num_pages: 243
description: Excerpts from the author's official website: "Shut your scuzzy mouth, fat body, and listen up. I am going to give you the straight skinny, because you are the biggest shitbird on the planet. Your job is to stand around and stop the bullet that might hit someone of importance. In Viet Nam nice guys do not finish at all and monsters live forever. We are teenaged Quasimodos for the bells of hell and we are as happy as pigs in shit because killing is our business and business is good. The only virtue of the stupid is that they don't live long. The Lord giveth and the M-79 taketh away. If you're lucky, you'll only get killed. There it is. Welcome to the world of zero slack.""We hump through a defoliated rain forest that is too dead even to smell dead. Ancient trees stand stark and black and stripped of leaves. The black trees are hung with limp windblown flowers that are parachutes from illumination shells.  Later we see trees that are as white as bone, sun-bleached skeletons of the great hardwoods, white trees with black leaves. The trunks and branches of the trees are warped by unnatural cancerous growths that look like human faces and human hands and human fingers growing out of decaying wood.  In the poisonous fields of the defoliated rain forest we see monsters, freaks, and mutants. We see a water rat with two heads and as big as a dog, birds with extra feet coming out of their backs, Siamese-twin bullfrogs joined at the stomach. The bullfrogs scurry for cover with clumsy and desperately frantic movements horrible to see, finally sinking into oozing slime inhabited by shadows that are alive and best never seen by human eyes. "There are a lot of stories about the Phantom Blooper.  Below Phu Bai the Phantom Blooper is a black Marine Lieutenant who inspects defensive positions at bridge security compounds. The next night, they get hit.  North of Hue City the Phantom Blooper is a salt and pepper team of snuffy grunts who guide the Marine patrols into L-shaped ambushes set by the Viet Cong.  Force Recon claims a probable kill for shooting the Phantom Blooper in the Ashau Valley. The Phantom Blooper was a round-eye, tall and white, with blond hair, wearing black pajamas and a red headband, and armed with a folding-stock AK-47 assault rifle. Recon swears that—and this is no shit—the round-eyed Victor Charlie was the honcho, the leader, of the gook patrol.  The Phantom Blooper has many names. The White Cong. Super-Charlie. The American VC. Moon Cusser. The Round-Eyed Victor Charlie. White Charlie. Americong. Yankee Avenger.  But whatever name we use, we all know in our hearts the true identity of the Phantom Blooper. He is the dark spirit of our collective bad consciences made real and dangerous.  “Go home,” the Phantom Blooper says, every night. And we want to go home, we really do, but we don’t know how.  “Go home,” the Phantom Blooper says, without mercy, over and over, again and again, punctuating his sentences with explosions.  "If there is a novel that illustrates the extremes to which the American soldier in Vietnam was driven, then Gustav Hasford has written it... (The Phantom Blooper) is a major contribution to our continuing examination of the Vietnam War."  --John S. Nelson, professor of English at Saint Mary of the PlainsCollege"Taken individually, each is a brilliant &amp; singular portrayal of the war. Taken together, we have a kind of Vietnam epic... If you can find The Phantom Blooper and The Short-Timers, read them both together."  --Brian Siano, The Kubrick Site: Regarding 'Full Metal Jacket'   This book was actually completed before Full Metal Jacket was released in 1987, but for some reason not published by Bantam until 1990, at which time Gus put out a press release, wildy attacking his editor. An excerpt of the novel was printed in the January 1990 issue of Playboy. It is a more powerful, more personal story than The Short-Timers, in its description of life among the Viet Cong and how that affects Private Joker. If The Short-Timers details the making of an American solider, this book shows the unmaking. In Hasford's original draft, Joker's conversion was so complete that he became an active VC, going out and killing his fellow Marines. As the inside cover says, "Here is another major novel of the Viet Nam experience from one of its most startlingly able chroniclers... Joker's personal odyssey exposes a searingly honest, tragic, and brutal truth about the war that damned a generation and the betrayal that scarred us all." This was supposed to be the second volume of Gus's Viet Nam trilogy, but the final novel was never finished. The Phantom Blooper is currently out of print, but you can download the entire text right here!
language: English
title: The Phantom Blooper
titlecomplete: The Phantom Blooper
genres: Fiction, War, Historical Fiction, Literature, Military Fiction
ratings_count: 233
publisher: Bantam Books