DESERTION, IN THE TIME OF VIET NAME

DESERTION, IN THE TIME OF VIET NAME by Jack Todd
Houghton Mifflin Company - 2001
ISBN: 0618091556 - Hardcover

Reviewed by Sue Bartroff, MyShelf.com
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This is a thoughtful, introspective book that reads in places like haunting poetry evocative of all our pasts. It was also a book that I read three times before I could begin to write a review. I was frustrated the first time through because Jack Todd is a newspaperman and I expected who, what, when, where and why. The why wasn't there for me. Oh, there were reasons he deserted from boot camp: partly a friends influence, partly the love of his life dumping him, partly his own involvement with the written works of anti-war protesters. But they never rang really true for me.

On my third reading, determined to find the explanation for so much suffering on his part and the part of his family, I discovered that this book is not about desertion so much as it is about the lost generation of young people in the late 60's and early 70's. Young men who lost their lives fighting a war for which there was no recognition and no honor. Young men who refused to fight on sometimes ambiguous grounds. Young men who tried to make a political statement and became conscientious objectors to a war that made no sense.

All these men suffered. Those that fled to Canada and other countries barely subsisted until they could get papers that allowed them to work. The very process of leaving the country and getting those papers was fraught with opportunity for abuse, arrest, imprisonment on both sides of whichever borders they crossed.

This is the story of people who felt betrayed by a corrupt government leading a country that they loved enough not to fight for it. People who gave up family, friends, home and sometimes their citizenship in anger and pity and heartbreak. It is also the story of a generation who broke their ties and lost their way: some never finding it, some lost in the horrors of a war they fought, some still riding the wave of anger for a government who threw them away.

This was a hard book to read; but a worthwhile one in the end. It manages by telling the tale of one deserter to tell the story of an entire generation who is still rootless, homeless and searching.