ONE VERY HOT DAY

This spends One Very Hot Day in Vietnam (Halberstam, it will be remembered, wrote The Making of a Quagmire-1965) with a small unit as the war "gets steadily a little older and uglier"; with Captain Beaupre, whose combat fatigue shows in a nervous thirst; with Negro Big William, a real swinger with a lust for the life he loses before he fires a shot; with Anderson, attractive, competent, motivated; and with Vietnamese Lieutenant Thuong who knows that "we are not an easy people to save." By the end of the day, spent in a small action with heavy casualties, Halberstam, in an understated but effective fashion, has again limned the sadness of this reluctant war with its pervasive boredom, futility and fatalism.... Has protest extended to a readership? Perhaps with strong promotion and Literary Guild selection.