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Author's Synopsis
Jungle Ghosts: Walking Point in Vietnam is a narrative nonfiction account of an infantry soldier’s tour of duty in 1969-70 Vietnam. Its raw, bottom-up perspective of the war has been described by a Vietnam Veterans Association reviewer as a “beautifully written, exquisitely detailed Vietnam War memoir [that] is almost a literary work of art.”
At barely 20 years of age, the author was a low-ranking enlisted man stepping beneath a jungle canopy for the first time with eyes wide with wonder. At that moment he knew little about the war in the jungle or the deadly North Vietnamese soldiers he would encounter, but what he experienced later that day led him to a decision that would follow him throughout his year in Vietnam: that to survive he had to rely on his own judgment, regardless of rank.
The book doesn’t lecture, allowing the bottom-up account to speak for itself and open a window to a time and a place where men fought and died unseen on a dim and leaf-littered jungle floor that was hidden from the sky. In so doing, the narrative captures raw hardships, inner reflections, the fears and courage of fellow soldiers, the lethal commitment of the enemy, and the systemic challenges of a complex military bureaucracy that may be institutionally incapable of effectively evaluating its performance.
This is not a story of a hero, but rather a survivor. The author quickly recognized the commitment and lethality of the NVA soldiers. He recounts how seductive the adrenaline-pounding danger was and how it reawakened long-buried survival instincts so that fleeting jungle sounds, scents, and images began to flow through the author unimpeded by ponderous analytical processing. He learned to recognize subtle nudges of alarm that some hidden part of his brain could generate from those myriad messages, and experience taught him to do whatever felt right to his subconscious mind without questioning why.
Many combat memoirs explore the aftermath of war, but Jungle Ghosts ends with a still-haunting memory of his imperiled fellow soldiers looking up at him as a chopper lifted the author off the floor of the jungle for the last time.
While deeply regretting that brutal war and the suffering it caused, the author nevertheless treasured the spellbinding connection he had with the natural voices, scents, sights, and feels of Vietnam’s ancient jungle. That connection is vividly illustrated in sections of the narrative that describe the living, breathing, animal and insect-filled ecosystem whose messages were his lifeline.
Format(s) for review: Paper or Kindle
Review genre: Nonfiction—Memoir/Biography
Pages/Word count: 325 / 135,000