Its lit fam

This really is for anyone of "my" generation who wants to go back and truly feel what "the time's they are a changin'" was all about...wish I had just a bit of this information when I was in my tree-hugger days. A memoir of Vietnam - a slice of life for one 19-year old who came back forever changed. Humbling to say the least.

A hard look at the long lasting effects of the Vietnam war

The war has been over for many years but as a Vietveteran I can always feel its presence, lurking. There have been a multitude of books written about the Vietnam war but not quite like this one. This one captures what the war was like, its horrors and after effects for the men and women who served. I wish our politicians would read it before sending our you out to die.

An absolutely searing and visceral account of one young mans war in Vietnam and its after effects on his life. At times extremely hard to read, making one ask many questions that have no answers, chiefly among them "Why?". I laughed, I wept, I squirmed, the author has a gift and hits all of ones emotions. If you read only one book about Vietnam...read this one.

I don't usually like autobiographies but this boom was amazing. Sheds light on the Vietnam war

This is one of those Vietnam War memoirs that rises above the rest. Ketwig was basically a kid when he enlisted in 1967, hoping to avoid getting drafted and sent to Vietnam the only way an ordinary kid from upstate New York could. The recruiter promised him he'd be fixing trucks in Germany, but he wound up at a military scrap yard near Pleiku, with 365 days of war to survive.

There are the standard scenes; ambushes, terror, dead bodies, Army brutality, whorehouses and drug-fueled benders. Ketwig witnessed a few truly atrocious things, including Green Berets executing a prisoner with a firehose, and truly bizarre, like getting stoned with NVA soldiers on the night Bobby Kennedy was shot. But what makes this book exceptional is the emotional honesty; Ketwig bleeds on the page, working out a decade of suppressed memories, and the cultural context. The boys who went to Vietnam, and they definitely went as boys, were a generation raised on TV, muscle cars, the Beatles and the Space Race. They were people with tremendous dreams, fed into a meat grinder of a war to justify lies. Ketwig has used this book as the foundation of a career speaking out against the military-industrial complex, and he is brave and right to do so.

Since I do read a lot of these, one thing that separates out Ketwig as a volunteer is that he had a second year in the Army, which he spent in Thailand. Thailand in 68 and 69 seems like a fascinating place, and Ketwig explored and appreciated the culture as much as is possible, while also getting his head in some kind of shape to come back to America. Too many of these books are just that one year, And a Hard Rain Fell explains how that year matters in the course of a life.

Music recommendation: The Electric Flag

piece of crap. Drugs are the hero

very good detailed version of what life must have been like in Vietnam.

A Hard Rain Fell, opinion

I enjoyed and respected the courageous retelling of personal experiences and the explanation of how terrifying war must be. I did not enjoy or agree with the liberal political view. You can have a different political view and still want no young people involved in war, ever again.

I heard a Youtuber recommend “...And A Hard Rain Fell” by John Ketwig (1985, revised in 2002) and I got it from the library. It’s the author’s story of getting sent to Vietnam and what happened both before and after that. Ketwig does a good job (perhaps without even trying) of conveying attitudes that prevailed at the time that we have difficulty understanding in retrospect. For example, we can look back at Vietnam and say that of course it was a big deal and of course America lost but at the time the war was downplayed by the government and the corporate media to the point that many didn’t realize how many Americans were deploying and dying or getting maimed there. The idea of America losing a war, after the high of being the biggest winner of WWII, was also almost unthinkable, something that we take for granted today.

The author also does a good job of conveying the unfairness of conscription, especially for a war that most people didn’t care about (or actively opposed) without laying on the “woe is me” too thick. He actually enlisted voluntarily to avoid being infantry and that actually worked. The author was a gearhead and got to be an army mechanic instead of a grunt. That said, he was still deployed to Vietnam, there were artillery pieces going off near his base in Vietnam the whole time he was there and he even volunteered to go on a supply run to Dak To at one point where he truly got lots of opportunities to get killed in action and to see the horrors of war up close.

There’s not a lot of gun stuff in the book, but apparently the author got issued an M14 as late as 1967-68 in the US Army in Vietnam. I guess there wasn’t enough M16s for everyone and REMFs got whatever they got? The only time that rifle got shot was at Dak To when a grunt there picked it up out of the mud (the author dropped it when he came under direct fire for the first time), wiped it down, and stuck it over the sandbags to rip off a few rounds to make sure it worked before handing it back.

The story takes an interesting turn when the author gets leave in Penang, Malaysia and gets to see a part of Asia that isn’t a war-torn hole. He also falls in love with a high-end prostitute there and asks to get stationed in Thailand when his Vietnam tour is over for the chance to see her again. Another motivation that the author has for staying overseas for an extra year is that he keeps hearing about things spiraling out of control back in “The World” (always capitalized, this is the term the author uses for the USA throughout the book) and doesn’t want to get involved in that. He also has learned to hate army discipline and protocol and doesn’t want to get stuck on some stateside base where he will be subject to such for the remainder of his enlistment contract, a whole year.

Thailand duty is reported to be almost luxurious, more like an exotic vacation than a tour of duty, and the reports turn out to be accurate. Getting leave to go to Malaysia turns out to be difficult for many reasons and the author has to content himself with exploring Thailand instead. He also continues correspondence with a girl from his home state of New York who participated in a program to write letters to randomly chosen GIs who were stationed in Vietnam. The author began writing to her back in Pleiku, Vietnam, where he’d been stationed previously. The combination of speaking to someone from The World as well as being stationed in a mostly peaceful and friendly locale with most of The World’s amenities and comforts gave the author something that most Vietnam-era GIs were denied: time to decompress. GWOT-era troops were often taken to a ‘friendly’ foreign nation to get things in order before finally shipping home, something that many have told me was a good way to transition back to The World without complete culture shock. This was a lesson learned the hard way and one that was too late for the Vietnam generation to benefit from, by and large.

Predictably, the author’s plans to marry the prostitute that he’d fallen in love with didn’t work out. She was good enough at her job to elicit such feelings in her clients but, of course, didn’t reciprocate those feelings. This only added to the author’s sense of disappointment and bitterness. On top of that, the author’s skill at welding caused him to be used for some hush-hush missions into a place he was ordered not to talk about (it’s hinted that this place was almost certainly Laos, where US troops weren’t supposed to be) to do some repairs on broken artillery pieces. Being snatched from the exotic paradise of Thailand and inserted back into a warzone, even temporarily, was bad enough, but the secret nature of the missions meant that the author couldn’t even discuss it with anyone, adding to his anxiety.

The author’s return home was marked by confusing and unexpected hostility from his countrymen for no better reason than his hair length and his uniform. The author gets into the almost obligatory closing chapter about how the government basically betrayed the American people with their actions in Vietnam, perhaps especially those they actually sent there, mixed with a healthy dose of “they just didn’t get it” when talking about his fellow Americans’ reactions to how the war had changed the veterans. Trying to explain the unexplainable, especially when it has affected one so profoundly, has to be frustrating for the veteran and confusing and uncomfortable for the uninitiated. As an aside, I was brought to mind of the joke:

Q: “How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

A: “You don’t know, man, you weren’t there!”

The author eventually meets the girl he corresponded with back in NY and begins dating her. He gets into rally racing and finds that she’s into it too, becoming his navigator at races. At that point, he realizes that she’s The One and marries her. The economic downturn of the 70’s makes finding a job hard, as does the author’s veteran status in many cases, with Vietnam vets being pariahs in the eyes of many, even after the war was over. The newlywed couple also have a miscarriage and another child dies of SIDS early in their marriage. The stress of all of the above is what drives the author to start putting his experiences down on paper.

The final part of the book is the author attending the opening of the Vietnam Memorial in DC. It’s here that he gets the most political but mostly succeeds in staying in his lane and not getting too bombastic or preachy, something that he succeeds at for pretty much the whole book.

I thought it was a good read and the author’s experience seems to be a little different than that of most grunts from the Vietnam era. I don’t think I’d ever heard any accounts from US personnel stationed in Thailand at that time either. There’s not a lot of actual combat in this book but it’s most certainly an important and interesting account of the Vietnam War.

One of the few books that makes me cry. The narration of this book was magnificent. In some instaces I felt that I was right besides him.

I found this book quite frustrating. Another American with an ignorant and arrogant perspective of the world outside of America. The book is poorly written and is written by a racist, often referring to the people of Vietnam as gooks! He also has little respect for the asian females, that comes across loud and clear throughout. The author has no empathy and little respect for the damage his country caused to millions of innocent people in Vietnam.