by Al Santoli
It was the mid-'60s, and then-Army medic David Ross recalls new arrivals at Dian in Vietnam watching body bags being dumped from helicopters. One of the bags split open and, Ross says, "Some people were shaking and some people were throwing up and one guy got down and started to pray." Mike Beamon, remembering his service in a Navy commando unit that sneaked into villages, knifing, blowing up or kidnapping Viet Cong suspects, observes, "It was a business and the business was terrorism. Terrorism in my mind is almost a perfect science." These are only two of 33 voices in this firsthand account of what Vietnam was like. Santoli, a thrice-wounded grunt in the 25th Infantry Division's 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry and now a New York playwright, taped interviews with officers, enlisted men, a CIA official and two nurses who took part in that disastrous, ambiguous conflict in Asia. His book is a litany of innocence brought face to face with evil and corruption. Everything We Had can take its place alongside Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and Michael Herr's Dispatches as one of the best—and perhaps the most shocking and graphic—of the books about Vietnam. (Random House, $12.95)
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