<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: how the Green Berets got to Vietnam
Review: Chalmers Archer must have been a remarkable soldier, for he was a black Green Beret at a time when the U.S. Army Special Forces was almost entirely a lily-white outfit. His book belongs on the shelf of every student of the Green Berets.It's not a knock-you-dead combat yarn like Jim Morris's "War Story"--Archer didn't really serve what you could call a combat tour in Vietnam. He was there much earlier, knocking about Southeast Asia in the years before there was a Vietnam War (or American War, as the Vietnamese prefer to call it). He was in Laos, Thailand, the Philippines, and of course Vietnam when the Green Berets were first staking out their claim to fame, and when men like Archer created the jungle-training practices that would make Special Forces the most effective American combat arm in South Vietnam. To me, the most interesting anecdote is the account of the American training mission that was attacked by the Viet Cong as it graduated its first class of Vietnamese Special Forces. Officially, Captain Harry Cramer died of an accidental explosion, and he wasn't even listed on The Wall (the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, D.C.) until 1983. In fact, as Archer recalls, Crame died in a mortar attack, and he was the first American to be killed in that long war--21 October 1957. This is a slight book--just 138 pages. How it can be priced at more than forty bucks is beyond me, so I'm glad to see that there are cut-rate copies available from the vendors of new-used books on this site.
<< 1 >>
| 
