WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING:

"One thing you got going for you is this universal soldier thread. Your title itself recasts the archetype. He's not the warrior (Another archetype, entirely, and one the military seems to prefer nowadays). No, the universal soldier is the guy who survives, the mother f**r who was in the rear. And there were a lot more of them than warriors. Their story is what, for most men, war was really like. It's what being a soldier is really like. When I finished the section in Saigon with Loan, I thought it was really a great piece of description and well paced. A lot happens that kicks the story into second gear: the pot, the mixing with the Vietnamese, the building of the narrator's character. There's nothing elemental to be changed there. I now recall that by the end of this chapter, I was hooked. Nice work." -- Dr. Richard Musser, professor emeritus and former Clyde Reed Teaching Professor at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas. 

"Van’s memoir is more than a commentary on the War, and more than a commentary on race relations, the drug culture of the early seventies, or the contradictions of the law. Van’s irony and sarcasm mask a profound capacity for sympathy and understanding of human strengths and frailties. His personality is a mixture of naiveté and sophistication, of idealism and skepticism, of clumsiness and dexterity. All of these traits are revealed in his memoir of Vietnam. This is some powerful stuff." -- 
Dr. Wilson J. Moses, Ferree Professor Emeritus of American History, Penn State University.