VIETNAM DIARY

Mr. Tregaskis has written a lot of diaries and witnessed a lot of warfare in the past twenty-odd years. If this book isn't up to Guadalcanal Diary and some of his others for stirring true-life adventure, well, the fault may not be entirely his own; Vietnam is a tedious, frustrating kind of war, especially for the 14,000 Americans involved in it. He was there from early October, 1962, to early January, 1963, and in those months he had an enormous amount of experience: flying with Army and Marine Corps helicopters and Vietnamese fighter planes, and slogging around in the rice paddies and jungles with the Arvins (Vietnamese infantry). Dangerous it certainly was, but he found it even more dirty, hot, verminous, unhealthy, and--most of all--boring. The trouble is, it just isn't a sporting sort of war; the enemy are always outgunned and outnumbered, and, when you think you've got them cornered, they disappear. Readers unfamiliar with the author should perhaps be warned not to expect any deep strategic or political insights into the problems of the region; however, as an intimate and unadorned account of what so many of our career soldiers and draftees (quite possibly you will know one of the hundreds mentioned by name) are going through day by day over there, this can be wholeheartedly recommended.