Vietnam Ambush
Publisher: Publish America
Published: 2010
Language: eng
Description: Review Written By Bernie Weisz, Historian, Vietnam War April 7, 2013 Pembroke Pines, Fl USA Contact: BernWei1@aol.com Title of Review: A Combat Infantryman in Vietnam; Shooting Dice For Our Souls With Our Spirits On The Line If We Survived.

Dan Seidenberg did not want to go to Vietnam. To escape the draft, the California native joined the Army in December of 1968. He has no memory of the last two weeks he was in Vietnam, as he was hit three months into his tour in the right temple with a Viet Cong rocket propelled grenade fragment, a wound from which 98% whom survive are now vegetables. Seidenberg's memoir is an attempt to make sense of his tour in hell, reluctantly participating in a war he neither supported nor understood. The recurring theme here is the author's survival, the wastefulness of young lives and the stupidity of those he served under. Seidenberg would be assigned as an infantryman in the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, patrolling IV Corps, the southernmost portion of South Vietnam. Although his life almost ended on March 2, 1969, he would see plenty of action prior to this in an area called "the Pineapple," an area full of enemy booby traps and snipers southwest of Saigon. At the time of his near fatal wounding, Seidenberg's heart had to be restarted twice and was the only soldier saved from his company that was severely wounded. What makes this memoir unique is that it is the only one that exists from a participant of the infamous "Operation Speedy Express." This was an operation in the Mekong Delta involving the Ninth Infantry Division serving as the anvil to drive the enemy towards the 199th L.I.B, which acted as the hammer for a shootout. After action reports claimed 10,889 enemy killed, with only 40 Americans lost from December of 1968 to May of 1969. The staggering ratio of enemy killed with only 748 Viet Cong weapons recovered brought America's policy of enemy attrition and body counts into question, with insinuations of brute force and atrocity being bantered about. This memoir will give the reader an invaluable insight into one's participation in a war that today most Americans prefer to forget about.

Dan Seidenberg makes it poignantly clear at the outset of his personal accountability, that he did not want to live the rest of his life remorseful of his actions in Vietnam. Reflecting on this, the author wrote; "No one could say what we were fighting for. The consensus was that our purpose was simply to survive it all. I knew that merely surviving would not be enough. I had to make sure I survived with a clean conscience." When the author received his draft notice in the winter of 1967, he asserted; "I didn't want to die. I was only 20 and life had barely begun. I saw no reason to kill the Vietnamese." He actually went to Canada before volunteering for the draft. After recalling the military heroics of his grandfather in W.W. I and father in W.W. II, not to mention being without a family or homeland, Seidenberg thought better, returned home and enlisted. He was told by an Army recruiter that since the war was over if he signed up for a two year hitch he would spend it safely in Korea. Six months later he was in Vietnam, describing his unit's never ending search and destroy tactics as follows; "Set an ambush, patrol to another ambush site, eat rations and pineapples, ambush, patrol, cross a river, on an on day after day. Seidenberg sets up his memoir by describing his observations of returning troops the day he was to deploy to Vietnam. Prior to his commercial flight to hell, he reported at Oakland Army Base the following of those he saw rotating back from their tours; "They all looked very aged and tired, even though they were no older than I. None of them would look me in the eyes nor say anything to those of us on our way to the war. They all looked haggard, distant, and emotionally numbed by their war experiences." Once in Vietnam, Seidenberg never thought of politics such as the "Domino Theory." Instead, it was simply surviving his tour and getting home alive without being maimed. Seidenberg reflected; "It wasn't the fear of death, scary as that is. It was the fear of losing one or both legs. All of us feared this and the loss of our genitals the most."

The sense of unreality Dan Seidenberg experienced as he sloughed through leech, rat and booby trap infested Vietnamese jungles is overpowering. Reflecting on this, he wrote; "The war was on television every night at dinner. It could not be escaped back home. And now I was right in the middle of it." His most telling comment was; "Here I was guarding a piece of Vietnamese jungle not knowing why as 1969 arrived." His unit was ordered to patrol very thick, booby trapped jungle areas and blow up any enemy bunkers encountered. With survival as his unit's only goal, they would turn the radio on so the commanders in the rear could hear and feign blowing up VC positions by throwing grenades harmlessly into a creek. Always wet from walking in the moist jungle, sleep deprived and not wanting to be the last person to die in a war America had all but given up on, Seidenberg lamented; "Everything that happened in my life before arriving in Vietnam seemed like ancient history now, a vague, very distant dream. My reality was to find ways to remain alive." Incidents of South Vietnamese treachery, friendly fire and even the cold blooded murder of a prisoner of war are discussed. After one of Seidenberg's fellow grunts was ordered to go on a dog patrol, the author learned that the dogs had set off a booby trap badly wounding them and killing his comrade. Dogs were known to do this with their incessant sniffing and probing. After learning that the dogs were dusted off before his mortally dying friend, Seidenberg concluded that he would be a survivor regardless of what occurred. Several years after his tour ended, Seidenberg was in New York and found that the Vietnam War had ended. He shouted this out to a passerby, whose only comeback was: "So what?" Despite the author being awarded the Combat Infantry Badge and Purple Heart among other accolades, Seidenberg concluded; "The war came to an end as it had begun; silently, unremarkably, very few Americans gave a damn. It don't mean nothing." However, it does mean something, and by reading this amazing memoir we will all acknowledge the both the author's tribulations as well as a generations' trials in that most trying of times!