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Rating: 
Summary: one of the great books about America in our time
Review: I hated finishing Ordinary Lives because I like the book so much. I think Ehrhart has written one of the great books about America in our time, the sort of book Studs Terkel would write if he could. Talk about American Dreams in our time, Lost and Found! Ehrhart's book is also full of mystery. Why did some of the men manage to get their act together and make something of their lives, when others who seemed to have as much or more going for them, ended up suicides? I love the relentless alphabetical format. It emphasizes the arbitrariness of our lives and works well with the military subject. Ehrhart's compassion and respect for the people he interviewed is the great strength and backbone of the book, I think. I had tears in my eyes many times. I also laughed out loud several times. While reading Steven T. Summerscales' entry I thought, there but for fortune go I. How did I end up with such a sweet deal in life, when others, perhaps more deserving, are long since dead? Ehrhart's book handles this mystery in a sensitive yet relentless way. His relentlessness also comes across in his manner of search, but he does know when to let a man go. He strikes a perfect balance between sensitivity and relentlessness in this wonderful engrossing book. David A. Willson Author, REMF Diary
Rating:
Summary: one of the great books about America in our time
Review: This book has a different slant about the military. It follows up the lives of 80 young men who completed Marine basic training at Parris Island, S.C. Most of the men knew they were headed for Vietnam. As a veteran, I always thought about my fellow recruits and what happened to them. I was sadden by parts of the book. The chaotic nature of some after leaving the Marines, and the death of others. I read many books, rarely military types, as I flinch from violence in my older days, but this type of book had a certain measure of attraction for me. I can't get this book out of my mind, and I don't know why. An interesting concept for a book.
Rating:
Summary: Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Book
Review: This is another fine book by an under-appreciated writer. Mr. Ehrhart, by combining talent with an enormous amount of sheer brute-force legwork, has transformed the individual, often mundane, sagas of his fellow recruit training platoon members into a work of art that is greater than the sum of its parts, much like the Marine Corps itself.There is a minimalist economy to Mr. Ehrhart's prose, owing, no doubt, to the fact that he is an accomplished poet and therefore acutely sensitive to the value of individual words. This allows, or causes, the reader to think, really think, about any unadorned contradictions present in the lives presented. One man profiled, successful, decent, religious, thinks the United States should have "annihilated" North Vietnam. The United States should not have been in Vietnam in the first place. Mr. Ehrhart knows this. "Ordinary Lives," without editorializing, allows us to hate the war without hating the warrior brotherhood that is the Marine Corps, and allows us to love the warriors who fought it, our sons and brothers.
Rating:
Summary: A Paragon of Biographical Research
Review: WD Ehrhart's journey into the lives of fellow Marines who served with him in his 1966 basic training platoon during one of the most trying times of American history is nothing shy of exemplary. This is due to his persistence and meticulous research into the labyrinth of Veteran's Administration (VA) records, his hundreds of phone calls and letters of inquiry, and the other ways he found people whom he had no idea where they lived, or if they were still alive.
The book is arranged alphabetically by the platoon member's name. What the reader finds in these men's lives runs the gamut from the enigmatic to the ordinary to the heartbreaking, and at least a few whose circumstances evoke Kipling's 'angry and defrauded young.'
Most of the men served in Vietnam at some point in their enlistments. In the course of Ehrhart's inquiries, he found that some of these men simply could not be found, while others offered terse replies to his requests for interviews, and a few gave Ehrhart nothing more than reticence. Others declined an interview after initially agreeing to one. In another reply, a man who had a life at sea after the Marine Corps said his history was private, and Ehrhart's query was not welcomed; when I read this I thought of a line from a Richard Hugo poem, 'Man always brought\his anguish to the sea.'
Hence, for some of the bios in the book, there exists nothing more than a few facts gleamed from the VA records or brief facts derived from other Marines or the veteran's families. Yet for those he did reconnect with, Ehrhart was welcomed, sometimes with only telephone interviews but very often with personal visits that provided the crux of the book that emerged.
Although critics elsewhere note that the book lacks the emotional impact of war memoirs, Ehrhart's work is a vital contribution to studies of the often-misunderstood Vietnam generation, and to studies of the war's veterans in particular. As such,'Ordinary Lives' makes a perfect parallel study to Rick Atkinson's 'The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966.'
Rating:
Summary: A Paragon of Biographical Research
Review: WD Ehrhart's journey into the lives of fellow Marines who served with him in his 1966 basic training platoon during one of the most trying times of American history is nothing shy of exemplary. This is due to his persistence and meticulous research into the labyrinth of Veteran's Administration (VA) records, his hundreds of phone calls and letters of inquiry, and the other ways he found people whom he had no idea where they lived, or if they were still alive. The book is arranged alphabetically by the platoon member's name. What the reader finds in these men's lives runs the gamut from the enigmatic to the ordinary to the heartbreaking, and at least a few who recall Kipling's 'angry and defrauded young.' Most of the men served in Vietnam at some point in their enlistments. In the course of Ehrhart's inquiries, he found that some of these men simply could not be found, while others offered terse replies to his requests for interviews, and a few gave Ehrhart nothing more than reticence. Others declined an interview after initially agreeing to one. Hence, for some of the bios in the book, there exists nothing more than a few facts gleamed from the VA records or brief facts derived from other Marines or the veteran's families. Yet for those he did find, Ehrhart was welcomed, sometimes with only telephone interviews but very often with personal visits that provide the crux of the book. Although critics elsewhere note that the book lacks the emotional impact of war memoirs, Ehrhart's work is a vital contribution to studies of the often-misunderstood Vietnam generation, and to studies of the war's veterans in particular. As such,'Ordinary Lives' makes a perfect parallel study to Rick Atkinson's 'The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966.'
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