One soldier’s chaotic life serves as an instructive microcosm of the American military experience in Vietnam.
Hartman effectively captures the hectic life at a medical clearinghouse in this exhaustive journal of his in country experiences during the Vietnam War.
Hartman explains that he enlisted as a Goldwater conservative—“I hated liberals, ‘pinkos’, and socialists, but above all I hated that filthy slave of Moscow and Peking, Ho Chi Minh”—but his view of the war changed. “I had turned against the Vietnam adventure,” he says, “that grossly mistaken attempt to prop up the corrupt mandarins, landlords and generals of the Saigon regime against their own people.” Still, after contemplating a draft dodge in Canada, he went to Nam—“not out of patriotism, but out of fear: of being forever cut off from friends and family in the USA, of someday being grabbed by FBI slave-catchers and dragged back to a life sentence.” Per the memoir’s appropriate subtitle, the highs for Hartman included his indulging in many of the easily available drugs to numb the pain and exhaustion of working for the American military. The lows, which the surgical tech thoroughly tallies, involved many wounded and dead soldiers who passed through “Charley Med.” Sprinkled into the journal are doses of politics: “The American public—a huge, inscrutable, torpid, star-spangled toad—didn’t catch on,” he says. “‘America—love it or leave it’, said many bumper stickers, foreshadowing the equally stupid ‘Support our troops’ of Junior Bush’s regime.” Also appearing throughout is correspondence documenting his relationship with Stella, the girl he left behind in Texas. Hartman successfully adds perspective to the journal with narrative jumps in time that place his Vietnam year within the timeline of his life. The large cast of characters and military acronyms are difficult to manage, though they undoubtedly contributed to the feeling he and many others had of being overwhelmed by the military machine. Likewise, his recording of endless drug use by himself and fellow soldiers will leave many impressed, though the psychotropic jumble of observations goes toward explaining the continuing effects of the Vietnam War, not just on its participants, but on the American psyche.
One soldier’s chaotic life serves as an instructive microcosm of the American military experience in Vietnam.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 591
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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