If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer
Gene R. Dark waited twenty-five years to write his intensely visceral response to his experience as a Marine in the Vietnam disaster, and then was forced to wait another frustrating twelve years to publish it.
The author’s commitment to tell his story and his dedication to getting it into the publics’ hands was worth the wait: THE BRUTALITY OF WAR is the most honest recounting of the Vietnam War, both in its description of the brainwashing preparation of the kids that were sent there and the grisly realities of the ‘non-Hollywood’ version of the truth about the fighting men, and in the evaluation of America’s angry response to that war to the abuse of the soldiers as veterans that continues to this day.
The cruel truth became obvious. America only accepts winners, and in the eyes of America, Vietnam was a loser, and those who fought were losers.’
While many very fine authors, such as Tim O’Brien, have gained wide readership for novels about the Vietnam ‘conflict’, making Vietnam the background draping for their novel/dramas, Dark very simply and very honestly reports on the way it was.
From his induction into the USMC with all the high hopes of the teenager testosterone-driven dreams of being a hero, through the brutality of the training preparations in being taught to kill, to the actual day by day experiences of engaging the enemy in their ubiquitous positioning, to the extreme hardships of living through the monsoons with the misery of gross skin infections from the filth that could not be cleansed, to the moments of seeing friends blown apart by enemy fire and in response to those sights, finding the killer within - the fire of hate and vengeance with which war soils the mind - it is all here, written without apology, without over-the-edge dramatics, and at all times with the keen-eyed observation of a human being becoming a murderer.
‘We were living day to day with an enemy trying to kill us and we were trying to survive by killing them. We saw death often. Don’t be quick to judge unless you’ve had the wet, sticky blood of a friend etched into your skin. And make no mistake - killing is brutal and there is nothing civilized about it.’
One of the most poignant moments in a book that hits the heart with a bayonet on every page is Dark’s sharing a small gesture on the commercial airline flight home after he had survived Vietnam: the flight was overbooked and an insensitive stewardess told Dark she didn’t have sufficient food trays to give him one, but instead gave him peanuts - and no one offered to share his food with a Marine returning from the horrors and hungers of America’s guilty war. It affected Dark deeply: his recounting of the incident reflects the reader profoundly.
So why did Gene R. Dark persist in finally writing and publishing his memoirs? For the healing effect of putting that horrid time and experience in the past - or at least in perspective. There are many damaged veterans from the Vietnam War, as well as the Iraq War, who desperately need public understanding for their sacrifice. They only ask America to look at the effects of wars and to address the impact and the aftermath, pleading for changes to be made. Dark accomplishes this as well as any writer this reader has read.
Stumble it!
