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Books in Review, September/October 2014

Blue-Eyed Boy: A Worthy Memoir of Disfigurement and Redemption

REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON AND DAVID WILLSON

“Blue-Eyed Boy: A Memoir”It’s been said before, but bears repeating: You need only two elements to create a great memoir: a compelling story and the ability to tell it effectively. But few possess both. In Blue-Eyed Boy: A Memoir (Penguin, 304 pp., $27.95), however, former Marine and one-time Baltimore Sun reporter Robert Timberg comes through big time on both counts.

Timberg, best known for The Nightingale’s Song, his excellent book about five Vietnam War-era Naval Academy graduates, is a great writer whose words flow smoothly onto the page. Timberg’s gripping story centers on his life-altering wounds in the Vietnam War and his ultimate success at overcoming the horrors of three dozen operations on his severely disfigured face.

Timberg graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and chose to enter the Marine Corps. He served in Vietnam as the XO of Bravo Company of the First Antitank Battalion with the First Marine Division. Since the enemy had precious few tanks, Timberg’s unit performed other roles. That included, as he puts it, “direct-fire support of infantry operations, static defense, and convoy protection. Mostly we did convoy duty, escorting trucks of various sizes on resupply missions from base camps to the outskirts of Indian Country.”

It was on a convoy mission outside Da Nang on January 18, 1967, when the vehicle Timberg (who was due to rotate home in thirteen days) was riding on tripped a VC mine. “I felt myself lifted from the top of the Amtrac,” Timberg writes, “as if in the eye of a hurricane, except in place of wind and rain I was being carried aloft by flames.”

The worst of his injuries were to his face, causing severe damage to his mouth, nose, and eyelids. Those injuries brought years of physical pain, accompanied by the psychic trauma of having to deal with his appearance. As Timberg puts it: “I looked like a monster.”

He became deeply depressed as he dealt with the pain and the disfigurement. “If I wasn’t the trim, hard-charging young Marine officer, the man who worked himself out of the chaos of a troubled family, who found a gorgeous bride, who was ready to fight and kill for the ideals of his nation, who was I?” Timberg writes. “I didn’t know anymore.”

This is a story of redemption, though, and Timberg managed to defeat his physical and mental demons. He started graduate school in journalism at Stanford in the fall of 1968. After he finished, Timberg began a journalism career in Annapolis, Maryland, as a general assignment reporter with the local newspaper. He found that life as a hard-working reporter chasing down stories lifted a lot of the anger and bitterness he felt as a result of his disfiguring wounds.

“Most of the people I spoke to reacted to my scars, usually with startled expressions of the sort that in other circumstances might have triggered a hostile response from me,” he writes. “Not now. I didn’t care how spooked they looked when I first approached them; I just wanted them to tell me what they’d seen or heard.”  From then on, he says, he “had no sense of being disfigured.”

Timberg went on to bigger reporting jobs with the Baltimore Evening Sun and in the Washington Bureau of the Baltimore Sun. He became one of the nation’s top journalists, earning a Nieman fellowship at Harvard. Timberg also wrote several well-received books, including Nightingale’s Song in 1996, which told the life stories of John McCain, Oliver North, James Webb, Robert McFarland, and James Poindexter.

There is a great deal in Blue-Eyed Boy about Timberg’s trials in researching and writing Nightingale’s Song—probably too much, although the project took several years to complete. But that’s a minor glitch in this otherwise smoothly written, revelatory, and brutally frank memoir.  —M.L.


HUE ’68

“Mourning Headband for Hue”What happened during the four-week battle that took place in Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive has been detailed in countless books of Vietnam War history and in memoirs and novels by those who took part in it. Virtually all of those books focus on the U.S. Marines and their role in the vicious, World War II-like urban fighting. In Mourning Headband for Hue Nha Ca provides a searing eyewitness account of what it was like to be a civilian during those weeks of hell.

The book was first published in Vietnamese in 1969. It is now available in a new edition (Indiana University Press, 376 pp., $30) with a translation, long introduction, and annotated footnotes by Olga Dror.

Nha Ca is a well-known and widely published Vietnamese writer who now lives in the United States. In late January of 1968 the thirty-year-old mother of two visited her family in the beautiful former Vietnamese imperial city for the Lunar New Year holiday.

On the first night of Tet, January 31, the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong invaded and held the city for nearly a month. Civilians were caught in the crossfire after American Marines and the South Vietnamese forces counterattacked. Adding to the horror: The invading communist troops summarily executed as many as 2,800 men and women who worked for the South Vietnamese government or the Americans, or who were otherwise suspected of being ideologically impure.

Nha Ca relates countless moments of terror she and her extended family members experienced trying to stay alive during the nightmarish four weeks. She also adds stories told to her by others in Hue in similar dire circumstances. It makes for an intimate—and disturbing—account of war at its most brutal told from the point of view of civilians trying to survive the maelstrom.  —M.L.


INCOMING

“Incoming: The Piteous Recognition of Slaughter”Richard E. Baker served with the 4th Infantry Division Band in Vietnam. The main character in his novel Incoming: The Piteous Recognition of Slaughter (Stephen Banks, 214 pp., $12, paper) is a trumpet player who enlisted and winds up in an Army infantry band. He is “a hell of a horn player,” but, as he says, “things have not gone as planned.”

The band ends up stationed near Pleiku. They are forced to break into a supply depot to steal training manuals to learn how to be soldiers. They set up their Claymores backwards at first because they had received no specialized infantry training.

With their band instruments in storage, they become infantrymen, slowly and with great sacrifice of lives. They serve the needs of the Army and the Army does not need band members. There is a powerful set piece in which a tank slowly runs over a protesting Buddhist monk that is as chilling as anything I have ever read in Vietnam War literature.

I recommend this book to anyone who intends to see an Army recruiter. It is a powerful corrective to the optimism of any teenager who thinks that joining the Army during time of war is a good idea—even if he can play the trumpet like Cat Anderson. —D.W.


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