TIGER THE LURP DOG

by Kenn Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 1983

Strong, small-scale, gently intense Vietnam fiction--marred, unfortunately, by the cloying, cute, almost Disney-esque appearances of the camp dog referred to in the title. Miller's close-up focus is on a mid-1960s Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LURP) camp, especially on Team Two-Four: young Mopar, the special favorite of brown-black mongrel Tiger; relatively erudite, equally young Marvel Kim, of Korean ancestry; Cuban nationalist Gonzales; and their new Team Leader--Wolverine, a Green Beret who's on the run from his Gospel-Church-family background and whose rung-ho approach (""we're gonna have the wisest and sneakiest Lurp team this man's Army has ever seen"") at first alienates ambitious, restless Mopar. (Jive-talking J.D., leader of another LURP team, sums up Two-Four this way: ""You got a Special Forces madman for a TL. Have one crazy gook commo man walkin' slack with an M-79, and a pointman who talks to dogs, then end it off with a Cuban tailgunner who don't know how to talk at all."") The team goes out on its first, uneventful mission, while J.D.'s team over in the next valley gets blown away; Miller plainly, vividly evokes the jargon, the silence, the tedium, the leeches, the dependence on hard-to-hear radio messages. Then, while the men split up for a while--Mopar on leave (raunchily anticipated) back home, Marvel to recondo school--Tiger the Lurp Dog is featured in a few vignettes: killing chickens, cannily surviving through an obstacle-course of mines, barbed-wire, punji stakes, showing a better-than-human escape technique. And then the team reunites, adding one member (the oafishly cheery Schultz), going out on a mission that ends in terror and carnage. . . while, back at the camp, loyal Tiger the Lurp Dog is ""waiting for Mopar, his main man, waiting for his team to return from wherever it was they had gone."" True, there's a faintly effective, dark irony in the man/dog parallel here--the animal knowing far better how to survive; what comes across much more heavily, however, is the B-movie/sit-corn sentimentality. And that's a great pity, because the scene-by-scene writing here, except for one or two lapses into farce, is quietly black-comic and credible. Without the doggie-gimmick as an ostensible framework for this short, uneven book, Miller might have developed the human characters instead, building the best of these talented, involving episodes into a full-fledged novel.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atlantic/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION