A Grunt’s Saga –James Hogan’s “Nam ‘68: A Novel”-A Book Review

Book Review

By Fritz Taylor

Nam ’68: A Novel, James Hogan, Hellgate Press, 2015

If you want to get a birds’ eye view of the existential nature of warfare at close quarters then perhaps you should check out Norman Mailer’s World War II classic standard in The Naked And The Dead. If you are looking for a slice of Army life in the calm just before the storm of the Pacific War then check out James Jones’ classic From Here To Eternity. If you want to get an overview of the Vietnam War in novelistic form at the larger unit level then check out Tim O’Brien or Phillip Caputo. But if you want a ringside view of what it was like for the average infantryman, the “grunt” of hoary legend down at the squad level, down at the base then check out James Hogan’s novelistic treatment of that latter war in his Nam ’68 saga.

Although it is in novelistic form for obvious reasons the book’s story-line centered on main characters High Pockets and Brownie are based on the adventures, misadventures, screw-ups, weird actions and camaraderie is based on the author’s experiences as a grunt in the 7^th Cavalry mostly up in the Central Highland in that critical year of 1968 when all hell was brewing in Vietnam-and in America. When the guys out in the boondocks taking a line from the famous Country Joe and the Fish song asked “what are we fighting for” while trying to survive-and help their buddies survive too. As it said on the blurb on the back of the book the story rings true to any Vietnam veteran, heck, any veteran on some of the stuff from the well-known rough barracks language to the seemingly irrational details that brass were forever dreaming up.        

Of course when one thinks of 1968 in terms of the Vietnam War, at least as those from my, from Hogan’s generation experienced it was the Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese/South Vietnamese Liberation Army which in many ways exposed the futility of going along the road to further American escalation of the troop levels. And while that feeling is reflected in the story line even among the grunts here down at the fighting squad level something more like having “your buddy’s back” and survival were closer to day to day reality and not what was happening with the politicians in Washington or Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City).   

The two key characters honed in on in this squad’s eye view of the war are High Pockets who is mostly a private (the author a very tall man and hence the moniker) and Brownie who is mostly a sergeant in both cases depending on what craziness they got themselves into. Craziness determined in the Army, in the military by how far away from regulation you have drifted in whatever you were up to. The scene is filled out by a shifting array of other rank and file squad members like Dudley, Big Mike and Eli and anchored by NCO Top (top sergeant) who let this squad go through its paces without much supervision he trusted the guys that much. A high compliment from a career Army man. (That “shifting array” determined by when a squad member’s tour was up either by time, grievous wounds or death). More distance were a revolving array of officers mostly lieutenants most famously one named Pineapple, a respected captain and a sporadically seen colonel. But the main action and hijinks are were among those rank and file soldiers holding ground, or trying to.  

The scene of most of the action in the book is in various firebases in the Central Highlands (with a shorter stay in the Mekong Delta near the Cambodian border later on toward the end of the High Pocket’s tour). And mostly the action is about the fate of various patrols the squad goes out on into the bush looking for enemy soldiers-and finding them (or they finding the squad). High Pockets usually walked the “point”-figured out where the landmines and other traps the enemy had laid down and got the squad to its objective and back (that latter part very important). As the story develops it becomes apparent that for a city boy this High Pockets is an exceptional soldier, exceptional in the ability to stay alive and keep others alive as well. Brownie a little less impulsive than High Pockets is also an excellent soldier. If you were knee-deep in a fire fight then High Pockets was your man due to his personal bravery and what the hell manner. If you needed to figure out the best use of personal, a leader making quick on-the-spot decisions then Brownie was your man. The two anchored the day to day operations of the unit from those fire fights to guard duty to digging fortifications.       

I really couldn’t do justice to all of the actions that this squad carried out in this short review. Let’s leave it that in the Central Highlands there was plenty of action, plenty of experience, inexperienced soldiers and officers and plenty of mistakes. Enough to keep the story moving at a steady pace. And plenty of description of the “down” time, the time in base camps when the favorite activity of the squad was to get high on drugs and “chill” out (rampart drug usage to keep your head on the great “secret” of that war and a whole separate issue of what happened to those guys when they got back to the real world). Check this novel out if you want the skinny on the real face of war down on the ground where the bloody action takes place.