Gunning For Ho: Vietnam War Stories (Battle Born) - Military History Book for Veterans & War Enthusiasts

I read Gunning For Ho from a unique perspective...I've known the author, H. Lee Barnes, for some twenty three years. I can truly say (and should, in honesty for this review) he is a rare jewel in my current group of lifetime friends. But...when I met him, he was impenetrably wrapped in the shield of his own personal darkness...the major souvenir he (and so many others) brought home from Vietnam. I cared for him, and wanted to know him...but there is no caring for a man who cares for nothing...and there is no knowing a man who has lost faith in everything he ever believed he knew. Lee and I lost touch with each other for over eighteen years. In those years, this man, who I predicted to do a slow and certain self destruction, was busy rebuilding and refilling himself. He achieved academic degrees by going to school at night while working full time in the emotionally and intellectually draining environs of a casino. He learned that he loves the language, and the sculpting of it. He found that he enjoyed and was gifted at sharing knowledge and imparting skills to the young and bright and eager. He became a writer, then a teacher, and then a professor. Eventually he grew to use his new comfort with words as self-therapy, and somewhere during this healing (exorcism?), he emerged with a full and freed soul. He is now a man with much to say about the experience that so tainted his youth; indeed, tainted all the youth of our nation for a decade. This book contains the essence of his considerable insight about the unique experience that was the war in Vietnam. You have never in read any other author's work the same perspective that you will find here. Lee's mastery of characterization is unequalled. You not only believe these young men he offers you, you earnestly care for them. You agonize for them, and your heart is warmed by them, often unexpectedly. This author has refused to be pulled into the trap of polishing his subjects, or glorifying their motives or results...he steadfastly writes them as they surely were; scared, brave, ethnic, dumb, smart, real. You will never read anything on Vietnam that more accurately conveys the uniqueness of this conflict; the simple geography of it, the unconscious sociology of it, the fragile humanity of the boys our nation dispassionately sacrificed to the experience of it. Read this book. It's not a war novel; it's a seriously creative collection of stories about a surreal experience that was arguably the grittiest and most definitive reality of a generation. I expect many more books of quality from H. Lee Barnes, but I don't expect any more work on this subject. This man survived, returned home, reclaimed himself, and acquitted himself. He now offers his exceptionally literate view of the experience and the men who died in it, the men who lived through it, and those who just got lost in it. H. Lee Barnes no longer qualifies as one of those lost. I think his Vietnam tour is finally over and complete, and his upcoming horizons are free of it...and this book is both his parting shot and his heartfelt tribute to the Vietnam War.