Well, to describe what I like about the book I mentioned is the way that the most mundane details of wartime experiences become an engaging part of each story. From the details of “what they carried” physically, in the first story: the .60-cal machine gun, the field radio, to books, talismans, letters & photographs… a girlfriend’s nylons worn as a good-luck scarf, even after she dumps the guy in a Dear John letter (“the magic is still there”) ... and of course the things they carried inside themselves… then to a flashback story to where the author considered running away from his draft notice (he’s a native Minnesotan, so Canada wasn’t such a strange place), and even did it, and was taken to within yards of the Canadian border on a nominal “fishing trip” – by a relative stranger who would never have done what he intended, but would help him do it – when he “chickened out” as he puts it. He considered himself to have been a coward because he didn’t evade the draft. And in the way he presents that, and the reasons he gives, I guess I see his point.
The details of the violence of war, too, are presented with so much vividness – and routine, mundane horror: a squad-mate being blown by a mine into a tree, and the look of surprise on his face as the thing detonated underneath him, another man killed with a rifle shot “and dropped like a bag of cement” after relieving himself in the bushes.
I haven’t read a book about war like this since All Quiet on the Western Front, and I suppose Quiet had its own elements of realism and verité, but a book about Viet Nam, which also describes the drugs and the demons the grunts carried, seems more real to me. It’s a thoughtful book about war. Of course, no one likes war; you don’t read this book for that reason. But you have to like the men (and now women) who fight the wars – even the guy on the other side. The story about the man he killed is one of the most poignant in the book so far.