Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Read this book! If you were there, or know someone who was there, or want to know something about those who served in what became a long and unpopular war, Zigzag Men distills and conveys some basic truths about the often surreal character of the war in Vietnam. It was the end of the 1960s; authority questioned, dope smoked, sex casual and hair long. Although conscripts did much of the fighting, even professional soldiers questioned the purpose of the war.
Unlike any previous war, the young scouts of the Air Cavalry spent hours every day, from first to last light, within pistol shot of the enemy; often finding him only by the streak of the tracers from his machine guns. How dangerous was it? The scout ship on the book's cover in an OH-6; 1,434 were built and 842 crashed in Viet Nam. When they weren't flying these young men often found release in the Army's culture of heavy drinking; many smoked pot and some turned to drugs. Resentful troopers were sometimes so alienated that they used explosives to express their discontent.
Against this background the pilots in Zigzag Men come of age, fight, carouse, make friends and mourn the loss of them. The events described by Sherrer are fictional, but in essence they are true. They or something very like them happened to many soldiers of the period.
The words and actions of the characters also give a very real insight into the how a large organization, in this case the Army, can be so dysfunctional that it compromises its mission. The senior officers portrayed here capture that dysfunction in a very real way.
I must make a disclosure here. I was for a time a scout pilot in an air cavalry troop, although not the one in which Mr. Sherrer served. I was at Quan Loi and the other places mentioned in this novel and I remember seeing a scout ship with the zigzag man on the side. My year in Viet Nam was about the same period as that of the novel. The men who were there, both "lifers" and temps generally did their best at dangerous work that they know from the evening news would not get them a victory parade, but might well kill or injure them. Yet every character and every event in Sherrer's book called up a memory of something that I saw or heard.
I do not read much modern military fiction or history, but I recommend that those who do should add Zigzag Men to a short list that includes--
We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore
Catch-22: A Novel (Simon & Schuster Classics) by Joseph Heller
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Click Here to see more reviews about: Zigzag Men
Zigzag Men captures the dark humor of an unruly cadre of loosely led, overworked helicopter pilots, reluctant warriors who commute into combat from a remote airfield in Vietnam, zigzagging over the jungle, around one another, and through the indelible intensity of war. Quan Loi is their staging-point for flight operations during the day and a disreputable haven for hardcore, drug-altered malcontents during the long hours of darkness. When Newbies arrive at Quan Loi, the inevitable friendships and animosities become amplified by exhausting hours of combat flying, followed by immoderate revelry, into a bizarre distortion of military life, where unlikely friendships, inconsolable grief, and surprising heroism are stirred into a unique and unexpected brew.--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.
0 comments:
Post a Comment