The War Of The Innocents

New York: McGraw-Hill. Very Good+ in Very Good- dust jacket. 1970. First Edition. Hardcover. DJ shows some shelf wear with short tears and light chipping along top edges. ; A tight solid book dustjacket in Mylar, unclipped. Stated first edition ; 8.3 X 6.1 X 1.9 inches; 480 pages; "Charles Bracelen Flood entered the Vietnam War not as a correspondent, but as an attached member of a dive-bomber unit which was dropping napalm in the single most unpopular activity of the war. He remained in Vietnam for a year, stationed far from Saigon. Flood spent a total of three months in the jungles of the Cambodian border with an American infantry battalion, and another four months with American civilian and military advisors working with the Vietnamese in the province in which his Air Force unit was stationed. His experience was so unique and deep that at the end of his year in Vietnam he was asked to brief incoming officers on the conditions to expect in the province where he had lived. From this emerges a reportage infused with the grace and force of an accomplished novelist. Flood's involvement was exactly that of the men doing the fighting, and he brings to his narrative the gifts that produced such books as Love Is a Bridge and More Lives than One. Battle scenes alternate with quiet days spent talking with nuns at orphanages. There are conversations with Vietnamese businessmen who are profiting from the war, lunches with famous correspondents in Saigon, and a chilling description of how it was to be in a schoolyard on election day whe the Viet Cong set off a bomb in a crowd of farmers waiting to vote. Flood puts the reader at the elbow of the visiting United States Senator, and the rice farmer just digging out of the ruins of his house. The author had lived three years in the Far East as a university lecturer and journalist before this year in Vietnam, and his knowledge of Asia and feeling for Asians parallels his compassion for the young American draftees. His description of both enemy and Allied civilian and military programs and tactics in on the level of sourcebook material. Flood mixes hard information with a sense of humor, and has the honesty to demonstrate that many a man, on both sides, throughly enjoys warfare. His narrative force and quick-moving scenes, ranging from thrilling descriptions of aerial and ground combat to an account of a Vietnamese bar girl hurling a bottle of beer at an American, are the essence of an experience that has burned itself into the national consciousness. " (jacket blurb) .