Doug Bradley (2) (1947–)

This book is essentially a long string of anecdotes, most of which relate to the Vietnam war and music. The authors divide the war into sensible eras and talks about each era's music, but I'm not convinced the differences are all that meaningful. They do mention that we REMFs experienced the war differently than the folks on the front lines, but don't really examine that analytically.

One thing they do really well is let their subjects tell their own stories. Not only are there forty sidebars (called "Solos") which are explicitly written by someone about their war experience, but even within the authors' text the typical anecdote is predominantly a quotation from an interview.

An interesting book, with good stories. But not really the book I hoped for; that would have had more analysis.… (més)

Bradley and I were in Nam at pretty much the same time, and I really wanted to like this book. But it just wasn't that interesting. This is a collection of short stories, mostly with the same characters. Bradley's intro tells us that some of the stories are "true" and some are fiction, and all are fictionalized. Within the work he goes out of his way to blur that line; I'm not sure why.

The book's main point is that many of us who served in Vietnam had non-combat jobs--supply clerks, nurses, communications techs, mechanics, mail clerks, and so forth. Doug Bradley wrote press releases and edited a newspaper, and his book's about the people he worked with and how their work didn't square with the image you might have of our war.

One (irrelevant) oddity: Bradley tells us about the Teletype Room, where he and his colleagues read wire service news and press releases. His Teletype Room and the teletype room I worked in seem not to have been much alike. We were handling real messages--though I confess we tended to think the battle reports were fictionalized. We took the Amcross (American Red Cross) messages seriously, though, and gave them much higher priority than the system did.… (més)