[This is the second book by this author on the required reading list at the U.S. Naval Academy. It is further evidence of a 'shadow' de-facto Anti-Vietnam War Studies Program at the Academy.]

       This book is even a more egregious excuse for writing an anti-Vietnam War book than was O'Brien's 'Going After Cacciato.' Several favorable book reviews at the front of the book give it away. Harper's Bazaar says, "A tremendous achievement, a truly postmodern thriller..." Of course it is. It is written in the form of the modern deconstructionists who hate America, its Constitution, and its history.

       The L.A. Weekly says, "One of the most haunting and true evocations of moral trouble...This novel is about many things -- marriage, Vietnam, American politics, the devil..." The truth is that this book could have been written without even a reference to the Vietnam War. The character weaknesses of John Wade, the lead protagonist in O'Brien's novel are so numerous, deep, and dark that the entire plot would have been just as believable if Vietnam were never mentioned. But the Vietnam War, and especially the tragedy of the massacre at My Lai, are introduced as a means of demonizing the Wade character and give broad believability to his evil ways. It also gives justification for the central event in the plot -- the public exposure of Wade's secret connection to the My Lai massacre as a reason for his precipitous fall from political glory by losing an election to the U.S. Senate. Which causes him to lose his sanity and murder his wife -- by pouring boiling water in her eyes, nose, and mouth while she was sleeping and then disposing of her body so she could not be found.

       Or did he? In another of O'Brien's vaporous mysteries, or tales of adventure, one never knows what really happened to his wife, or to Wade in the end. But, the point is -- who cares?  The whole purpose of the story is to demonize America's Vietnam War effort and the Americans who fought there.

       Wade was a rising star, fast track politician. Lieutenant governor at thirty seven. Candidate for the United States Senate at forty. Loser by a landslide at forty-one. "Landslide, he was thinking. The thought formed as a picture in his head, an enormous white mountain he had been climbing all his life, and now he watched it come rushing down on him, all that disgrace...The numbers were hard. He had been beaten nearly three to one within his own party; he had carried a few college towns and Itasca County and almost noting else."

       We readers don't know it yet, but let me spare you the grief. Wade was winning by a vast majority when the newspapers exposed the fact that, as a young combat infantryman in Vietnam, he had been involved in the massacre at My Lai and had covered up this personal history. This sudden exposé cost him the election, and presumably all he had worked for all his life -- a life in national politics.

       But let's learn more about Wade's character, absent the Vietnam experience. "But it was more than a lost election. It was something physical. Humiliation, that was part of it, and the wreckage in his chest and stomach, and then the rage, how it surged up into his throat and how he wanted to scream the most terrible thing he could scream -- Kill Jesus! -- and how he couldn't help himself and couldn't think straight and couldn't stop screaming it inside his head -- Kill Jesus! -- because nothing could be done, and because it was so brutal and disgraceful and final. He felt crazy sometimes. Real depravity. Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn't keep it in and he couldn't let it out. He wanted to hurt things. Grab a knife and start cutting and slashing and never stop. All those years. Climbing like a son of a bitch, clawing his way up inch by fucking inch, and then it all came crashing down at once. Everything, it seemed. His sense of purpose. His pride, his career, his honor and reputation, his belief in the future he had so grandly dreamed for himself.

       John Wade was the son of an alcoholic who teased him about his weight as a youngster. His father died when John was fourteen. "What John felt that night, and for many nights afterward, was the desire to kill. At the funeral he wanted to kill everybody who was crying and everybody who wasn't. He wanted to take a hammer and crawl into the casket and kill his father for dying. But he was helpless. He didn't know where to start."

       "In the weeks that followed, because he was young and full of grief, he tried to pretend that his father was not truly dead. He would talk to him in his imagination, carrying on whole conversations...And so when things got especially bad, John would sometimes invent elaborate stories about how he could've save his father...In his heart, despite the daydreams, John could not fool himself. He knew the truth...But still the idea kept turning in his mind. He'd picture his father stumbling down a dark alley, lost, not dead at all. And then the pretending would start again. John would go back in his memory over all the places his father might be -- under the bed or behind the bookcases in the living room -- and in this way he would spend many hours looking for his father...It was only a game, or a way of coping, but now and then he'd get lucky. Just by chance he'd glance down and suddenly spot his father in the grass behind the house. 'Bingo, ' his father would say, and John would feel a hinge swing open. He'd bend down and pick up his father and put him in his pocket and be careful never to lose him again."

       Early in his life, John Wade had mastered the art of magic. "He used to practice down in the basement, just stand in front of that old mirror of his and do tricks for hours and hours. His father didn't think it was healthy. Always alone, always shut up by himself. A very secretive boy..."

       Interspersed with these telling accounts of a young man whose childhood was traumatic and stilted are quotes from witnesses who give affidavits to the police in connection with the mysterious disappearance of John Wade's wife while they were alone at their cottage near the Lake in the Woods. One set of quotes, one in each such sequence, are those from a Richard Thinbill. His quotes are completely out of context with the story as it develops. Examples are;

          "You know what I remember? I remember the flies.
          Millions of flies. That's what I mostly remember."
       Another quote which is at the end of a chapter is,
          "Fucking flies."
       Another quote is, "We called him Sorcerer." And after the first quote above, O'Brien gives us the following footnote.

          "Interview, July 19,1990, Fargo, North Dakota. Former PFC Thinbill, a Native American (Chippewa), served with John Wade as a member of the First Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade, Task Force Barker, Americal Division, Republic of Vietnam."

       Unless you were a student of military history, you would not know that this unit was the one in which Lieutenant William Calley, the incompetent Army officer who led a platoon into the village of My Lai and wantonly destroyed it, along with its men, women and children. But those unsuspecting are not let in on this little secret until much later in the story.

       In the meantime, O'Brien weaves a story of John Wade's developing personality before and after his Vietnam experiences. "You know, I think politics and magic were almost the same thing for him. Transformations -- that's part of it -- trying to change things. When you think about it, magicians and politicians are basically control freaks," says Wade's campaign manager. A quote from The Magician's Handbook, is quoted, "The capacity to appear to do what is manifestly impossible will give you a considerable feeling of personal power and can help make you a fascinating and amusing personality."

       And in the midst of this set of quotes, we find O'Brien bringing in the stereotype of the Vietnam War veteran, assumed to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome because of his war experience. "To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature." Having paved the way with this quote, O'Brien applies it to his character, John Wade, "There is no such thing as 'getting used to combat'...Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare."

       And just to cement the fact that Wade's character was formed long before this apparent attempt to blame his behavior on combat in Vietnam, O'Brien quotes Wade's campaign manager, "Show me a politician, I'll show you an unhappy childhood." But that isn't quite enough. Directly after that quote, O'Brien gratuitously pans Richard Nixon, as would any modern liberal author worth his 'cultural Marxist' credentials, with the quote from Nixon's Memoirs, "My mother was a saint."

       But in order to further pin PTSD on the Wade character, O'Brien quotes a sister of his wife saying, "I remember Kathy telling me how he'd wake up screaming sometimes. Foul language, which I won't repeat. In fact, I'd rather not say anything at all."

       Then a quote from John Wade's imaginative dreams, "Kill Jesus!"

       "John Wades' hobby was magic...[His] was not true magic. it was trickery. But John Wade pretended otherwise, because he was a kid the, and because pretending was the thrill of magic, and because for a while what seemed to happen became a happening in itself. He was a dreamer." In addition, Wade had carried out covert spying on his wife, from the time of their courtship, to their marriage, and up to the time of her death. And the wife knew this character flaw but did not confront him with it. His spying on her was like his magic, it gave him a sense of power and control.

       So now you see that the Wade character had enough flaws that anything was believable of such a person -- even murdering his wife and disposing of her body in such a way that no one would ever find  her. And then disappear into the vast reaches of the northern Lake of the Woods.

       O'Brien did not need to spice the story with a characterization of the My Lai incident in order to make it believable. In fact, the truth is the opposite of this invention. The whole story is concocted with a plot that gives an excuse to write the genre of anti-Vietnam War books and actions that propelled Jane Fonda to the forefront of the anti-war demonstrators in our colleges and universities in the mid-1960s and 1970s. And O'Brien chose to take advantage of the most horrific of all Vietnam War stories, that of the My Lai atrocities committed by LT William Calley and his company of draftees. In fact, O'Brien never authenticates that the U.S. Army ever killed an enemy Viet Cong combatant. The only deaths attributed to U.S. Army action against the enemy were innocent civilians. According to O'Brien, we only killed women, children, babies, old men, pigs, water buffalo, dogs, and chickens in the Vietnam War. Only the innocent were the targets of destruction. And O'Brien's view of the U.S. soldier was that of a scalp-taking rapist of young Vietnamese women.

       And that is where Richard Thinbill comes in, with his inimicable quote, "Millions of them. Big mean fuckers. Those were some very pissed-off flies." And the buzzing of such flies is what fills John Wades mind as he set about boiling his wife alive.

       "The war was aimless. No targets, no visible enemy. There was nothing to shoot back at. Men were hurt and then more men were hurt and nothing was ever gained by it. The ambushes never worked. The patrols turned up nothing but women and kids and old men."

       "Like that bullshit Kid's game," Rusty Calley said one evening. "They hide, we seek, except we're chasin' a bunch of gookish fucking ghosts."

       "In the dark someone did witch imitations. Someone else laughed. For Sorcerer [John Wade], who sat listening at his foxhole, the war had become a state of mind. Not bedlam exactly, but the din was nearby."

       "Eyeballs for eyeballs," Calley said. "One of your famous Bible regulations."

       "All through February they worked an AO called Pinkville, a chain of dark, sullen hamlets tucked up against the South China Sea. The men hated the place, and feared it. On their maps the sector was shaded a bright shimmering pink to signify a 'built-up area,' with many hamlets and paddy dikes and fields of rice. But for Charlie Company there was nothing bright about Pinkville. It was spook country. The Geography of evil: tunnels and bamboo thickets and mud huts and graves."

       "On February 25, 1968, they stumbled into a minefield near a village called Lac son."
       "I'm killed," someone said, and he was.

       "A steady gray rain was falling. Thunder advanced from the mountains to the west. After an hour a pair of dustoff choppers settled in. The casualties were piled aboard and the helicopters rose into the rain with three more dead, twelve more wounded."

       "Don't mean zip," Calley said. His face was childlike and flaccid. He turned to one of the medics. "What's up doc?"
       "Three weeks later, on March 14, a booby-trapped 155 round blew Sergeant George Cox into several large wet pieces. Dyson lost both legs. Hendrixson lost an arm and a leg."
       "Two or three men were crying."
       "Others couldn't remember how."
       "Kill Nam," said Lieutenant Calley. He pointed his weapon at the earth, burned twenty quick rounds. "Kill it," he said. He reloaded and shot the grass and a palm tree and then the earth again. "Grease the place," he said. "Kill it."

       The evening before the fateful raid on My Lai, Sorcerer wrote a letter to his future wife, Kathy, "What do you get when you breed VC with rats?" He smiled to himself and jotted down the answer on a separate slip of paper." With that revelation of the 'attitude' of LT Calley's troops on the eve of the 'battle,' O'Brien describes his part of the killings in My Lai.

       "At 7:22 on the morning of March 16, 1968, the lead elements of Charlie Comapany boarded a flight of helicopters that climbed into the thin, rosy sunlight, gathered into assault formation, then banked sought and skimmed low and fast over scarred, mangled, bombed-out countryside toward a landing zone just west of Pinkville."

       "Something was wrong."

       "Sorcerer felt dazed and half asleep, still dreaming wild dawn dreams. All night he'd been caught up in pink rivers and pink paddies; even now, squatting at the rear of the chopper, he couldn't flush away the pink. All that color -- it was wrong. The air was wrong.' The smells were wrong, and the thin rosy sunlight, and how the men seemed wrapped inside themselves. Meadlo and Mitchell and Thinbill sat with their eyes closed."  Oh, Oh. Thinbill. There is that name again. The one of whom O'Brien laced his novel full of quotes about 'flies.' A fictitious character, just as John Wade is fictitious -- right in the midst of a 'real-life' rendition of the My Lai massacre. How convenient. How secretive. How phony!

       But the narrative goes on. "Sledge fiddled with his radio. Conti was off in some mental whorehouse. PFC Weatherby kept wiping his M-16 with a towel, first the barrel and then his face and then the barrel again. Boyce and Maples and Lieutenant Calley sat side by side in the copper's open doorway, sharing a cigarette, quietly peering down at the cratered fields and paddies."

       "Pure wrongness, Sorcerer knew."

       "At 7:30 the choppers banked in a long arc and approached the hamlet of Thuan Yen from the southwest. Below, almost straight ahead, white puffs of smoke opened up in the paddies just outside the village. The artillery barrage swept across the fields and into the western fringes of Thuan Yen, cutting through underbrush and bamboo and banana trees, setting fires here and there, shifting northward as the helicopters skimmed in low over the drop zone. The door gunners were now laying down a suppressing fire. They leaned into their big guns, shoulders twitching. The noise made Sorcerer's eyelids go haywire."

       "Down and dirty!" someone yelled, and the chopper settled into a wide dry paddy. Mitchell was first off. Then Boyce and Conti and Meadlo, then Maples, then Sledge, then Thinbill and the stubby lieutenant.
       "Sorcerer went last."
       "Just inside the village, Sorcerer found a pile of dead goats. He found a pretty girl with her pants down. She was dead too. She looked at him cross-eyed. Her hair was gone."
       "He found dead dogs, dead chickens."

       "Farther along, he encountered someone's forehead. He found three dead water buffalo. He found a dead monkey. He found ducks pecking at a dead toddler. Events had been channeling this way for a long while, months of terror, months of slaughter, and now in the pale morning sunlight a kind of meltdown was in progress."

       "Pigs were squealing."

       "He watched a young man hobbling up a trail, one foot torn away at the ankle. He watched Weatherby shoot two little girls in the face. Deeper into the village, in front of a small L-shaped hootch, he came across a GI with a woman's black ponytail flowing from his helmet. The man wiped a hand across his crotch. He gave a little flip to the ponytail and smiled at Sorcerer and blooped an M-79 round into the L-shaped hootch. 'Blammo,' the man said. He shook his head as if embarrassed. 'Yeah, well,' he said, then shrugged and fired off another round and said, 'Boom.' At his feet was a wailing infant. A middle-aged woman lay nearby. She was draped across a bundle of straw, not quite dead, shot in the legs and stomach. The woman gazed at the world with indifference. At one point she made an obscure motion with her head, a kind of bow, inexact, after which she rocked herself away."

       "There were dead waterfowl and dead house pets. People were dying loudly inside the L-shaped hootch."
       "Sorcerer uttered meaningless sounds -- 'No,' he said, then after a second he said, 'Please!' -- and then the sunlight sucked him down a trail toward the center of the village, where he found burning hootches and brightly mobile figures engaged in murder. Simpson was killing children. PFC Weatherby was killing whatever he could kill. A row of corpses lay in the pink-to-purple sunshine along the trail -- teenagers and old women and two babies and a young boy. Most were dead, some were almost dead. The dead lay very still. The almost-dead did twitching things until PFC Weatherby had occasion to reload and make them fully dead. The noise was fierce. No one was dying quietly. There were squeakings and chickenhouse sounds."

       "Please," Sorcerer [John Wade] said again. He felt very stupid. Thirty meters up the trail he came across Conti and Meadlo and Rusty Calley. Meadlo and the lieutenant were spraying gunfire into a crowd of villagers. They stood side by side, taking turns. Meadlo was crying. Conti was watching. The lieutenant shouted something and shot down a dozen women and kids and then reloaded and shot down more and then reloaded and shot down more and then reloaded again. The air was hot and wet. "Jeez, come on," the lieutenant said, "get with it -- move -- light up those fuckers," but Sorcerer was already sprinting away. He ran past a smoking bamboo schoolhouse. Behind him and in front of him, a brisk machine-gun wind passed through Thuan Yen. The wind stirred up a powdery red dust that sparkled in the morning sunshine, and the little village had now gone mostly violet. Hutto was shooting corpses. T'Souvas was shooting children. Doherty and Terry were finishing off the wounded. This was not madness, Sorcerer understood. This was sin. He felt it winding through his own arteries, something vile and slippery like heavy black oil in a crankcase.

       "Stop, he thought. But it wouldn't stop. Someone shot an old farmer and lifted him up and dumped him in a well and tossed in a grenade."

       "The killing was steady and inclusive. The men took frequent smoke breaks; they ate candy bars and exchanged stories."

       "A period of dark time went by, maybe an hour, maybe more, then Sorcerer found himself on his hands and knees behind a bamboo fence. A few meters away, in the vicinity of a large wooden turret, fifteen or twenty villagers squatted in the morning sunlight. They were chattering among themselves, their faces tight, and then somebody strolled up and made a waving motion and shot them dead."

       "Tracer rounds corkscrewed through the glare, and people were dying in long neat rows. The sunlight was in his blood."
       "He would not remember squealing."

       "He would not remember raising his weapon, nor rolling away from the bamboo fence, but he would remember forever how he turned and shot down an old man with a wispy beard and wire glasses and what looked to be a rifle. It was not a rifle. It was a small wooden hoe. The hoe he would always remember. In ordinary hours after the war, at the breakfast table or in the babble of some dreary statehouse hearing, John Wade would sometimes look up to see the wooden hoe spinning like a baton in the morning sunlight. He would see the old man shuffling past the bamboo fence, the skinny legs, the erect posture and the wire glasses, the hoe suddenly sailing up high and doing its quick twinkling spin and coming down uncaught. He would feel only the faintest sense of culpability. The forgetting trick mostly worked. On certain late-night occasions, however, John Wade would remember covering his head and screaming and crawling through a hedgerow and out into a wide paddy where helicopters were ferrying in supplies. The paddy was full of colored smoke, lavenders and yellows. There were loud voices, and many explosions, but he couldn't seem to locate anyone. He found a young woman laid open without a chest or lungs. He found dead cattle. All around him were flies and burning trees and burning hootches. Later, he found himself at the bottom of an irrigation ditch. There were many bodies present, maybe a hundred. He was caught up in the slime."

       "PFC Weatherby found him there."
       "Hey, Sorcerer," Weatherby said. The guy started to smile, but Sorcerer shot him anyway."
       "There were flies now -- a low droning buzz that swelled up from somewhere deep inside the village."

       O'Brien interlaces actual testimony from the court martial of Lieutenant William Calley with this imaginative account given in this book. For example, the testimony of a Ray Wood, "I came to a hootch and a lady jumped out. I shot and wounded her, and she jumped in again and then came out with a baby and some others ... There was a man, a woman, and two girls ... [A] guy from the Second Platoon came up and grabbed by rifle and said, 'Kill them all!' He shot them."

       And then comes O'Brien's make believe in testimony of his character, Richard Thinbill. "The place stunk, especially that ditch. Flies everywhere. They glowed in the dark. It was like this spirit world or something."

       Aha! Now, we finally see the significance of the reference to 'flies' in testimony of PFC Richard Thinbill in O'Brien's horrific, make-believe account of the My Lai tragedy. As in O'Brien's other two books, 'fragging' his own 'buddies,' NCOs, and officers was a common occurrence by the out-of-control draftee foot-soldiers in the Army that fought the Vietnam War. And of, course, to hear the anti-Vietnam War sympathizers tell of it, all came home to be homeless, no-account alcoholics, drug addicts or even the more 'sophisticated,' like John Wade, sufferers from PTSD who end up murdering their wives because of the stress of civilian life, including life's little disappointments, as a veteran of that war.

       In a footnote, at the bottom of page 198, O'Brien attempts to legitimize his imaginative account of the My Lai tragedy, based on his actual experience in Vietnam as a combat infantryman. "It was the spirit world. Vietnam. Ghosts and graveyards. I arrived in-country a year after John Wade, in 1969, and walked exactly the ground he walked, in and around Pinkville, through the villages of Thuan Yen and My Khe and Co Luy. I know what happened that day. I know how it happened. I know why. It was the sunlight. It was the wickedness that soaks into your blood and slowly heats up and begins to boil. Frustration, partly. Rage, partly. The enemy was invisible. They were ghosts. They killed us with land mines and booby traps; they disappeared into the night, or into tunnels, or into the deep misted-over paddies and bamboo and elephant grass. But it went beyond that. Something more mysterious. The smell of incense, maybe. The unknown, the unknowable. The blank faces. The overwhelming otherness. This is not to justify what occurred on March 16, 1968, for in my view such justifications are both futile and outrageous. Rather, it's to bear witness to the mystery of evil. Twenty-five years ago, as a terrified young PFC, I too could taste the sunlight. I could smell the sin. I could feel the butchery sizzlng like grease just under my eyeballs."

       Having given us his credentials for judging the My Lai massacre, O'Brien immediately goes back to laying on the gore in his imaginative account, as if to further seal his view of the 'sin' in the reader's mind. "The killing went on for four hours. It was thorough and systematic. In the morning sunlight, which shifted from pink to purple, people were shot dead and carved up with knives and raped and sodomized and bayoneted and blown into scraps. The bodies lay in piles. Around eleven, when Charlie Company broke for chow, PFC Richard Thinbill sat down with Sorcerer along a paddy dike just outside Than Yen. He opened a can of peaches, cocked his head. 'That sound,' he said, 'you hear that?'"

       "Jesus, man. What I'd give for earplugs."

       "In mid-afternoon Charlie Company saddled up and headed east toward the sea. Sorcerer kept to himself near the rear of the column. Head down, shoulders stooped, he counted his steps and tried to push away the evil. It wasn't easy. The buzz had gone into his head. Flies, he thought ..."

       Compare O'Brien's fictional account of the My Lai massacre with the real-life account of the American fighting-man in the Vietnam War, written by those who also actually fought there. In LTGEN Harold Moore's book, written with Joseph Galloway, "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young," Moore describes his courageous combat infantrymen, who fought and won the battle of the Ia Drang valley in November 1965. His Airmobile Battalion of the 7^th Cavalry Division 'dropped into' an area swarming with an entire North Vietnamese regiment, and killed 12 enemy to every American killed in the battle. "What, then, had we learned with our sacrifices in the Ia Drang Valley? We had learned something about fighting the North Vietnamese regulars - and something important about ourselves. We could stand against the finest light infantry troops in the world and hold our ground."

       Later in the book, O'Brien builds on the My Lai massacre as a debating point about the larger scale 'sin' of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. He abstracts his horrific imaginative account of My Lai into an attempt to go back into our nation's history and paint the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese as patriots who were attempting to overthrow a corrupt and evil oppressive foe. That is, he uses quotes from the American Revolution in an attempt to characterize the valiant VC and North Vietnamese as patriots similar to our American ancestors who were simply fighting the oppressive, overpowering forces of the United States in the 1960s, which takes the place of the British of 1776.

       A quote from an Anonymous British infantryman, 1775 (After the battles at Lexington and Concord), "They did not fight us like a regular army, only like savages, behind trees and stone walls, and out of the woods and houses ... [The colonists are] as bad as the Indians for scalping and cutting the dead men's ears and noses off."

       Then a quote from a member of LT Calley's Charlie Company, "When we first started losing members of the company, it was mostly through booby-traps and snipers ... You didn't trust anybody ... [I]n the end, anybody that was still in the country was the enemy."

       This is followed by a quote from a Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie, 1775 (After the battles at Lexington and Concord). "[Our British troops] were so enraged at suffering from an unseen enemy that they forced open many of the houses ... and put to death all those found in them."

       Then O'Brien juxtaposes testimony from his fictitious character, Paul Meadlo, in court martial testimony. "Q: You killed men, women, and children? A: Yes. Q: You were ordered to do so? A: Yes. Q: Why did you carry out that order? A: I was ordered to. And I was emotionally upset ... And we were supposed to get satisfaction from this village for the men we'd lost. They was all VC and VC sympathizers and I still believe they was all Viet Cong sympathizers."

       Followed by this quote from the same Anonymous British officer, 1775 (After the battles at Lexington and Concord). "On the road, in our route home, we found every house full of people, and the fences lined as before. Every house from which they fired was immediately forced, and EVERY SOUL IN THEM PUT TO DEATH. Horrible carnage! O Englishmen, to what depth of brutal degeneracy are ye fallen!"

       Ah, yes. Tim O'Brien juxtaposes the U.S. Army in Vietnam as the oppressive British Army of 1775. And the Viet Cong are the modern counterparts of the patriotic, brave, courageous American revolutionaries of 1776. A grander theme could not be envisioned to appeal to the cowardly counter-culture revolutionaries of the mid-1960s and 1970s who became, in time, the power elites of the Boomer generation. Those who choose America's heroes in our postmodern, deconstructionist, multicultural age.

       In a final footnote on page 298, Tim O'Brien, the darling anti-Vietnam War author of the New Left, modern liberal, 'cultural Marxist' foot soldier power elites of the Boomer generation who were motivated by the revolutionary Frankfurt school intellectuals, gives his credentials in order to affirm the 'sin' of America's fighting for the freedom of South Vietnam against Communist aggressors from the North.

       The testimony of PFC Richard Thinbill in the investigation of the murder of John Wade's wife introduces the footnote. "Yeah, if I know Sorcerer, he had some slick shit up his sleeve. Guy had a million moves. No matter where he is, though, I bet he's still got nightmares. I bet he's out there swatting flies."

       And then the footnote -- about O'Brien the author, not Wade the lead character. "Swatting flies -- yes. Maybe. But still, it's odd how the mind erases horror. All the evidence suggests that John Wade was able to perform a masterly forgetting trick for nearly two decades, somehow coping, pushing it all away, and from my own experience I can understand how he kept things buried, how he could never face or even recall the butchery at Thuan Yen. For me, after a quarter century, nothing much remains of that ugly war. A handful of splotchy images. My company commander bending over a dead soldier, wiping the man's face with a towel. A lieutenant with a bundled corpse over his shoulder like a great sack of bird feed. My own hands. A buddy's bewildered eyes. A kid named Chip Merricks soaring into a tree. A patch of rice paddy bubbling with machine-gun fire. Everything else is a smudge of hedgerows and trails and land mines and snipers and death. We moved like sleepwalkers through the empty villages, shadowed by an enemy we could never find, calling in medevac choppers and loading up the casualties and then moving out again toward the next deadly little village. And behind us we left a wake of fire and smoke. We called in gunships and air strikes. We brutalized. We wasted. We pistol-whipped. We trashed wells. We kicked and punched. We burned all that would burn. Yes, and these too were atrocities -- the dirty secrets that live forever inside all of us. I have my own PFC Weatherby. My own old man with a hoe. And yet a quality of abstractions makes reality unreal. All these years, like John Wade, I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us. Still, it's odd. On occasion, especially when I'm alone, I find myself wondering if these old tattered memories weren't lifted from someone else's life, or from a piece of fiction I once read or once heard about. My own war does not belong to me. In a peculiar way, even at this very instant, the ordeal of John Wade -- the long decades of silence and lies and secrecy -- all this has a vivid, living clarity that seems far more authentic than my own faraway experience. Maybe that's what this book is for. To remind me. To give me back my vanished life."

       Yes, and to cement the author's position with America's opinion-makers, its modern liberal media elites and especially its reigning power elites of the Boomer generation, most of whom dodged the draft, demonstrated against the war (some, like Bill Clinton, in foreign countries, some of which were Communist controlled), and who now celebrate the author who holds the de-facto Distinguished Jane Fonda Chair of Anti-Vietnam War Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy.

       Of course, all of O'Brien's make-believe of the Vietnam War is a lie. Compare his rhetoric and characters in his novels with true-life accounts of our fighting men in Vietnam. For example, read what LTGEN Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway have to say about the battle of the Ia Drang valley in November 1965 in their non-fiction account (written in the words of and by the men who actually fought that battle) in the book, "We Were Soldiers Once ... And Young.'

"We were the children of the 1950s and John F. Kennedy's young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would 'pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship' in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John F. Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with our white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us."

       "Another war story, you say? Not exactly, for on the more important levels this is a love story, told in our own words and by our own actions. We were the children of the 1950s and we went where we were sent because we loved our country. We were draftees, most of us, but we were proud of the opportunity to serve that country just as our fathers had served in World War II and our older brothers in Korea. We were members of an elite, experimental combat division trained in the new art of airmobile warfare at the behest of President John F. Kennedy."

       "We went to war because our new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, ordered us to go, but more importantly because we saw it as our duty to go. That is one kind of love."

       "Another and far more transcendent love came to us unbidden on the battlefields, as it does on every battlefield in every war man has ever fought. We discovered in that depressing, hellish place, where death was our constant companion, that we loved each other. We killed for each other, we died for each other, and we wept for each other. And in time we came to love each other as brothers. In battle our world shrank to the man on our left and the man on our right and the enemy all around. We held each other's lives in our hands and we learned to share our fears, our hopes, our dreams as readily as we shared what little else good came our way."

       "The class of 1965 came out of the old America, a nation that disappeared forever in the smoke that billowed off the jungle battlegrounds where we fought and bled. The country that sent us off to war was not there to welcome us home. It no longer existed. We answered the call of one President who was now dead; we followed the orders of another who would be hounded from office, and haunted, by the war he mismanaged so badly."

       "Many of our countrymen came to hate the war we fought. Those who hated it the most - the professionally sensitive - were not, in the end, sensitive enough to differentiate between the war and the soldiers who had been ordered to fight it. They hated us as well, and we went to ground in the cross fire, as we had learned in the jungles."

       "In time our battles were forgotten, our sacrifices were discounted, and both our sanity and our suitability for life in polite American society were publicly questioned. Our young-old faces, chiseled and gaunt from the fever and the heat and the sleepless nights, now stare back at us, lost and damned strangers, frozen in yellowing snapshots packed away in cardboard boxes with our medals and ribbons."

       "We rebuilt our lives, found jobs or professions, married, raised families, and waited patiently for America to come to its senses. As the years passed we searched each other out and found that the half-remembered pride of service was shared by those who had shared everything else with us. With them, and only with them, could we talk about what had really happened over there - what we had seen, what we had done, what we had survived."

       "We knew what Vietnam had been like, and how we looked and acted and talked and smelled. No one in America did. Hollywood got it wrong every damned time, whetting twisted political knives on the bones of our dead brothers."

       And this is an exact description of Tim O'Brien, those who raised him to the level of 'hero' in the anti-Vietnam War crusade against America's past, and, now those at the U.S. Naval Academy who make O'Brien's novels required reading in the English Department. He is the 'ghost' who holds the de-facto Distinguished Jane Fonda Chair of English Literature at the academy. And if the Naval Academy Foundation is successful in raising their $175M to fund such Distinguished Chairs in the future, the Jane Fonda Chair will be filled with a Boomer counter-culture revolutionary who will make this de-facto position a reality.

       O'Brien's anti-Vietnam books are a genre of literature that reeks of Jane Fonda's traitorous conduct during that war. During her visit to North Vietnam during the war, she was photographed manning an anti-aircraft gun, donning a protective battle helmet, while being quoted in the world press, including the American press, that our American POWs were being treated humanely by their North Vietnamese captors.

       And we find that O'Brien was impressed by the writings of Eric Fromm, one of the primary 'cultural Marxist' intellectuals of the Frankfurt School who imbedded the anti-Vietnam War ideas into the minds of America's vulnerable college-age youth at that time. And now, O'Brien's anti-Vietnam War novels are required reading at the U.S. Naval Academy. There is no evidence that LTGEN Hal Moore's book, 'We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young,' is required reading at the Academy. So, why are the anti-Vietnam War novels by a 'foot soldier' of the Frankfurt School revolutionaries, Tim O'Brien, given such mandatory status? Why does the flag-rank Navy leadership allow this? Why do the mid-level naval officers follow their lead - like sheep? Why is the U.S. Naval Academy, the premiere military educational institution in the land, being converted into a 'cultural Marxist' icon for the New Left in America? The answer is simple: only because we allow it.

       It is too bad that O'Brien's education did not study a component of American history that praises the unique exceptionalism of our nation's form of government -- a constitutional republic. And it is telling that his education contained not a trace of the nature of communism and the quest for world domination by the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War. For O'Brien, the major battles of the Cold War -- which, by the way, America WON -- Korea and Vietnam, did not exist as a part of that titanic struggle. One of two (the other being Germany's National Socialism) that America engaged in and won during the 20th century. Had he realized this, or cared to take this into account, he would have written a novel in praise of the valiant efforts of his generation to help stem the tide of communism and contribute to winning the Cold War.

       It is not really surprising that O'Brien would not have this kind of education. The elites of the Boomer generation, while in their young adulthood, decided that they would cut future American generations off from their nation's history. And now, O'Brien has become part of that tradition -- an agenda that attempts to destroy American civilization.

       Had O'Brien and his elite Boomer cohorts treasured our nation's exceptionalism, they would have understood then and even now that which has been described as 'Making Patriots.' Walter Berns, the John M. Olin University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes 'Making Patriots,' University of Chicago Press, 2001), "We were [as described by Winston Churchill in World War II] 'the arsenal of democracy; more than that, we were, as Abraham Lincoln said -- not boastfully but as a fact -- 'the last, best hope of earth.'...This was true in 1862 when Lincoln said it, as well as in 1941, and it is more obviously true today. Like it or not -- and it is something of a burden, certainly a responsibility -- America is to modern history as Rome was to ancient, and not only because we are the one remaining superpower. Modern politics began three hundred -- plus years ago with the discovery or pronouncement of new principles, universal and revolutionary principles, respecting the rights of man. In 1776 we declared our right to form a new nation by appealing to these principles. Because we were the first to do so, it fell to us to be their champions, first by setting an example -- this was Lincoln's point -- and subsequently by defending them against their latter-day enemies, the Nazis and fascists in World War II and the communists in the Cold War. Our lot is to be the one essential country, 'the last, best hope of earth,' and this ought to be acknowledged, beginning in our schools and universities, for it is only then that we can come to accept the responsibilities attending to it." And this is especially true for our nation's premiere military academies.

       Unfortunately, the Tim O'Briens of America and the power elites of the Boomer generation have not, do not, and will not shoulder such responsibilities. Instead, they have joined hands with the only Marxist movement that is alive in America today -- the 'cultural Marxists.' It threatens the survival of 'the last, best hope of earth.' And it's seed has been planted, along with other 'cultural Marxist' weeds at the U.S. Naval Academy.



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