This is a story about a lost war, told from the perspective of a soldier fighting for a cause, even as that cause is gradually abandoned by the country that sent him. It is a story of suffering and violence and it’s a story about a countries abandonment of the kids sent to fight a lost war.
But most of all it is the story of one mans war and his way back home.
I truly enjoyed listening to this book which had both an excellent narrator and a well paced story without feeling fabricated or overly factual. However at times the storyline did become somewhat jumbled between narrative timeliness. At times the author seems to slip into a more historical focus with sections of the book dedicated to faithfully recounting names and ranks of characters either on the fringes of the story line or that just crossed the geographical areas currently covered.
These little nibbles is nitpicking on a great story that left me thinking about the historical absurdity that is the Vietnam war. The book left me thinking about how the victor usually writes history, but in the case of Vietnam this is only partially correct.
The US lost the war in Vietnam but capitalism based democracy did win the ideological war against the communists, making it possible for the US to nearly erase the Vietnam war from the public consciousness.