IF I DIE IN A COMBAT ZONE

A group of very low-keyed autobiographical sketches about America's least-popular war, narrated by an intelligent, rather lonely Pfc. who knows he really should be somewhere else. Between rather off-handed descriptions of legs being blown off and gooks wasted is a running apologia pro vita sua that works just because it is so sincere in its rather adolescent Socratic ponderings: "Men must know what they do is courageous, they must know it is right, and that kind of knowledge is wisdom and nothing else." Bits of innocent midwestern background and letters from boot-camp comrade Eric who quotes Robinson Jeffers complete the sadness. There have been and will be more better and worse soldier-survivor recalls of that slaughterhouse we now call Nam.