Dear Mr. President

Rating:
Summary: Veteran Speaks
Review: I served in the Gulf, and not only has Mr. Hudson completely nailed that war to a tee, he also has a serious bead on human nature. I think it'll be a couple years before people truly see the historical importance of this book, but I am willing to say that this might be the most important book published this year. Mr. Hudson, through dark humor and wild story-telling, addresses issues such as Biological warfare, the little publicized psychological effects of modern war, the Bush administration's lust for war, the tenuous relationship between the Middle East and the West, America's lust for oil, the White House's utilization of mainstream media as a propaganda tool (especially CNN--anyone who served in that war will know what I am talking about), the hypocrisy inherent in America's foreign policy, gays in the military, the failure of American Intelligence, Gulf War Syndrome, the way that each generation heaps its war stories on the younger generation (namely the relationship between the Vietnam generation and the Gulf War generation), and the role that technology plays in modern warfare. Most importantly, though, it shows the human side to a war that was largely censored, and has been perceived by the American public as virtual and sanitary. And while Mr. Hudson is clearly opposed to war, he is just as quick to lampoon the Doves as he is the Hawks. It's rapidly becoming one of the most talked about books in the veteran message boards, a favorite of both young and old. I laughed a lot, sure, but I was also, somehow, very moved. It brought a lot of stuff back. It gave me a way to think about things I had previously not been able to think about. Thank you Mr. Hudson for your courage and bravery--for giving a voice to a group of men and women who have been largely marginalized and swept under the carpet by the government--especially now that Bush II wants to go make more of a mess over in Iraq. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, for civilians and veterans.

Rating:
Summary: Heartbreaking yet funny
Review: These stories are about people I might have gone to high school with. It's so wierd to think that my contemporaries are veterans, and now there's a new bunch of kids going over to Iraq who are younger than my little brother & sister.

But here they are in all their human strength and frailty. Fictional, yes, but every writer uses his experiences and those of his friends to color their fictional world.

This book is far more readable and approachable than Catch-22 or Going after Cacciato, Apocalypse Now, and other war-genre stories to which it has been compared. Perhaps this is due to the contemporary nature of the stories, or maybe it's just because the writer captures character so well with dialogue
and action. This is a very quick, captivating read.

These stories have a huge dose of irony among the realistic snapshots of what the first Gulf War was like up-close. This is not the war we saw on CNN, this is more like Vietnam in the desert, where a confrontation with a few belligerent locals can turn into a landmine and booby-trap ridden massacre.

War veterans come home and can't forget their lives on the front lines. Minds snap, but their hearts are still in the right place. Chemical warfare takes its toll on veterans' bodies in different, horrible ways. Iraquis know just enough of our culture to get it wrong. You kill someone in order to save them. Your life back home goes to hell while you're living in hell on the front lines.

You have to laugh or you'd cry.

Read this.

Rating:
Summary: A REVELATION
Review: Wow, Dear Mr. President is a story collection that heralds the arrival of a great new writer! Gabe Hudson, to me, is the first writer that signals a transition of generations from war fiction about Vietnam to the group of young people who fought in the first Iraqi War. Due to the overinundation of books like Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and the almost God-like worship of writers like Ambrose, the soldiers of wars after that (Korea,Vietnam,Iraq) are not given the attention and respect that they deserve. In Dear Mr. President, we are not treated to the super, almost soviet style citizen of the fatherland that Ambrose glorified in his books, but men and women who are bashed and broken and absurd and humorous and insane and brave and trying to do the best they can.

In "The Cure as I Found It", a soldier returned from the Gulf War must decide if the rules he learned in the special forces, namely to maim and kill, can be used against a neighborhood bully as he deals with the horrors of war in his nightmares.
Among the best stories is "Sneak and Peek Outside Baghdad" about a reconaissance mission which finds that the worst aspects of American hip-hop culture have transferred to Iraq even as one soldier remembers his lover left in the US. "Those Words Were Yours Not Mine" is about a blind woman named Valerie Hackett, whose 19 year old son is killed in the War. On his person is found a letter which she can't read. After asking a lot of people to read it to her, she senses that they are all lying to her, concealing the dreadful contents from her. So she hires someone at the hospital she's staying in to read it and learns about her son's disastrous marriage, of infidelity and betrayal. The last story, a novella called "Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8" is a plea for peace and brotherhood as a Green Beret, shocked by the blood and guts he sees, gathers up a wounded comrade and abandons the war, holding up in a bunker with a bunch of lab apes, venturing out to the surface to help out wounded civilians and keeping his friend a virtual prisoner in his insane fantasies.

This was a great great book. The stories are funny, horrible, psycho, and masterful at times. He writes like Chuck Palahniuk, if Chuck had something to write about. Gabe has a war. With war comes atrocity, insanity, and absurdity. It's about time someone not only caught up to history, but overtaken it. Ironically, just as this book comes out, we are again engaged in Iraq (some would say we were never disengaged) and so the very issues the men and women deal with in this book might as well be set in the present. Hudson might just evolve into a great writer. We'll see.