Nam-A-Rama

by Phillip Jennings (Goodreads author!)

published

2005 by Forge Books

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binding

Hardcover, 336 pages

isbn

0765311208 (isbn13: 9780765311207)

description

Everybody knows War is Hell. Only the Few and the Proud know what fun Hell can be.Here it is, folks: "How the cow ate the cabbage" in the CL...more

[close] Everybody knows War is Hell. Only the Few and the Proud know what fun Hell can be.Here it is, folks: "How the cow ate the cabbage" in the CLASSIFIED words of the President hisself [sic:]. TOP SECRET stuff. EYES ONLY. If you want to know the real story (and you know you do)Nam-A-Rama is Catch 22 meets "Apocalypse Now." It's the wildest, wackiest, saddest and truest war story ever told, because it's all made-up, which means it's all real-from the oatmeal dropped on the VC (the Marines won't eat it) to the naked movie star parachuting into Hanoi; from the jarhead who calls in air strikes from a Bangkok brothel to the "Sky-Kyke" who fills out the Marine Corps' diversity quota; from the businessmen demanding a long inventory-reducing war to the Pentagon brass hoping for a glorious medal-worthy one; from the locals who'll do anything for a Yankee dollar to the grunts nobody ever asked and never will. It starts and ends, like all the best adventures, in the air. Almost-Captain Gearheardt and his buddy, Almost-Captain Armstrong, are ferrying bodies (live in, dead out) for the CIA's Air America, but they have never forgotten their TOP SECRET orders, given when Gearheardt was delivering pizzas to the Oval Office for the CIA: Chopper into Hanoi and buy Uncle Ho a beer. Then either shoot his ass or shake his hand (the instructions get vague at this point). And so they do, Semper Fi, pausing only to get an aircraft carrier black-flagged for bubonic plague, have an affair with Mickey Mouse, cleverly decode the message sewn into a lusty spy's black panties, commandeer a Russian truck complete with a midget Chinese 'Uncle Sam,' avenge themselves on a Cuban torturer, and dutifully experience all the Honor and Glory of the next-to-the-next-to-last war that never (God forbid) made the Nightly News.And they do it all for laughs. Because if they were to stop laughing, where would the heartache end?Phillip Jennings' unpredictable novel of Vietnam is an American classic in the making, a not-so-longing look at the absurdity of a war in which the damned and the innocent share the same hootch, the same Commander-in-Chief, and sometimes even the same body-bag. You won't stop laughing, or thinking. [close]

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Mike rated it:

(review of isbn 0765349868)

07/06/08

Read in July, 2008

recommended to Mike by: The NYTimes, some way back, and more recently someone here
recommends it for: many. My dad, for starters.

The stars are rounded from a half-grade. Whether up or down, the author can decide. (You read these, P? You a glass half-empty or half-full sort?) Either way--it's good.

But let me jump over the qualification, what keeps me from total love and admiration and obsequious pandering to said author about said book. I gotta admit to some nervousness in the opening section, as we're introduced to the exasperated Armstrong and exasperating Gearheardt toward the end of their hyperkinetic war-&a...more The stars are rounded from a half-grade. Whether up or down, the author can decide. (You read these, P? You a glass half-empty or half-full sort?) Either way--it's good.

But let me jump over the qualification, what keeps me from total love and admiration and obsequious pandering to said author about said book. I gotta admit to some nervousness in the opening section, as we're introduced to the exasperated Armstrong and exasperating Gearheardt toward the end of their hyperkinetic war-&-spy hijinks, and they discuss (debate? bicker over) the dense plot we've not yet experienced. This is what they call foreshadowing, right? I felt pretty shaded. A book this plot-heavy needs not to be heavy in its plotting, needs a helium lift to its cartoonish complications and gags, and yet in these first conversations I felt seriously burdened by the weight of the "wacky." Big, complicated plot--I felt like the gunny officer late in the book, listening in on the protagonists piloting their craft into North Vietnam, hearing a lot of noise and detail but not feeling any investment, listening to two men snip and "banter" without any sense of why they like one another or why I should like them. I was seriously pissed, because against my better instincts (to avoid seriously reviewing anything a friend or quasi-friend ["quasi-" means "fake":] had written, to stick to reading and offering up pleasant affirmations, whatever my experience), here I was committed to "currently-reading" and needing to some day, in some way, slip it over into the "read" shelf without causing a stink. (And I felt stupidly compelled to give an honest assessment.)

Part I closed for this reader with a glimmer of hope, a crazed and ineffectual yet wonderfully committed "therapist" promising to fix Armstrong ... and then we shift into Part II, a flashback to the start of it all, trickster Gearheardt delivering pizza to a meeting of the Joint Chiefs with President Larry Bob ... and this section is one of two astonishing bits of writing which sold me on this novel, and this author.

It is hard to be funny, and even harder to write funny: the strain so often shows, and you see the flopsweat and the physical exertion of the writer crafting her or his joke. Or maybe it's just me--I rarely laugh while reading, finding myself too keenly alert to the effort and thus too distracted from the sublime displacement of a great funny line. I suppose (for me) it's akin to reading about magic tricks: interesting, but usually not the same as being magically tricked. And yet there's the rare bird who gets it. Adams and Southern are the hall-of-famers, Christopher Moore and David Sedaris have good batting averages. You can make your own roster. And I'll be adding Jennings to mine. His LBJ is a glorious achievement, a seriously interesting buffoon, a buffoonishly interesting serious character. (I liked him just about as much as Coover's Nixon, and that's high praise from this reader.) Throughout, Part II was all fireworks, an extended glorious performance of Jennings' Strangelovian skill with the seriously silly. E.g., the President, snarling back at a bit of idiocy, says "[t:]o the Army chief . . . 'Tom, I get that kind of bullshit advice about every three seconds from those idiots over at the State Department. I don't need to hear it from the soldier boys.'

The Army chief's uniform suddenly became three sizes too big. He squatted behind the couch, a tear running down his face. He did have the presence of mind to later put out a memo changing his name to Tom."

Presto, digito. The book consistently pulls such rabbits out of holes it would be impolitic for this decorous reviewer to note.

The second great section was chapter 12. Chapter 11 had snuck in a bit of serious combat writing, in and around the silly and the bleak and the absurd, as Armstrong experiences on-the-ground combat, and finds himself thunderstruck and horrified. I was impressed, but maybe not as immersed; I found myself recalling other accounts, and here, as in a few other sections, I found the novel good but reminiscent of its great ancestors. But chapter 12, in and around the silly and the bleak and the absurd, turns to combat in the air, and it's as strong, stirring, shattering as any of the greats. I've not read anything so effective at conveying what happens when you pilot a 'copter in for a rescue while under intense enemy fire.

The graft between such heart-stopping and eye-poking doesn't always take, and the junctions of horror and low comedy on occasion dislocate the reader rather than complement (or at the best of moments complicate) one another. But it's a very good novel, not to mention a very good first novel, not to mention a very funny novel (rare indeed). I'll be reading the second.

And there--a real review, not simply blowing smoke, and I avoided the comparison to _Catch-22_.
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Nathan rated it:

12/03/07

bookshelves: fiction, humor

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: Heller fans, Air America's board of directors.

Phillip Jennings is about as subtle as a (wait for it...) hand grenade at times. And yes, he was clearly influenced by Joseph Heller, as many reviews of Nam-A-Rama have pointed out. But that's an easy, somewhat lazy comparison that doesn't do justice to this future-classic satire. It's more like an amalgamation of influences, as if Heller, Monty Python, Lyndon Johnson, Dr. Strangelove, Vonnegut, Jimmy Bond, Robert McNamara, Richard Simmons, William Westmoreland, one of Mickey Mouse's nightmares ...more Phillip Jennings is about as subtle as a (wait for it...) hand grenade at times. And yes, he was clearly influenced by Joseph Heller, as many reviews of Nam-A-Rama have pointed out. But that's an easy, somewhat lazy comparison that doesn't do justice to this future-classic satire. It's more like an amalgamation of influences, as if Heller, Monty Python, Lyndon Johnson, Dr. Strangelove, Vonnegut, Jimmy Bond, Robert McNamara, Richard Simmons, William Westmoreland, one of Mickey Mouse's nightmares and On Golden Pond were put in a Cuisinart with a bottle of Scotch and a little bit of Hunter S. Thompson's blood, God Rest His Soul. (You don't have to be drunk to love this book, but you may have to be drunk to get it.) It is quite possibly the only book that will ever make you wish Morrissey had been a Marine commandant. Yeah, it's a little over the top at points. But wasn't the Vietnam War? This is a world where the president sends the CIA's pizza delivery boy (you will fall in love with him) on a secret mission that has something to do with Jane Fonda and ending a war the president just started. (I've read Dallek, I've read Caro, I've even read Beschloss. All fine historians. But Jennings has written the finest printed representation of Lyndon Baines Johnson I've ever read.) It's a world where therapy comes with blowjobs. One expects, at any moment, Slim Pickens, straddling an atomic bomb, to part the sky, hee-hawing at the top of his lungs, swatting his cowboy hat at his ass, only to land in the middle of Danang. This novel isn't discriminating in its targets, and everyone and everything from Big Business to the Great Society to southern racism is skewered at some point. But for every discomfort, there's a laugh, and through it all, as with all great satire, a truth that makes the absurdity almost plausible. If Gary winds up as Director of Central Intelligence in the sequel, then Gearheardt's version of the CIA will officially be at least as plausible as the CIA we have in reality. What's remarkable about this book is how prescient, whether intentional or not, it really is. Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22 ostensibly about WWII, a war he fought in, but later claimed it was really about Vietnam. Myself, try as I might, I've never been able to figure out what Vietnam was really about. All I know for sure is that from a literary point of view, whether history repeats itself or not, it certainly piles the hell up. And I'm not 100% sure I know what Nam-A-Rama is about. But it is hilarious, and probably truer than any of us would like to admit. Somewhere in all this, there's a Shirley Bassey song. Anyway, Nixon's not in yet, and we've got a war to fix.

NC

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Lori rated it:

(review of isbn 0765349868)

11/09/07

bookshelves: 2007november

Read in November, 2007

Though I really wish I'd discovered the joys of Jenning's boys in order, I didn't know Mexico was a sequel when I picked it up. So I knew more going into this book (plot points and weird quirks) than I'd have liked.

But that may be my only complaint.

Almost Captains Gearhardt and Armstrong may be my favorite (anti?) war heroes ever. And their absurdity-laced tale is as close to any truth as I've ever read about the war. Plus it's a hell of a lot more fun -- if not much less painful.

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