Don Julin

An obscure and rather depressing self-published memoir of Nam, I found this book by accident on Amazon when Googling for music CDs by a different Don Julin, a Traverse City area jazz mandolinist. The author Julin was a suburban Chicago kid who drifted aimlessly between dead-end jobs after high school until he joined the Marines. Small of stature and a self-styled loner and firearm fanatic, Julin's tale of his time as a rifleman with the 4th Marines is a dark tunnel of horrors and atrocities. One example concerned some "VC" prisoners, a woman and two children found in a bunker.

"'...You aren't gonna kill a woman and two kids?'
Yup, that's just what they were doing, and there were
enough of them to make sure that I didn't interfere. They
rolled a grenade in ... and nothing happened. One of the
kids came out holding the dud grenade. God works in
mysterious ways ... and so does the devil ... 'cause they
pitched the dud, shoved the kid back inside and threw in
two more behind him, and these weren't duds."

There is a numbing repetitiveness to the awfulness of combat that Julin describes in grunt-speak, and there is no redemption to be found in his dark tale. On the final page he states flatly, "Our stories just aren't first-rate. John Wayne would never play our part ... for all the time and risk, we simply didn't shine." And finally, "Anyway you look at it, you lose."
If you read Julin's book you'll need a strong stomach and perhaps an appetite for despair to finish it. Nevertheless it is a darkly powerful and painfully real look at one man's Vietnam war. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA… (more)