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