Ketwig's memoir is an excruciating emotional odyssey that follows a young man from small-town USA through his draft into the Vietnam War and the subsequent experiences that teach him the meaning of the term "expendable."

"...And A Hard Rain Fell" delivers not only an account of the physical and emotional trauma of the war and aftermath, but also the cultural upheaval and political corruption and turmoil of the US in the 1960s. Prepare to experience the news of MLK Jr and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations, the moon landing, Woodstock, civil rights struggles and peace protests, the Fort Kent shootings, and all of the hope, despair, anger, and joy that accompanied these events through the mind of a young, wide-eyed soldier who struggles to find hope and spread peace as an unwilling participant in the Vietnam War.

I generally shy away from such books, but a new friend of mine gave me a copy of a book he wrote in 1985. He thought it would have meaning for me. It did, but maybe not in the way he intended.


...And a Hard Rain Fell: A GI's True Story of the War in Vietnam by John Ketwig is still in print. It's a hard book to read if you were in Vietnam or if you were on the home front, protesting or not, waiting for a loved one to come home or not. The back cover likens this to Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, a great anti-war novel. I read it years ago during a sit-in. I read it again before I plunged into Ketwig's story. Different, but so much the same.

Ketwig was a kid when he went to Vietnam. Late teens. He was there near Dak To and through the Tet Offensive. His book, divided into three sections, is stream of consciousness for the first half. His fear, his anger, come through in long run-on sentences where his emotions pour out onto the page. His second section, his healing year in Thailand before he returned to The World, is less frenetic. As he feels he's safe, his language is less powerful. The return to The World in section three is the weakest and shortest. But what he writes in the first section overrides the weakness of the last section.

This is one of the most painful books I've read about war. The writer, my friend, is damaged by PTSD. He still hasn't recovered, but his bravery in writing this book was one step in his healing process.

Not having much else to do one vacation, I picked this up at my parents' house and started reading. Oddly enough, I enjoyed it...I generally hate movies about war because they tend to glorify it, but this story told how wrong and pointless it is. It appealed to the bleeding-heart liberal in me.

Life as a Vietnam drafty

I don't think I have ever read a book that stayed with me longer than this one. Without serving in Viet Nam, no one can imagine the horrors this war brought to the young men and women that served.

This is an amazing story of one man's account of his Viet Nam experience. It is all about harsh reality and one becomes ensnared in his story. It is suspenseful and gruesome, but reality is never absent. I couldn't put this one down...

Very well done story of his experience in Vietnam liked the honesty and straightforward writing

A book I will never forget...

I have a much better understanding of my Vietnam veteran friends.

For a soldier who lived in base for part of a tour and in Thailand for the other part, he sure did have a lot happen. Imagine meeting the enemy socially or suffering from depression due to a bad experience with drugs. Yes it's all here, it's sometimes well written, but at times lacks that quality that can lead the reader to believe what happened, maybe didn't.

One of my favorite books from vietnam. Extremely powerful

Overall a pretty good insight of the revelations over time that shaped the authors life in Vietnam. Although we was not in combat often the 4 instances he did experience I felt were reiterated way too many times throughout the book. Also there was a few times he got bogged down talking about the political agenda that strayed away from his story.