Title: Hot Rain
Subtitle: Memoirs Of A Vietnam Veteran
Description: Review Written by Bernie Weisz, Historian, Vietnam War July 15, 2012 Pembroke Pines, Fl. USA contact: BernWei1@aol.com
Title of Review:  Gunfire, Explosions, Smelling Napalm, Rice Paddies and Human Excrement: Living & Breathing Vietnam 24 Hours a Day!   
Hot Rain is a book that is guaranteed to mesmerize, captivate and hold you. It will disgust you, make you cry, sympathize, feel indignation and horror, yet give you the power of the healing of love. Subjects such as killing in combat, death and mutilation, the loss of a best friend, unemployment, divorce, PTSD, and even mortality are all served up to the reader. Yet "Hot Rain" is ultimately a love story to his wife, Barbara, as well as an explanation of his tribulations to his friends, family and America of how an innocent 18 year old from Cincinnati named Robert Dirr was affected by the misfortune of being born in 1947. By the time he graduated from high school, our nation's role in Southeast Asia had passed from both advisement of the South Vietnamese and America's escalation of the war against the Communist North Vietnamese to the infamous 1968 "Tet Offensive." Emulating the actions of his father during W.W. II, Dirr enlisted in the Navy in 1966, right out of high school. Deciding to be a hospital corpsman, he was oblivious to the horrors he would find himself enmeshed in. Curiously, Dirr started off his memoir with a quote from Ernest Hemingway, written in 1935 for Esquire Magazine; "They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. Perhaps Dirr might have been dissuaded from signing up if he had read that or paid more attention to President Lyndon B. Johnson's January, 1966 annual message to Congress on the State of the Union; "How many men who listen to me tonight have served their Nation in other wars? How very many are not here to listen? The war in Vietnam is not like these other wars. Yet, finally, war is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world."

Why did Dirr enlist? He explained; "I always had a keen interest in medicine and a secret desire to go to medical school one day, so I figured that with the training received from the Navy I would have an edge over other applicants. Another big mistake!" How big was Dirr's mistake? Read on, if you dare! The author changed all the names of the characters in this book to protect their privacy and dignity, but after being sent to "Great Lakes Naval Base" near Chicago, Illinois, he quickly picked up a fatally bound friendship with a fellow Corpsman Dirr calls "Robert Engels." They paired off together in an inseparable friendship to begin basic training. Engels parents adopted Dirr and the two future corpsmen spent every free movement planning a future together. They graduated as sailors together in September, 1966 and were jointly ordered to report in December to the Naval Hospital Corps School. By this time, 6,143 Americans had been killed in this war, and by the war's end in January of 1973, 58,282 Americans, almost two thirds under the age of 21...would pay the final price. Was it worth it? Read on! In 1967, 11, 153 Americans in Vietnam were killed and twice that number were being wounded in action. Corpsmen were badly needed and Dirr thought he would be stationed stateside at a large naval hospital without involvement with combat situations and Vietnam. His big mistake began to be realized, in living color. First Dirr was told by his commander that because of the war's rapid escalation, the basic course he was to take was changed from 16 weeks to 8. His commander had another surprise for Dirr, telling him not so politely; "Son, The Marine Corps has a lot of troops in Vietnam. Unlike the Army, who has medics, the Marines don't have any people with medical specialties. They get them from the Navy. That's you and me, boy. The corpsman is the medic for the U.S. Marine Corps!"

The commander was not kidding about the severity of America's escalation. Ever since President Johnson seized congressional approval of his actions in August of 1964, by that year's end there were 23,300 American military personnel in South Vietnam trying to bolster the fledgling democracy in its fight against the bellicose, invading communist North Vietnamese. This jumped to 184,300 Americans in 1965. During Dirr's enlistment, there were 385,300 U.S. Military "In Country" to join the fray. The climax would be 1968, where 536,100 U.S. Troops were there to prevent the Communistic "Domino Theory" from overwhelming South Vietnam. The author was changing. On a short leave from Great Lakes he wore his navy uniform and found himself taunted and made fun of at one of his old high school's football games. Dirr commented: "I soon found myself drifting away from the old school crowd. I didn't particularly care for those young punks who turned their haughty noses at me, like I was part of a giant killing machine. I now realize they were doing that out of peer pressure, for in 1966 Vietnam was not a popular war. Hell, I wasn't even permitted to see my old girlfriend!" Both Dirr and his friend began to see the barbarity of Vietnam working at the Great Lakes Hospital, as demonstrated by his following comment: "There were a lot of messed up guys there, some in wheelchairs missing legs and feet, and others sitting around minus a hand or an arm. The gastrointestinal ward was overflowing with men who had colostomies with the necessary bags and tubes attached to their sides, a consequence of being gut shot. Many were disfigured and mutilated, and few ever smiled. Most of the patients were Marines."

Dirr and his friend Engels wondered if they would go to Vietnam and die. After making a pact with each other that if either friend was killed the other would tell the deceased parents exactly the way it happened, Dirr wrote: "We shook hands while gripping each other's arm very tightly, while looking past the pupils of the eyes into the essence of our beings. That was the closest I've ever felt to another person, aside from my family, and I felt something unusual flow over me. I saw a side of Engels I had never seen before and that particular conversation still haunts me." After learning the basics of first aid, suturing, starting IV's and giving injections, both Dirr and Engels graduated from Great Lakes in February of 1967 and the next month they were both ordered to report the following month together to "Field Medical Training School" at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Dirr wrote; "The jungles of Vietnam called to us with a frightening urgency." Dirr and Engels planned to live out in the country together after the war, building A frame and log cabin houses. The two friends would live in them and sell the rest to their friends. They even planned to name it "Wilderness Retreat." After more military and medical training, they both graduated; Engels was dispatched to Okinawa, Japan for deployment to South Vietnam and Dirr temporarily held over in the U.S. working with the Sanitation Department. The two wrote to each other regularly, and Dirr even stayed at Engels' parents house while their son was in Japan. However, their greatest fear would come true, and as the reader will tragically read, Dirr would have to make the phone call that he promised Engels if he perished.

As mentioned before, this is a very hard book on the emotions to read. By September of 1967, Dirr was in Okinawa and on October 2, 1967 he boarded "Flying Tiger Airways" for a one way trip to Danang, the Republic of South Vietnam as a corpsman for "Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, 3rd Marine Division. Dirr wrote while on the airline the following; "So, I thought, I'm finally going to Vietnam. Well, those little yellow ants running around in black pajamas better watch it! Look out, Vietnam, here comes "The Kid." Dirr would later rue that bravado, as he did not realize the tenacity of the North Vietnamese Army. Oblivious to the dangers of deadly warfare and desperate hand to hand combat, even to the point of not hearing a shot fired during the January 31, 1968 Tet Offensive, this calm was a harbinger of the perils to come. For Robert Dirr was to be right in the middle of one of the fiercest battles of the Vietnam war. The battle of Dai Do and An Lac were among the biggest battles of the Vietnam War, occurring April 30 to May 2nd, 1968. Bob Dirr would see and write about the horrors he saw those three days with gruesomely painful details. To explain it, Dirr actually in his 40's went back to college and received two degrees in both creative writing and journalism. Although brutally effective with Dirr's use of pseudonyms, author Keith Nolon gave all the gripping, intense fighting details that Dirr took part in, and was severely wounded in a separate account. Real and gripping, Nolan's book "The Magnificent Bastards" details how Dirr's Bravo unit of 98 men along with several other units similarly manned went up against between 7,000 to 10,000 hard core NVA troops of the 320th NVA Division intent on seizing Dong Ha and the Northeast Sector of South Vietnam and thwarted them!

Robert Dirr sparred nothing in describing his tour. When he first deplaned in Danang on October 2, 1967, he described Vietnam as follows; "I stepped off the plane and was punched with an invisible fist of intense heat that almost knocked me down the portable stairs. When I could breathe again, I looked to the sky and saw a line of black clouds that climbed from the horizon to the heavens and remembered from our training that it was a monsoon. The winter storms came in from the sea and pounded the country with daily downpours; 120" of rain from October to April Alone." After being told that he was assigned to 1/3, an irritated Marine told Dirr, a "Cherry" that it was the First Battalion, 3rd Marines. Before being flown by a H-34 "Seahorse" to a helicopter carrier, he would experience enemy shelling for the first time. The carrier in the South China Sea was used as a staging unit for the wounded that were medically evacuated. The next day, after breakfast, Dirr went to the fantail where no one would see him and practiced his quick draw. He wrote "Wyatt Earp had nothing on me." He then saw an ominous sight: "I wandered around the ship and discovered the staging area where the injured were taken off the choppers. The whole scene was surreal and filled my eyes with visions of blood soaked bandages wrapped around limbs and torsos, and I shivered at the blank faces that suggested traumatic shock. The area was off limits, but since I was a Corpsman, nobody said anything. It was also a ghostly place, for the smell of death hovered in the air and I made it a point to stay away from there."

The author was on the ship for a week when he was finally sent into action to link up with the 1/3. On the last afternoon on the ship, he asked himself: "Will I be okay? Would I be able to handle all the blood and guts I caught a glimpse of at the staging area? Could I kill another human being if I had to? Would I make it back to the world? Everyone of Dirr's mental ruminations would be answered affirmatively in "Hot Rain." A Huey UH-1 landed on the carrier to take Dirr into a hot landing zone. Before he got on the Huey, he witnessed the following; "I slowly grew accustomed to the gruesome spectacles until I saw something I hadn't noticed before. It was a body bag, long, black and plastic that zipped up and had a tag on it that bore the name of the unfortunate individual inside. I inched myself over to the bag, hoping to catch the name out of pure curiosity when I noticed another thing. I trembled when I saw that the body inside the bag was in pieces. There were large lumps on both ends of the bag and an unnatural empty space in between." Any illusions that this was going to be the adventure of Dirr's life had now been smashed. It was rapidly becoming his worst nightmare.

As he arrived at his unit in the jungles of Vietnam and jumped out of the helicopter, Dirr realized the NVA made a game of shooting the aircraft he was in out of the sky and caught some shrapnel in his shoulder. Dirr remarked; "I executed a perfect swan dive into the first hole I saw. I poked my head above the rim of the hole and watched the incoming rounds land. It seemed as if I was watching some kind of war movie being shown on a giant screen at a drive-in." Within a week, Dirr would go to a stream to fill his canteen and come face to face with an NVA soldier doing the same. Wyatt Earp would win the ensuing duel and Dirr had killed. He would also accidentally kill a mother and her four babies, burned to death under a hut floor's trap door. Dirr lit the hut afire after being convinced it was unoccupied. He would also describe taking on the role of a "Vietnam Dr. Kevorkian, giving a fellow marine a fatal dose of morphine while he burned to death. White Phosphorous from a VC booby trap was burning him to death from the outside in and he asked Dirr to kill him. The author performed an act of mercy. All of this pales to Dirr's description of the battle of Dao Dai. As he set up shop to treat the casualties, evaluate their gunshot and shrapnel wounds, Dirr would experience a North Vietnamese barrage of enemy RPG's, artillery and AK-47 fire from all directions directed directly at him and Bravo company. The reader hears the bullets snapping, cracking by, making that splat sound of hit human meat, and the resulting yelp of "Corpsman Up!".

"Hot Rain" gives an excellent account of that long forgotten battle, how Dirr saw NVA RPG's and Chicom grenades flying through the air making the "whiz, bang, flash, bang sound. He also declared that despite his fellow Marines dying and becoming wounded all around him answered the NVA with M-16's, M-60's, captured AK-47's and RPG, and when it got down to hand to hand combat, pistols, rocks and barehanded knuckles. It ultimately stopped the NVA charge cold. All of Dirr's commanders were either killed or severely wounded. He also mentioned that most of the guys in the 1/3 were only a few months out of high school, tragically facing bunker to bunker, trench line to trench line, hand to hand combat. Needless to say, Dirr did not write this highly graphic account of the brutality of war to horrify anyone. Although he passed away on June 16, 2012 after a ten month valiant battle with lung cancer, the intent of this author was to let the American people know what he did at a time when on many college campuses students were rioting and carrying anti-war signs. It was important for Robert Dirr to let America know there were many fine Americans who were fighting for a freedom of a people they did not even know. Although Dirr survived the war, he sustained a serious back wound for which he continued to adjust his lifestyle. No "Purple Heart" medal could adequately acknowledge the heroic actions described in this book. Dirr would get very sick later in life, almost dying. He recovered and met the light of his life. Although the description of his relationship with his eventual wife, Barbara only consumes a few pages at the end of this book, it is the most significant and satisfying part of Robert Dirr's life. For his marriage to Barbara Dirr would be the happiest part of his troublesome life, letting Bob go to his astral perch content in an otherwise troubled journey of life's bumps and bruises. The author can also proudly take his heavenly place alongside Marines who have served their corps in every climate and place for the past 200 years. Robert Dirr...Rest In Peace!


Robert Dirr's Obituary:
Robert H. Jr., age 64, of Mt. Juliet, TN, died on June 16, 2012, at his home, after a lengthy battle with cancer. Born on July 30, 1947, to Edna Shelton Dirr and Robert H. Dirr, Bob, also known as Bongo, was a long time resident of Cincinnati, a retiree of the USPS, a former professional drummer and local DJ. He is survived by his wife, Barbara, sister Venny Cole, brother Donald, sons Tony, Nick, Andy and Rob, daughter Lyndsey Wesley, and five grandchildren, Jaylen, Tristan, Lyric, Pepper and Kamryn. Bob was Navy Corpsman attached to the Marines during the Viet Nam conflict, earning a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. He graduated from Mt. Healthy H.S. and Miami University, earning degrees in journalism and creative writing. Bob was known for his killer smile and his lifelong passion for music. Visitation will be Friday 10am-12pm at Paul R. Young Funeral Home, 7345 Hamilton Ave., Mt. Healthy, with Funeral Service to follow at 12. Burial will be in Arlington Memorial Gardens. Condolences may be sent to www.paulyoungfuneralhome.com