LIEUTENANT DANGEROUS

Acclaimed political cartoonist Danziger looks back at his year in Vietnam, somehow managing to convey difficult truths without completely depressing readers.

Drafted shortly after graduating college in 1968, Danziger believed (as many did) that the war was in its final stages. He reported to Fort Dix hoping the worst would be over before he could be sent overseas. He offers detailed, often amusing accounts of the ill-focused basic training, which was “phenomenally stupid, left over from World War II and ha[d] nothing to do with conditions in Southeast Asia. It was this side of mad.” Seeking ways to further delay deployment, he entered language school to learn Vietnamese, assuming he would then be stationed far from combat zones, interpreting intercepted signals from the field. But the instruction was perfunctory at best, and after acceptance to officer training—another ploy to postpone deployment—Danziger was sent for ordnance training, and his language skills eroded quickly. Then he was deployed to Vietnam, where he was one of many junior officers with inadequate training and no enthusiasm for the missions. The author’s account of his year “in-country” is consistently candid about the futility of the war, and he makes little effort to portray his own role as anything but ineffectual. The book’s title plays on the Vietnamese’s attempts to pronounce his name. Looking back, as if trying to explain the era to a younger audience, he tries to provide perspective. Subsequent history shows that America learned nothing from Vietnam, he writes; the country has entered one unwinnable war after another, with few moments of success and thousands of lives lost. Unsettling as these truths may be, Danziger’s compelling presentation of his experience makes the book a must-read war memoir. The author aptly opens his trenchant book with an epigraph from Joseph Heller.

A Vietnam memoir with zero punches pulled, related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene.