corporate culture and the origens of the Vietnam War. In this case, Chomsky looks at the historical revisionism that clouded the discourse on the assassination of JFK. The book does not debunk the notion that a conspiracy in Dallas occurred; rather the emphasis is on how JFK simply continued (and, in some cases,expanded) the basic thrust of American foreign policy. Using mostly the internal record, Chomsky details JFK and his virulent hawkish and anti-communist ideology, a fact which Camelot propogandists attempt to hide or minimize. Once again, the point is to highlight the reality: a single political party exists today to do the bidding for the corporate sector (of which the military-industrial complex is a large component). Remember, JFK had increased defense spending and forced through a great deal of pro-corporate legislation (while also dragging his heels on Civil Rights legislation and scolding the Warren Court for its progressive leanings) prior to the assassination. All in all, another worthy contribution from one of the great American intellectuals of the 20th century.

While reading this book, I had the uncanny feeling that I had been transported back to my youth, during which I had consumed large numbers of DC comic books. The only thing that's missing are the illustrations. As one who rates Jorgenson's "Acceptable Loss" as one of the best Vietnam books I've ever read, I found "Very Crazy, G.I." a major disappointment

I think that this a very god book, a series of short stories about the vietnam war, one or two off them are perhaps " non-confirme-able", but who cares, just as long as it is a good storie.
I wery much enjoyed the R-R storie to Thailand; revenge is to be enjoyed cold.
Also the story about marine SGT Henderson, that died and diden't
send chills up and down my spine.
Kregg has a way with frases and words, especialy his funny and self-ironic way of decribing himself and his conversion with all those who contributed stories to his book, he is very much the
Wiseguy he always describes himself as.

I can highly recommend this book to anyone.
Keep up the good work !!

From the point of view of one person who never served in Vietnam, Kregg P.J. Jorgenson`s VERY CRAZY G.I. is a great book. It is highly readable and very entertaining. The book makes you feel like you are a Vietnam War soldier yourself, wearing the very clothes (or: in the chapter on visits to brothels, not wearing any clothes at all) that the G.I.s did.
I would highly recommend this book.

More BS from a true red commie. One fails to mention the 1950 conference in Moscow with Stalin, Mao, and Uncle Ho where they plotted the war. This imbessile's lies are completely refuted by Vietnam: The Necessary War. This book is selective history. Not all factors that lead into and event are represented, only hogwash from a nostalgic hippie. He is the part of the same group of people that distorted the infamous napalm burned girl picture. That girl was hit by napalm from an aircraft piloted by a South Vietnamese pilot in where also a few ARVN soldiers were killed. But for some reason nuts like this guy called it American barbarism. His ilk also left out the caption the South Vietnamese photgrapher wrote on the bottom of the picture.

"This never would have happened if the Communists stayed in the North."

As a Vietnamese living in America, I have always been puzzled by different historical accounts of what went on during the Vietnam war. One account was what I learnt while growing up there. Another account was the Vietnam that many Americans know from the media. This book explained some of those differences well. The two Viet Nam (North and South), the gulf of Ton Kin incidence, the liberal press, antiwar activists spitting on returning GI, and the emotionally afflicting POW/MIA myth were the few fabrications concocted by various imperialistic American administrations. With the help of the jingoistic corporate press, they brainwashed the ill informed American public to garner support for the genocidal war in southeast Asia. Four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians died from the "good intentions" of the United States.
Americans may have a free press. But are Americans free from the bias, prejudice, and bigotry of men who decide "all the news that's fit to print" and what is fit for us to read? Read the book and make up thy own mind.

This book provides a gripping examination of how the Right has redefined "Vietnam" (a war, not a country). Franklin reviews the horrors inflicted by the United States on the people of Vietnam, and shows how our culture has made us the victims. He shows how the famous photo of the Saigon Chief of Police executing an enemy prisoner has been reversed in movies showing Americans POWs in cages with the gun to their heads. He reminds those who would blame the anti-war movement for our failure, that every President from Truman to Nixon ran as a peace candidate, knowing the American public would never support the war. He discusses the first American anti-Vietnam-war protests, in 1945. Franklin himself was fired from a tenured position at Stanford for his stand against the University's involvement in making napalm, a truly horrific weapon which has only been used against people of color. He reveals that Nixon's need to prolong the war and declare victory by focusing on the Americans unaccounted for (extremely few though they were) led to the creation of the post-war POW/MIA myth. This myth, never substantiated, has justified our refusal to pay Vietnam the reparations we promised in the Paris Peace Treaty and our longstanding lack of diplimatic relations with the country. This book explains the war and its cultural fallout better than anything I've read. Reading this book made me truly alarmed for the lack of democracy in the United States.

This book was less about Ho Chi Minh, and more about why the United States should not fight him. This reader was hoping for a more detailed discussion of Ho's life, his philosophy, etc. This book does over some insights into Ho Chi Minh's character and life, but I was left with the feeling that the book was written for other purposes. The book was originally published in 1970, a year after Ho's death so the book also smacks of the eulogy, glorification of the dead variety.

Ho Chi Minh was, in many ways, a mysterious figure. This book reveals some of those mysteries. But also, his stalinist tendencies which caused the death of many of his fellow countrymen and women. Although a revolutionary, he was a stalinist in many ways. Halberstam is such a brilliant writer though, its worth a read.

Yes I read this. You read. You learn so much. YIf you are like me and you can like this book. I went to see Ho in Hanoi. His body was in Russia for maintenance. This was not informed to me by word of David. Sorry my English. Please visit my country.

I have to agree with Mr. Hurst's eloquent review, and I'll put it more succinctly: this is a lousy book. Why write a biography of Errol Flynn, of all people, if you're going to do it with no humor and with lordly disdain? It's like a biography of Tom Sawyer written by his half-brother, the tattle-tale goody-goody Sid. Like many, I guess, I picked it up in order to read about Sean Flynn, since there is so little out there about him. But as noted, Sean is reduced to three chapters presented as endpapers. One might conclude there wasn't enough to his short life to make a full book... if there weren't so much other evidence of the biographer's tendency to stop researching once he has enough evidence to support his (rather ugly) pre-determined thesis.

Jeffrey Meyers, best known for his works on such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a gifted, at times brilliant biographer. Here he brings to his treatment of Errol and Sean Flynn his knowledge of the world's great literature. Meyers can take almost any figure and make him acceptable from a literary point of view. Who else could find a parallel between Errol Flynn and Edgar Allan Poe? One can imagine a future Meyers biography of Bugsy Siegel, with frequent allusions to Julius Caesar, Faust, and MacBeth.

Meyers's gift for finding parallels between disparate people's lives is especially impressive. I found those between the lives of John Barrymore and Flynn to be especially compelling and insightful - more so than those between Errol and Sean. With reference to Sean, few will feel competent to judge the validity of Meyers' sections which reincarnate his last days. Some of it I found persuasive, but other parts - especially some of the links in the chain of logic - seemed weak; the recreation of "the facts" may be a bit too confident when dealing with mainly hearsay evidence.

In the main section of this book Errol Flynn comes across as a tragic, forlorn, dejected, melancholic sociopath. The habitual choice to put Flynn in a darker rather than positive light surfaces in numerous ways, as in Meyers' handling of Basil Rathbone. All biography involves some shading of details, which usually goes under the heading of "literary license." But the deliberate reshaping of a quotation by rearrangement and omission, for the purpose of producing the desired result, is disingenuous - a distinct "no-no" for a front-rank biographer. At the top of p. 146, a long comment of Basil Rathbone is subtly rearranged so as to produce the desired result ' to contribute to Meyers' overall scheme of the father-son shared death-wish. It creates a false impression of what Rathbone actually wrote about Flynn, and leaves one wondering how many other things have been cleverly reshaped in order to fit the thesis.

The question therefore lingers: Does Meyers actually get under Errol's skin (or that of Sean for that matter)? The answer, I fear, must be no - despite what Meyers and his publicists say. Meyers, in my opinion, is far too detached in his literary mien to explore effectively a man like Flynn. His Flynn is a two-dimensional, black-and-white figure who set out to destroy himself. The real-life Flynn was an infuriatingly complex, three-dimensional, Technicolor personality. Meyers is a very careful writer, but he also tends to be a cold, dispassionate, joyless writer, with an occasional tendency toward shading and over simplification. One gets little sense of the joi-de-vivre of the Errol Flynn of this book. Flynn was at heart a very, very funny man.

On the other hand there is something un-humorous, at points even tiresome, about INHERITED RISK. The whole thing is written from the point of view of Greek tragedy. It is doubtful that after reading it the reader will have chuckled even once. This is a major failing in a biography of Errol Flynn. The ever-so-literate Meyers, in all his zeal to analyze him - to dissect him into his component parts and to isolate his various destructive influences - has somehow let the real Flynn elude him.

There are other anomalies in INHERITED RISK. In one of his appendices (p. 326), Meyers breaks down Flynn's films into three categories: "best," "seeable," and "poor." With all due respect to Meyers, the list is bizarre, and may call into question his cinematic judgment. Is "The Roots of Heaven" (1958) really a better film than "They Died with Their Boots On" (1941) or "Adventures of Don Juan" (1949)? What cinematic myopia would place "The Sisters" (1938), "Edge of Darkness" (1943), and "Northern Pursuit" (1943) - not to mention "Silver River" (1948) - into the "poor" category?

Despite the dual photos on the front of the dust-jacket, the book is not really an analysis of the relationship of the two men, Errol and Sean, along the lines of Sir Edmund Goss' FATHER AND SON. The disparity in the treatments is made clear by the arrangement - Sean constitutes the endpapers (totaling a mere 49 pages), while the main section deals with Errol (244 pages). There is thus a serious question of balance.

Also, Meyers' central idea of Greek tragedy - that of the fatal character flaw of the father being reproduced in the son, leading to the latter's inevitable doom, does not really come off - no matter how energetically Meyers tries. One gets from this book the clear impression that the lives of the two Flynns were a complete waste. That may well have been true of the son, but it can't be said of the father. Errol Flynn brought untold joy to millions worldwide ' and still does to this day.

INHERITED RISK is a missed opportunity. With all the research that went into the book, it could have been the best Flynn biography ever written. But throughout most of it Meyers' staid approach just doesn't hold the reader's attention. There is also a procrustean feel ' the impression that the lives of these two men are being stretched and cut to fit the "Greek tragedy" model that Meyers is pushing. Such shortcomings, sadly, mar what otherwise might have been a monumental biographical achievement.

There is a tendency to describe people whose lives veer into chaos far more frequently than our own as troubled. The balance is provided in this book by rendering an account of how superior the lives of ERROL AND SEAN FLYNN IN HOLLYWOOD AND VIETNAM seem compared to the rest of us. I'm partial to this account because I was already a fan of the Flynn associates in Nam: Tim Page, Michael Herr, John Steinbeck IV, Robert Sam Anson, and Dana Stone. Dana Stone gets credit for taking the photo in Ha Than in 1968 in which Sean Flynn, "In full battle dress and holding a grenade, with arms outstretched and right boot in midair, he charges over the top of the hill and attacks the North Vietnamese enemy. . . . After the officer was wounded, Sean saved the day by assuming one of Errol's movie roles, leading the charge himself and killing an enemy soldier." (pp. 55-56). There are few pictures of Sean in this book, but real fans will have the collection in REQUIEM: BY THE PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO DIED IN VIETNAM AND INDOCHINA, edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page.

The picture of Sean Flynn and Dana Stone on motorcycles in Vietnam, c. 1970, facing page 97, might be rough for those whose expectations were shaped by Jack Warner's "considerable shrewdness and a clear grasp of public taste." (caption to picture 11). Errol Flynn was interesting enough to dominate the first 29 pictures in this book. Then number 30 shows Sean Flynn with a friend, Steve Cutter, in 1958, and the final page of pictures shows the contrast between the highly professional look of an American studio portrait, c. 1962, and how Sean and Dana would look when last seen by Western eyes.

If armies are usually considered highly disciplined, as well as the most modern, civilized mechanism for establishing order in the midst of chaos, Sean and Dana miscalculated how outrageously the enemy in Cambodia would be striving for something else, that they hadn't counted upon. A journalist card issued by the U.S. Department of Defense was supposed to be sufficient to convince the inhabitants of this planet that they possessed the opportunity to have their story told to the world, and the cameras should have convinced the enemy that the main thing the Americans wanted to take was pictures. Part of Sean's trouble was that he was expecting to see more than the usual amount of trouble. The previous year, Sean spent a few days in jail in Djakarta because of a 17-year-old high school girl, daughter of a Caltex corporation lawyer and a princess from Sumatra, "named after a Hindu goddess." (p. 49). For me (still an effetely snobbish reader and broadcaster of my own opinions), being in the army was like spending two years with the Djakarta taxi driver who drove Sean and the girl to her home in his Mercedes taxi. The taxi driver assumed that the girl was the hot attraction that Sean thought she was and returned with a Chinese businessman. The story is related partly in words that Sean wrote to his mother November 2 and December 4, 1969, which admitted that Sean "stepped out of the bushes swinging a baseball bat. He smashed the car's and windshield, then attacked the driver. The Chinese customer meanwhile had fled." (p. 49).

Tying it all together like this book does is a hoot: "American officers expected extraordinary courage from Errol's son and Sean always met their expectations. Accompanying the 4th Division's long-range recon patrollers for a month, Sean walked point on dangerous four-man patrols in the northern Highlands. He stayed in a besieged bunker at Kon Tien where, in only three days, 375 Marines were wounded." (p. 51). As famous as Sean Flynn became, it might still be possible to find 375 Marines who remember being wounded in the same bunker at Kon Tien, but it seems more likely they were wounded at Con Thien when Sean was in some other country. Sean probably had more combat experience than most of the guys on walking recon patrols for the 4th Division, who previously were more likely to have some incident of looking for a lost pet in their childhood than of finding anything in the Highlands. Most of the 4th Division called it the Central Highlands. Up north, where the Marine operated, Con Thien was at one end of the McNamara Line on the map on page 127 of HISTORICAL ATLAS OF THE VIETNAM WAR by Harry G. Summers, Jr. According to an official count in that book, 3,077 mortar, artillery, and rocket rounds struck the base there during the week of September 19-27, 1967, only three months after Sean Flynn photographed the results of the six-day Arab-Israeli War, when, "On his way back from Sinai, Sean dragged a recoilless rifle behind his rented Volkswagen and gave it to Mandy Rice-Davies (who had been implicated in the John Profumo spy-and-sex scandal in Britain and had emigrated to Israel) to decorate her discotheque in Tel Aviv." (Meyers, p. 45).

Most of ERROL AND SEAN FLYNN IN HOLLYWOOD AND VIETNAM is devoted to the life of Errol Flynn, pages 59-303. His death of a heart attack was rather pathetic, as the doctors in those days seemed better able to find heart problems in an autopsy setting than "when Flynn suddenly felt sharp pains in his back and legs." (p. 295). A doctor told him to ease the pain by lying on the floor. "After an autopsy, the coroner found that his death was caused by myocardial infarction (blood not reaching the heart), coronary thrombosis (clot in the coronary blood vessels) and coronary atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries)." (p. 295). Errol's mother, Marelle, wrote to Sean two months later that "my poor boy knew that he had not long to live. He had several heart attacks, & had been warned seriously only a short time ago." (p. 295).

You guessed it: It's the same leftist b.s. we were all taught in school. Please, I'm already almost asleep...spare me these tired old lies.

I say semi-definitive reportage because this brilliant compilation of news articles, magazine essays and excerpts from books is the distilled nectar from the two volume hardbound series issued earlier. While I haven't read the above-mentioned 2 volumes, I have read enough other Vietnam material to authoritatively state that this book does a more than adequate, dare I say brilliant, job of crystallizing the plethora of intertwined issues that encompassed the Vietnam war and the world stage upon which it unfolded. This book also offers some very unpleasant lessons to those of us who found our way to it due to the recent round of warfare commenced by the Bush Administration in order to save the world from Communism, ummm, I mean Terrorism.
For better or worse all of the other books I've read on the Vietnam war fall into two categories: The "Minute History of ..." and the "My personal Hell in ...." The problem with the former is that most people either don't have the patience or the desire to wade through all of the excrutiating details that went into the Vietnam war, and since any good history necessarily contains at least a majority of such unsavory bits, all of the 'good' histories of Vietnam rarely, I suspect, get finished. Plus, even when well-done the story is told with such detachment that the reader's mind often wanders while his eyes glide over the text. The problem with the latter style of narrative is that the events contained within are of such a narrow scope that no matter how powerful and well-written (see 'Rumor of a War' by Caputo, and 'A Boy's War' by Wolf, for instance), they are mere pinhole theatre. 'Reporting Vietnam' is unique, enlightening and vital because of the following factors. First, the editors chose to paint a broad canvas of the war by choosing articles that tell not only firsthand of battles, POW camp, campaigns and day to day life but also of home such as the events of and reactions to the Kent State incident, a soldier's return to "the world," and from Norman Mailer, his account of a Vietnam protest in Washington, D.C. The volume also contains extended essays upon the history of Vietnam, its social structures, the conduct of the war and politics (in both USA and in Vietnam), the living conditions and infrastructure of both South and North Vietnam, reportage on the military excursions into Laos and Cambodia, and the effect that the protracted conflict has on tribespeople, peasants, urban dwellers, etc. If one reads this book without more, he will be rewarded with page after page of top notch and fascinating writing. If one chooses to seek answers to common complaints and unspoken questions of history regarding this war, I believe that he'll find some answers. For instance, one of the most common complaints we hear from the diehards (inevitably nonparticipants?) is that we didn't win because we didn't go all out. An answer is found in the article by one of LBJ's personal secretary's on his discussions with her about the war. To wit, only the loonies seriously contemplated nuclear strikes and there was an ever-present threat that some escalation of the war would be the trigger-point for a world war with either or both the USSR and PRC. Also, we really, really were fighting all-out every time our young men and women were out there fighting (at least until the Nixon administration) and it is an insult to any who served in Vietnam to argue differently. An uspoken question never asked or answered in my presence is why didn't the South fight? The easy answer to this is that, of course the South fought, they just were overwhelmed by the Communists. The more compelling answer which this book satisfactorily demonstrates is that the social structure and politics of South Vietnam were fundamentally incapable of sustaining protracted, successful war-winning conflict due to its inherent weaknesses (an "absence of ideology, tradition or a coherent nationalism" says Peter Braestrup in one article). Finally, the question of whether we won or lost the war. To put it succinctly, however inaccurately, we won every battle we fought, North Vietnam won everywhere else. Finally, I believe that this book will lead one to the conclusion that the USA has once again set itself up for the very hard, obviously thankless and ultimately impossible task of saving the world from terrorism by sending US men and women to occupy foreign soil for these stated aims. I base my belief on the contents of 'Reporting Vietnam' which convincingly demonstrate that ultimately no war can be won by proxy, and an occupying power's efforts and accomplishments are always temporary and superficial until and unless the proxy population take to heart the aims of the intervening power's program. This was not done in South Vietnam, I doubt it is being done successfully in the Middle East.

Reading this collection of Vietnam-era reportage from The Library of America is a stark reminder of the lasting power of the written word. Has it really been nearly a quarter-century since the black and white images of the helicopters taking off from the roof of the American Embassy faded from our television screens? Grenada, Panama, Iraq -- three wars and God knows how many humanitarian efforts (Somalia, Yugoslavia, did I miss any?)

Yet, the power of memory is such that it doesn't take much to bring it all back. Dipping into these compilations of writings about Vietnam -- the original reportage and memoirs in the Library of America volumes and the best of everything else in "The Vietnam Reader" -- shards of long-forgotten memories were struck just by reading the names of towns and villages. Khe Sahn, Haiphong: The words sound so completely alien, as if they had been coined by H.P. Lovecraft. They trigger memories of tracing the S-curve of the countries on maps in the newspapers, seeing the photographs in Life magazine -- for me, the 1960s will always be remembered as a series of black and white freeze-frames from the magazines, with color reserved only for the more silly stories found in the back of the book -- and hearing them recited on TV in the stentorian tones of Walter Cronkitethe who would recite the weekly casualty figures, printedon screen before the national flags, like baseball scores, while the family ate our meat loaf and mashed potatoes and waited for Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom to come on at 7.

Time has passed and in this media-drenched age, so much history has been created, screened and absorbed over the past quarter-century. Vietnam and Cambodia became a backwater in the American consciousness, flaring up from time to time in response to specific, finite events such as the debate over Agent Orange, the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the screening of "Platoon" and "The Killing Fields," and the debate over draft evasion by Bill Clinton, Dan Quayle, Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich.

For those of us who were not there, who can view the war almost dispassionately, it is this lack of intervening history that makes these books so powerful and painful to read. This is a chronicle of a nation marching deeper and deeper into a war that the journalists there saw as early as 1965 -- about 150 pages into two volumes that total more than 1,600 pages -- could not be won the way it was being run. Historians will probably argue eternally if it could have been won at all. The repressive and corrupt South Vietnamese government could not win enough "hearts and minds" of the people to defeat the Viet Cong, and an invasion of North Vietnam could have triggered a Korean War-style invasion from China. It took nearly a decade for the United States to find the way out of that bloody tunnel and another two decades before full diplomatic relations were reestablished.

The casualty figures fly beyond the mind's grasp: 58,000 Americans killed, 4,400 South Koreans, 500 Australians and New Zealanders, 180,000 Cambodians (with another million perishing under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1978), a half-million South Vietnamese and an estimated 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

"Reporting Vietnam" starts with Time Magazine's report on the first U.S. advisers killed in South Vietnam, then continues chronologically with the inevitability of the Zapruder film of John Kennedy's murder ride. It moves with reports from the field -- a report on a Viet Cong massacre in the Ca Mau Peninsula, Neil Sheehan's account on South Vietnamese troops refusing to fight in the battle of Ap Bac, to Joseph Alsop's profile of South Vietnam's president Ngo Diem, from the scenes in Washington of President Johnson and his advisers defending their policies to Tom Wolfe's account of Ken Kesey disrupting an anti-war rally in Berkeley and Norman Mailer's self-important essay about the March on the Pentagon.

Then there are the incidents, as bizarre as any recounted in "Apocalypse Now." The American-run television channel presenting the German opera "Hansel and Gretel" backed by the American Chamber of Commerce; Gloria Emerson reporting the idea by the head of the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, challenging his fellow CORDS members to participate in the 1971 decathlon comprising "bridge, tennis, gin rummy, volleyball, nautical sports, Chinese chess, winetasting, close harmony, etc." (Emerson, who had spent two years in the field as a correspondent, quoted and commented on Richard Funkhouser's memo: "'It is always open house here at Bienhoa for competitors,' Funkhouser wrote, in that playful spirit so many of us in Vietnam really lacked.")

While movies and TV news reports will fade with time, this will remain as a monument to show the madnessa and unreality of this terrible war.

After an internal review at the NASM, the Executive Director ordered "Taking Fire" to be removed from the gift shop due to fraudulent claims and highly racist rhetoric. For example, the back cover of the paperback states that Mr. Alexander was the "second highest decorated helicopter pilot of the Vietnam era." That would come as a big surprise to the nine helicopter pilots who were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. If you like lightweight, highly fictionalized accounts of the Vietnam War, then read this book. However, it makes a mockery of the sacrifices made by members of A Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry and Company H, 75th Rangers. How do I know? I flew with Alexander throughout his entire tour and I have firsthand knowledge of the missions he describes so poorly and inaccurately. I wish I could give it zero stars but the format doesn't allow it.

very enjoyable... and well written.. only negative was too few pictures of a personal nature, would have liked to see more photos of Ron, his family and his crews. He and Mr. Sasser have a written a book that gives a great flavor of the war... no p.c. revisionist thoughts in this one..

I have read approximately 200 books on the Vietnam war, and I have to say Taking Fire is the best of all. I never realized how dangerous the helicopter pilots jobs were. This is absolutely the most exciting book I have ever read. It is one of those books you can't put down. I have the most respect and admiration for Ron Alexander that I have ever had for anyone else. What a remarkable man. I just wish I knew if he had an e-mail address where I would be able to correspond directly with him. Thank you Ron for publishing such a terrific book.

i met spike on the north end of vancouver island,...what a guy, what a book,...if you want to read an interesting story of survival from a guys guy ex jet fighter jock there isn't many better than this.
i have read many vietnam POW books, this is one that does'nt wallow in the darkness that was certainly the North Vietnam POW's life,...you will laugh, you will cry,...you might have a hard time putting it down.
i could and should write the book on this guy's life since he wrote this one,...this guy is a real character that lives it on the "edge of the performance envelope",...and does it with panache'. it shines through in this book.

I just wanted to add another viewpoint than the previous reviewer. The language is appropriate for the context of the book. This is explained in the beginning by the Author. His point of view is first person. It is an interesting account of this man's experiences. I found it to be an excellent book. As an afterthought. If you liked the movie Good Will Hunting and the language did not bother you. Then this book is right for you. If you did not like Good Will Hunting because of the language then move on. This is real life in Vietnam and the language is appropriate.

I read this book and was really impressed with the Authors take on his experience as a POW. It is a one of a kind. As a Vietnam Vet of two tours and an Author of my own experiences there this one hit home. Its honest, different, and refreshing. Not to take anything away from anyone who was a prisoner but this guy had an approach and as they say today a paradigm that we would all do well to learn from. Im surprised the book is not more widely distributed but then its not politically correct or down trodden. Its unique as Im sure the Author was and is today. Great book!