Matt McAvoy Book Review

Another entry from the excellent Glyn Haynie, on the tours of duty of Sergeant Andy Carter, in the Vietnam War.  Gritty and gripping as always, veteran Glyn’s books are as accurate a portrayal of the day-to-day life of soldiers on the ground as you are ever likely to read.  This is perhaps a less eventful tale than previous instalments, though as always there is no shortage of action – nor heartrending casualties.  Given another mission, to locate and destroy an NVA base situated amongst the civilian villes and hamlets, Andy’s team find themselves once again up to their necks in danger. 

There are now six in this series of novellas, I believe, as well as Glyn’s prolific novels and memoirs; he is truly a Duracell-powered author, with an abundance of stories to tell about his time in the war, and it is very clearly apparent that writing is a major catharsis for him.  This book, if I’m being honest, doesn’t quite hit the heights of some of the earlier ones in the series, nor his awesome feature-length compositions, but is rather a simple mission story.  It feels less profoundly prosed than much of his previous writing, and as a consequence perhaps the scenes don’t drag you so gutturally into them; in my opinion, there was definitely room for a few thousand extra words of emotive and incidental detail.  But it feels wrong to critique anything about Glyn’s writing, for he is a far better author than the vast majority of us will ever be, and this is absolutely another worthy entry into the series.

If you like Vietnam War stories which you can throw yourself into, one per night or afternoon, written from the heart by men who were actually there, killing and dying, watching friends fall and losing a piece of themselves in the process, then this is absolutely the series for you.  But my advice is to read them in order, for the narrative running throughout the series is gut-wrenching; the anthology’s quality absolutely lies in the sum of all its parts, of which this is yet another from an author who needs to write like a shark needs to keep moving – to live and breathe.