Vietnam War Fiction

I invite the listener to enter the lives of two young men with completely opposite views of the Vietnam War. One was a helicopter pilot, flying gunship in Hueys. The other enlisted in the navy to keep from being drafted by the US Army. Slightly fictionalized to provide a coherent narrative and to protect their identities and the identities of several supporting characters, the story line is amazing in revealing details that are true, almost beyond belief.

Rookie Joe Walker, 3rd Brigade, 7th Air Cavalry, was finding life in Vietnam tough. The war is building into a major conflict, yet despite his efforts, he feels like a square peg in a round hole. He can’t shoot straight, missed the bayonet course, and nothing ever goes right. He can throw a mean grenade, but the army made him a rifleman, and they’re determined to make sure he can shoot straight. Or else.

John Ryan never killed anyone; never even fired a gun in Vietnam. He worked in an air-conditioned building in the safest city in Vietnam. If you had to fight a war, this was the way to do it. Friends, parties, weed, and rock n' roll filled their nights. Laughter and comradery were plentiful. They thought they would serve their tour and escape back to the real world without wounds. War leaves no one untouched. No one escapes. All wounds are not from bullets.

It is 1965, and America is putting more boots on the ground to fight the communists who have sent their powerful People’s Army of Vietnam, the PAVN, south. Their aim is to defeat the South Vietnamese Army, the ARVN, and impose the iron fist of communist rule on the democratic South. Walker knows nothing of politics or military strategy and tactics. A single obsession rules his life: to become a major league baseball pitcher.

Timely and timeless. This is a soldier's story and war is war, whether it's Bull Run, Ban Me Thuot, or Fallujah. Sent to Vietnam after being drafted, Carl Melcher makes friends with both the black and white members of his company in spite of racial tensions of the times. Naive and young for his nineteen years, he learns harrowing truths about life and death when his optimism proves false.

A scathing indictment of the corruption of the human soul by war, Kenneth Levin’s bracingly honest and harrowing debut is reminiscent of masterworks like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War. A decorated combat veteran whose his own experiences in Vietnam are combined with the personal interviews of North Vietnamese veterans, Levin deftly explores the nature of man amidst the chaos and horror of war. As illuminating as it is disturbing, Crazy Razor demonstrates with stark clarity that the real villain in war…is war itself.