John M. Del Vecchio

I don't care how many years pass. The plight of Cambodia in the years following the Vietnam War is atrocious. For the Sake of All Living Things is a difficult read. It is powerful. Powerful like a 250 pound man of all muscle punching you in the gut. From scenes when the poorest of poor farmers have to pay tolls or "donations" just to travel a road to the vicious methods of torture and killing (chopsticks driven into the brain via the ears, bodies cleaved in two, children buried alive) I was show more wincing the entire time I read For the Sake of All Living Things. Through fear and violence the dominance of the Khmer Rouge spreads like a staining black oil throughout Cambodia, indoctrinating and training villagers to become killing machines for the Pol Pot regime. The methods of brainwashing are subtle and sly. As a historical fiction For the Sake of All Living Things reads like a nonfiction because of the appropriate terminology, government reports and various strategic maps. At times I was internally cringing to be American.
I read somewhere that For the Sake of All Living Things is actually the second book in a trilogy about the Vietnam war, Cambodia and the Pol Pot year zero cleansing, and veterans coming home. show less

The 13th Valley is a Vietnam War novel that follows closely in the footsteps of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. The difference is that Mailer was one of the titans of 20th century American literature, and Del Vecchio is a fine author, but he's not Mailer.

The story follows Alpha Company, part of the 101st Airborne, through an operation into the titular 13th Valley, a remote highland area near the more infamous A Shau. Our three main viewpoints are Chelini/Cherry, just arrived and show more anxious to prove himself; Daniel Egan, a hardcore boonierat soldier who becomes Cherry's mentor; and Lieutenant Brooks, their commanding officer, an intellectual Black man.

The story is based on Del Vecchio's experiences, he was an army combat correspondent and has a Bronze Star, and the best parts of the writing are the little sensor details of Vietnam. The agonizing tension of combat marches, inch by inch through torturous hilly jungle with death moments away. Damp, heat, filth, jungle rot, leeches, and all the other indignities boonierats faced. And also some of the touches of humanity, like Egan whipping up an actual feast out of C-ration ingredients.

Where the novel stumbles is in its philosophical ambitions. Brooks ponders the meaning of war, questioning his men on the linguistic origins of the conflict. Various soldiers jaw over race in America, and what it means for Black men to be fighting a white man's war. I appreciate the presence of Minh, a Vietnamese Kit Carson Scout (Communist defectors attached as translators to American units), but his arguments that the Americans should get out of his country and let the Vietnamese lose the war themselves feel more like a prepared statement than an authentic characterization.

The dialog is both a high and low point. The highs are the language of grunts, a mix of profanity, slang, and radio jargon that is utterly at a time. The lows are attempts at dialect, which I personally think is an affectation that should be left in the 19th century. At times, the characters declaim in long philosophical paragraphs, perfectly organized thesis-antithesis-synthesis that'd be hard to assemble at the seminar table, let alone on day five of a combat operation.

Del Vecchio does his best to capture the hallucinatory chaos of combat, though I'm not sure its one of those things language can capture. Cherry, in particular, becomes a beast, charging through fire, throwing grenades, killing and being saved from certain death. And while sometimes battle is cinematic, mostly death is random and awful, bolts from the blue which whittle down Alpha company. Del Vecchio is absolutely clear that every name on the black wall in Washington DC (and the unlisted millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians) was a life destroyed, dreams forever unfulfilled, a universe lost.

Speaking of dreams, the story spends a lot of time in the character's memories, mostly flashing back to women. This is realistic and generally kind of weird. Likewise, each chapter is followed by an official summary in the form of an operation report, which does help contextualize the action and show how little the most important day in someone's life matters to the Army and the history.

Ultimately, I admire the ambition, but the execution leaves something lacking. This is a solid novel, but it's a long way from its inspiration, or the first tier of novelistic memoirs, like Dispatches, Chickenhawk, or Matterhorn. show less

A very powerful book that shows the circumstances that led to the to takeover by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia/Kampuchea. Although fiction, it has the verisimilitude of reality as it covers the village recruitment and training of the killers in the Pol Pot regime that would terrorize Cambodia in the mid-70s. This is an excellent supplement to the film - " The Killing Fields."

It's easy to appreciate this novel for the anthropological level of detail. The author fought in the war and started writing it in the early 70s, soon after he returned home. It has legitimate chops. It consciously tries to show things as they were and not as they have been portrayed. Something like a hundred pages comprise the first day alone though you don't realize it's only been one day. There is so much incident, time is compressed. Then you realize.. this is going to be a long tour. No show more wonder they constantly spoke of how many days were left. And this was before the fighting started. Great book. show less