![]() ![]() Bill Taylor, from a broken home, has post-Nam problems with sex, marriage, and work, turning to est for help. ![]() John Wakefield, insecure and regarded by his demanding family as a loser or ""madman,"" finds identity in Marine discipline coming home to find himself unimportant again, he drifts, drinks, ""intent on debasing himself,"" moving from obsession to obsession. Dale (""Rent-a-Party"") Szuminski comes home from the war seriously injured recovered, he spends years ""sidestepping the paltry challenges of civilian life""-drinking, womanizing, half-working-before settling down, more or less, in the 1980s. And, complicating any potential insights about the scars of Vietnam, most of these men seem to have been seriously troubled before they enlisted. ![]() All were white volunteers, all blue-collar Midwesterners (with one exception). All were ""grunts, pure and simple,"" no officers. Here, then, after reconstructing the platoon's traumatic, grisly involvement in a 1967 Que Son Valley ambush, Klein uses extensive interview-material to fill in each man's life in the 15 years since Vietnam. When a Vietnam vet named Gary Cooper was killed by police in 1981 after going berserk with a gun, Klein (Woody Guthrie) decided to write about Cooper-and about four of the other vets who were in Cooper's Vietnam platoon. ![]()
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