A Life in a Year

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NOV 29, 1993

Ebert combines interviews and printed primary sources in this brilliant reconstruction of the infantryman's experience during the Vietnam War. Though accounting for less than 10% of the American troops in Vietnam, the infantry suffered more than 80% of the losses. Ebert, a secondary school teacher in Wisconsin, tells their story chronologically, from the grunts' induction and training, through their arrival in Vietnam, their first encounters with battle and their final rendezvous with the airplane that would carry them home--the ``freedom bird,'' one of the numerous military terms, abbreviations and Vietnamese words defined in the glossary. The infantrymen confronted environments from rice paddies to jungles, from densely populated cities to virtually empty countrysides. They fought in patrol skirmishes and in division-scale battles. They learned to kill, but few understood a war with no clear objectives. They survived, but most paid a price for their survival. The book belongs in every collection on America's longest and most controversial war.