On a trip to Phoenix recently, I pulled out Crossers from Philip Caputo for an airplane companion. It's the story of Gil Castle, a 9/11 widower who retreats to the old family ranch in Arizona, near the Mexican border, to recover from the loss of his wife. There he reconnects to his family, to the Se...
A very good book. This is not a history of the grand strategy or politics behind the war but a personal memoir of one man's experiences in Vietnam, explaining the reasons why men march off to war, while also showing the cruelty and barbarism that seemingly normal people descend to in war.
Early Caputo, a mid-1970's memoir of his time as a marine in the early part of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. I wasn't aware of Caputo's legal difficulties and was riveted. Read it with Swofford's Jarhead and Kidder's My Detachment.
First serious war book I've read but I enjoyed it for the most part. It taught me a lot about Vietnam that I didn't know before.
“Do you suppose war to be here what wars are elsewhere?”… “Do you suppose that it is an event, with a discrete beginning that will proceed to a discrete middle und so weiter on to a discrete end? No! It is a condition of life, like drought. There is war in Sudan because there is war.”“Like Vietnam?”...
This is a sweeping masterwork in which Africa is the central character. The characters include a mixed race, UN bureaucrat, a ladies man, who falls in love with the much older, white, wealthy, colonial woman, an American entrepreneur, a daredevil pilot who seeks to earn his fortune and transport sup...
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