Review: `The pity of war, the pity war distilled' Wilfred Owen
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 18, 2014
The festering wound of the Vietnam War (1959-1975) will likely never heal - nor should it. That unconscionable war devastated a land with napalm and bombs, brutally murdered countless citizens and soldiers, marked deep indelible scars on the bodies and minds of those who returned, and remains a source of sorrow over fifty years later. Georgia-born Ron Argo captured that war through a journalist's eyes as he served in the days of the Tet Offensive of 1968 and recreated the horrors he observed and felt in his brilliant novel YEAR OF THE MONKEY, originally published in 1989 and now placed before our collective conscience in the Kindle format. His book falls in line with the finest of novels about Vietnam by such esteemed writers as Neil Sheehan (America in Vietnam), John Paul Vann (A Bright Shining Lie), Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried), Tobias Wolff (In Pharaoh's Army), Bao Ninh (The Sorrow of War) and Philip Caputo (A Rumor of War). This reader, also in Vietnam at the same time, first encountered Argo's book (as well as the others) while publishing 'War Songs' - very soon after Argo's book was first published. The impact was and is a tattoo. Re-reading it now, in this format, brings the experience thought healed to the forefront, and it is hopeful an even wider audience will step into the Vietnam War as Ron Argo so deftly paints it.One of the many aspects of Argo's account of the war is his sensitivity of not only reporting the quagmire of filth and danger and frank corruption that engulfed troops and civilians, but also building a human-interest story of how the war riddled the minds of those exposed. He offers the interplay of two men - journalist Russell Payne and the wildly unstable combat grunt Corporal Daryll Willingham - whose interplay in a twisted covert CIA operative is best outlined by Argo's description: 'Specification: On 6 January 1968, at about 2000 hours in an unmapped hamlet used as a North Vietnamese Army encampment in the province of Tay Ninh approximately two kilometers from the Cambodian border, Specialist 4 Russell Henry Payne of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Saigon Support Command, Long Binh, Vietnam, did commit assault upon Corporal Daryll Willingham by shooting him in or about the head with a pistol of unknown caliber and did thereby intentionally inflict fatal bodily harm to him Specification: ... that Specialist Payne, by not attempting to defend a senior officer in grave danger of his life, did willfully neglect and therefore contribute to murder in the brutal death of Lt. Colonel Rupert Shellhammer Specification: ... that Specialist Payne demonstrated blatant negligence amounting to acquiescence in the deaths of four enlisted personnel of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and furthermore of the systematic murdering of thirteen Asiatic refugees To the specifications, charges of one count of murder, and two counts of willful neglect resulting in murder.' It is this court martial specification that is the core of what the CIA has ordered: Specialist Russell Payne is to befriend and rat on Corporal Daryll Willingham as part of a secret operation that, no matter how sinister, cannot boost or sustain an unpopular war. The two troops are forced into an unwitting odyssey through hell -- and into a court-martial for murder. What eventually moves Payne to kill Willingham serves as the Argo's stimulus to make the remainder of the novel surprising and credible.Argo spares no visualization of the sights, sounds, stenches, days of boredom interspersed with frequent states of panic, the corruption visible on all sides by all participants - including the altered and falsified `daily reports' of casualties transmitted to the families and loves ones, hoping to garner support that the nation knew was a wrongful war. Argo's book tells it all, in stunning prose. Once read, this book will never leave the interstices of the mind. And that is the way it should remain. Brilliant! Grady Harp, April 14