I read Larry Heinemann's NBA-winning novel, PACO'S STORY, probably 25 years or more ago and was very impressed, and I'd always intended to read CLOSE QUARTERS, his first novel. Well, Heinemann died last year, and now I've finally read it, and it is a real gut-wrencher, absolutely shocking in its honesty about war and how it changes people. First published more than forty years ago, CLOSE QUARTERS got plenty of great reviews, but I'm not sure how well it sold. But it's still (or back?) in print, so that tells you something - that it has become a war lit classic, in my opinion.

It's not an easy book to read in its depiction of the brutality of jungle warfare in Vietnam. Young Philip 'Flip' Dosier arrives in Vietnam still pretty innocent. A Chicago kid, he is drafted and becomes part of an APC team in a Recon unit. It doesn't take long for him to start changing, from his first fire fight experience, which left him feeling "very small and lonely." Caught in the line of fire, Flip finds himself squirming and writhing backward in the mud, trying to escape. Later he looks at the marks he left in the muck, and thinks back to happier times when he and his brothers would play in the snow -

"And it was snow angels I was reminded of when I peeked over that berm, my breath hot and hissing with fright, and stared at that terrified splay-legged image of a struggle in front of that woodline, only our snow angels were white and as deep as the snow."

From the whiteness of innocence to the muddy darkness of experience - that's what I thought of when I read this, and wondered if Heinemann had ever read Blake. Indeed, not many days later, Flip finds himself in hand-to-hand combat with an enemy soldier, a "little man" who nearly kills him. Dropping his bayonet, Flip grabs the man by the throat and strangles him -

"I squeeze his Adam's apple with both thumbs. I lift his head and push it back into the turf with a muted splash. My fingernails work into the back of his neck. The little man grabs both my wrists. He gurgles and works his jaw ... Lift. Push. Squeeze. Something cracks and my thumbs work easier, deeper. His mouth, his tongue, make thick wet murmurs. Lift. Push. Squeeze. His body shakes as though someone is trying to yank it out from under me. His face and lips and jaw go slack. His head and hands go limp."

Yes. Hard to read. I was wincing as I read it.

Further into his tour, Flip learns in a letter that his brother Eddie, a Marine, also in Vietnam, had been badly injured, and may be blind and deaf. He thinks back -

"... on all those pillow fights and snowball fights and rotten apple fights. All those autumn afternoons lying out on the orchard weeds with our coats thrown open for sun warmth, thistles and burrs clinging to the linings. The nights we whispered back and forth in bed and giggled and laughed and argued about baseball. What is it going to be like whispering to him if he's deaf? What will it be like to lie up at night with a blind man?"

As his tour in Vietnam progresses, you see Dosier harden and sink further and deeper into war's darkness, engaging in casual cruelty against a camp-follower whore, initiating a gang-bang with other squad members. And Heinemann does not shy away from the racism that was rampant among the U.S. troops either, portraying an ugly incident in which Flip and all of his white squad members lie about a fight, sending a black soldier off to LBJ (Long Binh Jail) for months. He gives us too an ultra-descriptive chapter of R&R in Tokyo, where Flip hires a $100-a-day prostitute for a week.

But finally, the horror of the war makes a lasting impression, as Flip admits to himself -

"The war works on you until you become part of it, and then you start working on it instead of it working on you, and you get deep-down mean; not movie-style John Wayne mean, you get mean for real ... I dug free-fire zones because we could kill anything that moved, and all I wanted to do was kill and kill and burn and rape and pillage until there was nothing left."

And because of how much he has changed, Flip also realizes, with a kind of horror, "I can never go home. I just want to see it ... I just want to see it one more time."

But, unlike many of his comrades and friends, he does make it back home, and his encounters there - with his parents, his blind brother, his girlfriend, Jenny - are as touching and gut-wrenching as his combat experiences had been.

This is an awful story, but beautifully, starkly written. I could not help but think of all the tens of thousands of men who went through similar experiences in Vietnam. All that loss of innocence. All that pain, suffering, hurt, misery. So many that never came home. So many that did, and have tried for decades now to tamp down all that awful stuff, to "unremember." Larry Heinemann tried to exorcise those memories by writing them down, by turning them into "art."
He succeeded in the art. The memories though may have stayed and haunted him. No more. R.I.P., Larry.

I will recommend CLOSE QUARTERS very highly, especially to war lit buffs.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA ( )

Didn't like this book, although it has been highly recommended. Quit at 25%.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. If you don't like graphic violence, the f-word, and ethnic slurs, lots of brutal and mind-numbing sex, you should leave right now. Categorized as a novel, I suspect many of the incidents in this book reflected Heinemann's personal experiences in "the Nam." This book brings new meaning to the "pornography of violence." One feels almost like voyeur, feeling slightly dirty while reading.

There is one scene that I think particularly illustrates the frustrations of the troops. The protagonist has been assigned to a half-track and one job was to patrol up and down ambush and mine laden highways. After one ambush, the pull off the road, back up, and call in an airstrike. Two Phantoms, one strafing, the other napalming, obliterate the enemy's position. After the strike, they pull 14 charred remnants of the enemy. One of the men goes berserk, smashing one of the dead enemy with the butt of his rifle, over and over again. The lieutenant, walks to the front of the "track" so he can honestly report he saw nothing. The soldier continues to vent his rage until the dead soldier has been smashed to a pulp. They leave the bodies lined up [b:on the road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21E8H3D1JSL._SL75_.jpg|3355573]. When they return the following day, they are all gone.

I've been reading this in concert (perhaps a poor choice of words) with [b:Word of Honor|33809|Word of Honor|Nelson DeMille|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168465638s/33809.jpg|3217470], [b:The Cat from Hue A Vietnam War, Story|444084|The Cat from Hue A Vietnam War Story|John Laurence|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174835735s/444084.jpg|432850], and [b:Black Virgin Mountain A Return to Vietnam|417337|Black Virgin Mountain A Return to Vietnam|Larry Heinemann|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174569068s/417337.jpg|406492]. I've read a lot of Vietnam books, but these four together provide a whole that I find startling in its tragedy.

Additional pertinent title: [b:And a Hard Rain Fell A GI's True Story of the War in Vietnam|916|And a Hard Rain Fell A GI's True Story of the War in Vietnam|John Ketwig|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157748749s/916.jpg|5137] ( )

A grim novel about serving in Vietnam as US soldier. While this is fiction, it frequently reads like a memoir which should not be surprising for Heinemann did serve in Vietnam as a front line grunt. The last chapter carries the protagonist's experiences on to the home scene where he has to face his demons when he gets home. Very realistic and sensitive while also being critical of America's war policy in Vietnam. This is a good companion to Heinemann's memoir of Vietnam entitled Black Virgin Mountain. ( )