Vietnam War memoirs have a pretty similar structure, imposed by the facts of history. Here's a young kid who doesn't know anything, basic training, a battle or two, becoming a hardened veteran, hijinks in a rear area that don't disguise the psychological wounds of war, a dissatisfying return home, and at some point a book. In this collective biography of the men of Charlie Company, Wiest elevates this story into the tale of a generation in the popular history vein of Stephen Ambrose.

This book is exceptional in depicting each of the men of Charlie Company as unique individuals; California surfers, Southern farmboys, Navajo shepherds, athletes and drag racers and factory workers and young fathers from across America. All of them were drafted (with the exception of one voluenteer) sometime in 1966, the course of their lives forever altered. In 1966 the Vietnam War was quiet news, something happening far away. Most people, if they thought of the war at all, thought that it was worth fighting and would be over soon. For the children of WW2 veterans, service when drafted was assumed.

While the men of Charlie Company were anybody and everybody, Charlie was a unique unit. It was part of the new 9th Division, which was being slated to fight in the populous Mekong Delta. Charlie was trained and deployed as a unit, unlike the stream of replacements which defined the American fighting experience, and the old hands were a closely knit band of brothers.

In the Delta, Charlie was part of the Mobile Riverine Force, Army troops deployed on small boats from floating bases on Navy transports. While close support from the Navy had some advantages, like showers and mess halls on base and close support from river monitors, WW2 era landing ships converted into a close support fire barges armed with everything from 105mm cannons to flamethrowers, by and large the terrain was awful. Patrols had to cut through leech infested channels and impassable mangrove swamps. Good routes on the tops of rice paddy dikes were sure to be mined.

The first few months were almost contactless patrols, 'walks in the sun' marked by attrition through mines and snipers, but soon Charlie walked into the nameless ambushes that characterized the war. In these battles, Charlie gave as good as it got, with small units suffering heavy casualties until American artillery and airpower suppressed Viet Cong bunkers, allowing one of the platoons to flank and destroy the enemy in close assault.

If there's a hitch to this book, it's that Wiest hasn't quite figured out how to write combat. I'm not sure how you get across the utter confusion of battle, but there's a level of historical dispassion to the combat that cuts at cross purposes to the rest of the book. But the final chapter, on the men's lives returning home and the post-1989 reunions save the book. This is about people, not war, and it works.

The ultimate tribute is that of the 134 original Charlie Company soldiers, only 14 returned stateside alive and unwounded.