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The Big Buddha Bicycle Race
The Big Buddha Bicycle Race transports the reader to upcountry Thailand and war-ravaged Laos late in the Vietnam War. On one level a cross-cultural wartime love story, it is also a surreal remembrance of two groups who have been erased from American history—the brash active-duty soldiers who risked prison by taking part in the GI anti-war movement and the gutsy air commandos who risked death night after night flying over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Brendan Leary, assigned to an Air Force photo squadron an hour from L.A., has got it made—until the U.S. invades Cambodia and he joins his buddies (and a few thousand Southern California co-eds) who march in protest. First Sergeant Link ships him off to an obscure air base in upcountry Thailand, but even then Brendan figures he’ll be working in an air-conditioned trailer editing combat footage for the 601st Photo Squadron, a useful detour on his way to Hollywood. He expects to return unscathed from what he knows is a screwed-up war, only Brendan is wrong.
The Rat Pack needs cameramen and Leary is soon flying at night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a secret air war that turns the mountains of Laos into a napalm-scorched moonscape. He realizes he is trapped, his heart and mind divided between awe at the courage of the warriors he flies with and pity for the convoys of Vietnamese soldiers he sees slaughtered on the ground. As his moral fiber crumbles, he is seduced by a netherworld of drugs, booze…and a strung-out masseuse named Tukada. The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is a last gasp of hope, a project he dreams up that will coincide with Nixon's arrival in China, win hearts and minds in rural Thailand—and make him and his underpaid buddies a pile of money. The start of the race is glorious! Entrants from every Thai and American unit on the base mean big bucks for Leary’s syndicate. Except there’s a problem. Tukada has disappeared and Leary’s sidekick insists her brother is a terrorist...
Praise for The Big Buddha Bicycle Race
“Postmodern and poetic, heartfelt and compassionate, full of sad longing and dawning awareness.”
—Jeanne Rosenberg, screenwriter of The Black Stallion and Natty Gann
“The real deal—epic yet personal, filled with cynicism, sorrow, and hopefulness—as Brendan, the narrator, takes the reader with him on an illuminating journey from lost innocence to agonizing self-discovery.”
—Susan Craig, senior story analyst at Warner Brothers
About the Author
Terence Harkin served with the 601st and has returned many times to Thailand and Laos, living in Buddhist monasteries; interviewing Air America crewmen, CIA agents, and Lao soldiers; revisiting old Air Force haunts at Ubon, Udorn, and NKP; and trekking the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Brendan Leary, assigned to an Air Force photo squadron an hour from L.A., has got it made—until the U.S. invades Cambodia and he joins his buddies (and a few thousand Southern California co-eds) who march in protest. First Sergeant Link ships him off to an obscure air base in upcountry Thailand, but even then Brendan figures he’ll be working in an air-conditioned trailer editing combat footage for the 601st Photo Squadron, a useful detour on his way to Hollywood. He expects to return unscathed from what he knows is a screwed-up war, only Brendan is wrong.
The Rat Pack needs cameramen and Leary is soon flying at night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a secret air war that turns the mountains of Laos into a napalm-scorched moonscape. He realizes he is trapped, his heart and mind divided between awe at the courage of the warriors he flies with and pity for the convoys of Vietnamese soldiers he sees slaughtered on the ground. As his moral fiber crumbles, he is seduced by a netherworld of drugs, booze…and a strung-out masseuse named Tukada. The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is a last gasp of hope, a project he dreams up that will coincide with Nixon's arrival in China, win hearts and minds in rural Thailand—and make him and his underpaid buddies a pile of money. The start of the race is glorious! Entrants from every Thai and American unit on the base mean big bucks for Leary’s syndicate. Except there’s a problem. Tukada has disappeared and Leary’s sidekick insists her brother is a terrorist...
Praise for The Big Buddha Bicycle Race
“Postmodern and poetic, heartfelt and compassionate, full of sad longing and dawning awareness.”
—Jeanne Rosenberg, screenwriter of The Black Stallion and Natty Gann
“The real deal—epic yet personal, filled with cynicism, sorrow, and hopefulness—as Brendan, the narrator, takes the reader with him on an illuminating journey from lost innocence to agonizing self-discovery.”
—Susan Craig, senior story analyst at Warner Brothers
About the Author
Terence Harkin served with the 601st and has returned many times to Thailand and Laos, living in Buddhist monasteries; interviewing Air America crewmen, CIA agents, and Lao soldiers; revisiting old Air Force haunts at Ubon, Udorn, and NKP; and trekking the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
- GenresFictionHistorical
396 pages, Paperback
Published January 30, 2017
9 people are currently reading
292 people want to read
About the author
Terence A. Harkin
2 books22 followersTerence A. Harkin earned a BA in English-American Literature from Brown University while spending weekends touring New England with his band, Stonehenge Circus, opening for The Yardbirds, the Shirelles, the Critters and Jimi Hendrix. His play, Resurrection, produced during his senior year, was a winner of the Production Workshop Playwriting Contest. In the US Air Force, despite editing and writing for two underground GI newspapers—Pro Patria Mori and The sNorton Bird—he was asked to write the 1971 history of the combat photo unit he served with at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand. He won a CBS Fellowship for his screenwriting while completing an MFA at the University of Southern California and went on to spend twenty-five years as a Hollywood cameraman. His credits include Goodbye Girl, The Legend of Billy Jean, Quincy, Designing Women, Seinfeld, Tracy Ullman, MASH, and From Here to Eternity. Working as a cameraman on MASH and the six-hour mini-series of From Here to Eternity had a powerful effect—in both style and scope—on the writing of Big Buddha, a wartime love story filled with the possibility of healing and redemption from the traumas of both love and war.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 19, 2017
‘Cremation was merciful in the jungle.’
New Jersey author Terence A. Harkin appears to split his addresses between New Jersey and Thailand, though scouting his biographical information it appears he covers even more territory. He earned his BA in English-American Literature from Brown University while spending weekends touring New England with bands that opened for such luminaries as Jimi Hendrix, he also is a playwright (“Resurrection’), served in the US Air Force with the 601st during the war (writing the 1971 history of the combat photo unit he served with at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand), earned his MFA at the University of Southern California, and spent 25 years as a Hollywood cameraman (‘Designing Women’, ‘Goodbye Girl’, ‘Seinfeld’, and MASH, etc). He credits his working as a cameraman on MASH and the six-hour mini-series of From Here to Eternity as having a powerful effect--in both style and scope--on the writing of Big Buddha, a wartime love story filled with the possibility of healing and redemption from the traumas of both love and war.
Terence understands the permutations of war – on soldiers, victims of the countries at war, and the indelible impact the experience of war has on relationships while also seeing the power of forgiveness and healing and redemption in the aftermath. His prose echoes that sound and senses of battle, as a brief excerpt demonstrates: ‘I didn’t meet Harley until I stood toe to toe with Death. A warrior, an Air Commando, he taught me how to laugh at it and fear it and quash it away and never quite ignore it. Nothing in my Boston childhood had equipped me for the realities of Southeast Asia— the smooth, cool pages of National Geographic magazines stacked in our attic in the outskirts of Boston made Indochina look like Eden. It was Harley who prepared me for combat, accidentally preparing me for monkhood along the way. But in my vision I knew that Tech Sergeant Baker was as doomed as President Kennedy. And I could see my own soul, lost in the void, lost along the sidelines of the Big Buddha Bicycle Race. My mind skids past fading memories I want to recall and lands in catastrophe on days past I have forgotten just as vividly as days I never lived at all. It must have been the whiskey. Or the red-rock heroin. How did we survive the plane crash? It seemed so real when the North Vietnamese took us prisoner. Why do I still dream of fire and fear a candle burning in the night? Who was Tukada? Baker survived two crashes, but didn’t he kill himself shooting up speed? Why aren’t I certain? What has happened to my mind?’
As one synopsis of this huge story distills, ‘ Brendan Leary, assigned to an Air Force photo squadron an hour from L.A., had it made—until the U.S. invades Cambodia and he is shipped off to an obscure air base in upcountry Thailand, but even then Brendan figures he’ll be working in an air-conditioned trailer editing film for the 601st Photo Flight, a useful detour on his way to Hollywood. Only Brendan is wrong. He soon finds himself flying at night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a secret air war that turns the mountains of Laos into a napalm-scorched moonscape. He realizes he is trapped, his heart and mind divided between awe at the courage of the warriors he flies with and pity for the convoys of Vietnamese soldiers he sees slaughtered on the ground. As his moral fiber crumbles, he is seduced by a netherworld of drugs, booze…and a strung-out masseuse named Tukada. The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is a last gasp of hope, a project he dreams up timed to match Nixon's arrival in China that can win over hearts and minds in rural Thailand—and make him and his underpaid buddies a pile of money. It is both cross-cultural wartime love story and a surreal remembrance of two groups who have been erased from American history—the brash active-duty soldiers who risked prison by taking part in the GI anti-war movement and the gutsy air commandos who risked death night after night flying over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Fine as THE BIG BUDDHA BICYCLE RACE is as a novel, it is a journey that will shake all veterans of all wars – especially that echo of Vietnam that remains a glimmer in the flares of the chaos of the various wars in the Middle East that continue to confuse the world. There is a lot of memoir flavor to this tome, a fact that makes it even more pungent. But what Terence has managed to do is to extend the hand of redemption for all the agony of war – and that fact adds to the importance of this very fine book. Highly Recommended.
New Jersey author Terence A. Harkin appears to split his addresses between New Jersey and Thailand, though scouting his biographical information it appears he covers even more territory. He earned his BA in English-American Literature from Brown University while spending weekends touring New England with bands that opened for such luminaries as Jimi Hendrix, he also is a playwright (“Resurrection’), served in the US Air Force with the 601st during the war (writing the 1971 history of the combat photo unit he served with at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand), earned his MFA at the University of Southern California, and spent 25 years as a Hollywood cameraman (‘Designing Women’, ‘Goodbye Girl’, ‘Seinfeld’, and MASH, etc). He credits his working as a cameraman on MASH and the six-hour mini-series of From Here to Eternity as having a powerful effect--in both style and scope--on the writing of Big Buddha, a wartime love story filled with the possibility of healing and redemption from the traumas of both love and war.
Terence understands the permutations of war – on soldiers, victims of the countries at war, and the indelible impact the experience of war has on relationships while also seeing the power of forgiveness and healing and redemption in the aftermath. His prose echoes that sound and senses of battle, as a brief excerpt demonstrates: ‘I didn’t meet Harley until I stood toe to toe with Death. A warrior, an Air Commando, he taught me how to laugh at it and fear it and quash it away and never quite ignore it. Nothing in my Boston childhood had equipped me for the realities of Southeast Asia— the smooth, cool pages of National Geographic magazines stacked in our attic in the outskirts of Boston made Indochina look like Eden. It was Harley who prepared me for combat, accidentally preparing me for monkhood along the way. But in my vision I knew that Tech Sergeant Baker was as doomed as President Kennedy. And I could see my own soul, lost in the void, lost along the sidelines of the Big Buddha Bicycle Race. My mind skids past fading memories I want to recall and lands in catastrophe on days past I have forgotten just as vividly as days I never lived at all. It must have been the whiskey. Or the red-rock heroin. How did we survive the plane crash? It seemed so real when the North Vietnamese took us prisoner. Why do I still dream of fire and fear a candle burning in the night? Who was Tukada? Baker survived two crashes, but didn’t he kill himself shooting up speed? Why aren’t I certain? What has happened to my mind?’
As one synopsis of this huge story distills, ‘ Brendan Leary, assigned to an Air Force photo squadron an hour from L.A., had it made—until the U.S. invades Cambodia and he is shipped off to an obscure air base in upcountry Thailand, but even then Brendan figures he’ll be working in an air-conditioned trailer editing film for the 601st Photo Flight, a useful detour on his way to Hollywood. Only Brendan is wrong. He soon finds himself flying at night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a secret air war that turns the mountains of Laos into a napalm-scorched moonscape. He realizes he is trapped, his heart and mind divided between awe at the courage of the warriors he flies with and pity for the convoys of Vietnamese soldiers he sees slaughtered on the ground. As his moral fiber crumbles, he is seduced by a netherworld of drugs, booze…and a strung-out masseuse named Tukada. The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is a last gasp of hope, a project he dreams up timed to match Nixon's arrival in China that can win over hearts and minds in rural Thailand—and make him and his underpaid buddies a pile of money. It is both cross-cultural wartime love story and a surreal remembrance of two groups who have been erased from American history—the brash active-duty soldiers who risked prison by taking part in the GI anti-war movement and the gutsy air commandos who risked death night after night flying over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Fine as THE BIG BUDDHA BICYCLE RACE is as a novel, it is a journey that will shake all veterans of all wars – especially that echo of Vietnam that remains a glimmer in the flares of the chaos of the various wars in the Middle East that continue to confuse the world. There is a lot of memoir flavor to this tome, a fact that makes it even more pungent. But what Terence has managed to do is to extend the hand of redemption for all the agony of war – and that fact adds to the importance of this very fine book. Highly Recommended.
Read
June 19, 2020World War One poet, Siegfried Sassoon, fought for King and country, and was highly decorated. He enters the war as a romantic poet, but exits with a pen that writes a lone protest against the horrors he sees on the Western Front. History has details of battle strategies and body counts, but it takes poets and writers to reveal the unrecorded scenes that touch our souls. Terence Harkin has written just such a book about the Vietnam War. Though it has all the spirit of the tragic-comedic Mash TV series, The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is a poignant story of the lives of a band of men from different backgrounds who are thrown together to fight a controversial war. Humour and pathos shuffle in amidst romance between star-crossed lovers in the fast paced plot.
Brendan Leary, the main character, is not a natural soldier. His life as a California hippie takes a turn when Richard Nixon invades Cambodia. Leary organises peace rallies and tries for a discharge as a conscientious objector. Instead, he is assigned to Detachment 3 of the 601st Photo Squadron of the United States Air Force in upcountry Thailand. Though initially relieved he has not been posted to Vietnam, he ends up flying as a combat cameraman on night raids, hanging half way out of Spectre Gunships with heavy camera equipment to record napalm hits along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These tense episodes shift the reader to the edge of their seat.
When Brendan isn’t flying over enemy territory, he rides his bicycle from the base into Ubon where he and the cool guys, called the Rat Pack, live in Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng, rented out by a mama-sahn who sits on her porch bare-breasted and chewing beetle nuts. Sixties rock music blares from the soldiers’ bungalow while a steady stream of Mekong whiskey with Coca Cola are knocked back with regularity to try to blot out the war. Within this colourful band of American soldiers and the Thai locals with whom they mix, we meet the idiosyncratic characters we come to love. Tukada, a beautiful Thai woman, whom Brendan first sees through his telephoto lens, gets caught in the drug fests all too prevalent during the Vietnam War. Through her eyes, we see the desperation of women who bed GI Joes to make money to feed their families. But the fraternising with GIs isn't welcome by everyone and a particular character in the book plots revenge. The tension builds as the locals realise the end of the war is near. When the Yankees go home, poverty will once again become their fate.
Brendan and his friends see an opportunity to make some big bucks before transferring home. They convince the base commander that a bicycle race to the golden Big Buddha statue will enhance the profile of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. The betting begins and twenty-five thousand dollars settle into the pot. It’s the climax of the book and the writer pulls us to the finish line with unexpected twists and turns.
Subplots like race inequality weave through this suspenseful novel. The American black political movement has begun, and it casts a light on the disproportionate number of black and brown men drafted to Vietnam. Brendan Leary’s friendship with a black officer, the enigmatic Lieutenant Richard ‘Moonbeam’ Liscomb is particularly poignant. ‘Moonbeam’ is confined to his quarters for organising a march of hundreds of his fellow black soldiers when it’s revealed that men of colour have a top-heavy roster of flights over particularly dangerous territory. The Big Buddha Bicycle Race touches on subjects very much a part of our time, particularly in view of the recent American issues of police brutality against men and women of colour and the murder of George Lloyd.
The attention to detail and to historical facts lend credibility to this novel, based on the writer's own experience with the 601st. In the end, soldier Brendan Leary isn’t so different from soldier Siegfried Sassoon who wrote in 1917:
“I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.”
Some things never change.
DL Baylis
Author of Daphne’s Ghost
Brendan Leary, the main character, is not a natural soldier. His life as a California hippie takes a turn when Richard Nixon invades Cambodia. Leary organises peace rallies and tries for a discharge as a conscientious objector. Instead, he is assigned to Detachment 3 of the 601st Photo Squadron of the United States Air Force in upcountry Thailand. Though initially relieved he has not been posted to Vietnam, he ends up flying as a combat cameraman on night raids, hanging half way out of Spectre Gunships with heavy camera equipment to record napalm hits along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These tense episodes shift the reader to the edge of their seat.
When Brendan isn’t flying over enemy territory, he rides his bicycle from the base into Ubon where he and the cool guys, called the Rat Pack, live in Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng, rented out by a mama-sahn who sits on her porch bare-breasted and chewing beetle nuts. Sixties rock music blares from the soldiers’ bungalow while a steady stream of Mekong whiskey with Coca Cola are knocked back with regularity to try to blot out the war. Within this colourful band of American soldiers and the Thai locals with whom they mix, we meet the idiosyncratic characters we come to love. Tukada, a beautiful Thai woman, whom Brendan first sees through his telephoto lens, gets caught in the drug fests all too prevalent during the Vietnam War. Through her eyes, we see the desperation of women who bed GI Joes to make money to feed their families. But the fraternising with GIs isn't welcome by everyone and a particular character in the book plots revenge. The tension builds as the locals realise the end of the war is near. When the Yankees go home, poverty will once again become their fate.
Brendan and his friends see an opportunity to make some big bucks before transferring home. They convince the base commander that a bicycle race to the golden Big Buddha statue will enhance the profile of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. The betting begins and twenty-five thousand dollars settle into the pot. It’s the climax of the book and the writer pulls us to the finish line with unexpected twists and turns.
Subplots like race inequality weave through this suspenseful novel. The American black political movement has begun, and it casts a light on the disproportionate number of black and brown men drafted to Vietnam. Brendan Leary’s friendship with a black officer, the enigmatic Lieutenant Richard ‘Moonbeam’ Liscomb is particularly poignant. ‘Moonbeam’ is confined to his quarters for organising a march of hundreds of his fellow black soldiers when it’s revealed that men of colour have a top-heavy roster of flights over particularly dangerous territory. The Big Buddha Bicycle Race touches on subjects very much a part of our time, particularly in view of the recent American issues of police brutality against men and women of colour and the murder of George Lloyd.
The attention to detail and to historical facts lend credibility to this novel, based on the writer's own experience with the 601st. In the end, soldier Brendan Leary isn’t so different from soldier Siegfried Sassoon who wrote in 1917:
“I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.”
Some things never change.
DL Baylis
Author of Daphne’s Ghost
April 27, 2019
A Vietnam era war tale.
I won a copy of this book during a Goodreads giveaway. I am under no obligation to leave a review or rating and do so voluntarily. So that others may also enjoy this book, I am paying it forward by donating it to my local library.
I won a copy of this book during a Goodreads giveaway. I am under no obligation to leave a review or rating and do so voluntarily. So that others may also enjoy this book, I am paying it forward by donating it to my local library.
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April 30, 2020MWSA Review
It's 1970, years before the Vietnam War would actually end, and Brendan Leary has a problem. He wants to live in California and go to film grad school, but he's snagged by the draft. Because he has a film background, the Air Force puts him in a combat film unit not in Vietnam, but in Thailand. That location and the comparatively benign Air Force assignment seem like they'd be an easy gig. But things quickly go downhill from there in Vietnam veteran Terence A. Harkin's The Big Buddha Bicycle Race.
Leary quickly gets used to the laid-back Thai vibe, in large measure because film pals from his former stateside unit have also been assigned to the Thailand photo unit due to their vindictive first sergeant. They face terror when riding out in AC-130 Spectre gunships to film attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and face social challenges decompressing in the Thai bars. Growing recreational drug use doesn't deflect the eventual horrors of the shooting war that are visited upon them in their combat backwater.
The titular Big Buddha Bicycle Race was devised as an inter-squadron competition to raise bags of cash for Leary and his co-conspirators, but by the end of the novel the bike race has devolved into a bloody ambush that kills friends and foes, American airmen, and Thai civilians alike. It's how Leary and his friends live their lives along the way that brings home much of the tragedy that bleeds at the end.
This work is a brilliant companion to the most iconic depictions of life in a war zone, including Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H, and Barry Levinson's Good Morning, Vietnam. It depicts the sharply drawn characters, daily work drudgery, combat tragedies, political posturing, and the social upheaval of Americans in Southeast Asia in the heady days before the fall.
The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is smart, detailed, compelling, and occasionally heart-rending, and would make a completely legitimate entry in the canon as a movie.
Review by Daniel Charles Ross (April 2020)
It's 1970, years before the Vietnam War would actually end, and Brendan Leary has a problem. He wants to live in California and go to film grad school, but he's snagged by the draft. Because he has a film background, the Air Force puts him in a combat film unit not in Vietnam, but in Thailand. That location and the comparatively benign Air Force assignment seem like they'd be an easy gig. But things quickly go downhill from there in Vietnam veteran Terence A. Harkin's The Big Buddha Bicycle Race.
Leary quickly gets used to the laid-back Thai vibe, in large measure because film pals from his former stateside unit have also been assigned to the Thailand photo unit due to their vindictive first sergeant. They face terror when riding out in AC-130 Spectre gunships to film attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and face social challenges decompressing in the Thai bars. Growing recreational drug use doesn't deflect the eventual horrors of the shooting war that are visited upon them in their combat backwater.
The titular Big Buddha Bicycle Race was devised as an inter-squadron competition to raise bags of cash for Leary and his co-conspirators, but by the end of the novel the bike race has devolved into a bloody ambush that kills friends and foes, American airmen, and Thai civilians alike. It's how Leary and his friends live their lives along the way that brings home much of the tragedy that bleeds at the end.
This work is a brilliant companion to the most iconic depictions of life in a war zone, including Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H, and Barry Levinson's Good Morning, Vietnam. It depicts the sharply drawn characters, daily work drudgery, combat tragedies, political posturing, and the social upheaval of Americans in Southeast Asia in the heady days before the fall.
The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is smart, detailed, compelling, and occasionally heart-rending, and would make a completely legitimate entry in the canon as a movie.
Review by Daniel Charles Ross (April 2020)
December 10, 2018
The Big Buddha Bicycle Race, by Terence Harkin, is an exceptionally well written novel that reflects the quality of Harkin’s craft.
Harkin does a remarkable job of giving all but the most miniscule characters relatability and depth. The story, made of several stories within the whole, has the hallmarks of quality literature. Many of the substories are meaningful in and of themselves. Yet, they also seem metaphoric of the greater story itself. Many little wars going on.
The story finds a balance, celebrating the resiliency of the human soul in the darkest of circumstances. Good humor and laughs balancing fear and sorrow.
I highly recommend this read to anyone interested in a well written perspective of the times and situations pertaining to the Vietnam war, anyone who has an interest in human struggles with real celebrations and tragedies, and anyone who wishes to read an exceptionally well-crafted piece of literature.
Harkin does a remarkable job of giving all but the most miniscule characters relatability and depth. The story, made of several stories within the whole, has the hallmarks of quality literature. Many of the substories are meaningful in and of themselves. Yet, they also seem metaphoric of the greater story itself. Many little wars going on.
The story finds a balance, celebrating the resiliency of the human soul in the darkest of circumstances. Good humor and laughs balancing fear and sorrow.
I highly recommend this read to anyone interested in a well written perspective of the times and situations pertaining to the Vietnam war, anyone who has an interest in human struggles with real celebrations and tragedies, and anyone who wishes to read an exceptionally well-crafted piece of literature.
May 23, 2017
A moving and beautifully written account of a soldier's journey through the Viet Nam war. Thinking he'd sit out the war at a desk job in the States, Brendan Leary finds himself on an air force base in Thailand. Assigned to a photo squadron, he spends his days editing footage of burning villages at a time when Nixon was telling America we were no longer bombing Viet Nam. Bored and disgusted, he is slowly drawn off base into an underworld of drugs, nightclubs, and pretty Thai women looking for American men. Poetic and raw. A must read for anyone who loves historical fiction.
November 25, 2016
Another interesting read for me. I purchased this book because it was written by an acquaintance of mine from high school. Having been of the pacifist persuasion in the late 60s and early 70s, this book really struck a chord with me. It was well written and transported me back emotionally to that time in my life. Recommended for anyone who wants (or not) to remember a glorious and devastating time in American history. Well done, Terry.
September 23, 2018
Most descriptive and realistic book I have read about the word. terry has an excellent command of the English language to the point that you feel like you are the main character experiencing the war from a CO point of view. Look forward to the sequel
November 8, 2020
The pace of this book was kind of confusing. Sometimes it felt like nothing important happened in a couple chapters, and other times it would have major plot elements race by in just a couple paragraphs. The best part of the book was getting an inside look at the anti-war sentiments among GIs and an unfiltered perspective of life in Thailand. I also enjoyed Brandon's philosophical musings. The 'actual' plot about the bicycle race felt like a side note and then the book's ending took place over just a few short pages. Lots of unanswered questions at the end.
May 31, 2017
A wonderful read..In-depth knowledge and experiences. I felt like I was there.
He explores Vietnam and other areas.
A must read...
He explores Vietnam and other areas.
A must read...
October 2, 2017
a little long and rambling but fun read, 3.3?
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January 18, 2021The writing is excellent and keeps you on the edge of your seat. The plot and pacing are perfect. A great story well-told.
January 18, 2017
When I was a young teenager the Vietnam War was going on and I really didn't understand what was REALLY going on. I remember the Peace marches going on protesting Vietnam War and how our soldiers shouldn't be fighting there. After reading this book I now have a better understanding what was happening and why there was so much dissension about the Vietnam War. In this story, the author, Terence Harkin, takes you to the heart of this war in this work of fiction. The main character in this book, Branden Leary, is drafted and assigned to an Air Force photo squadron near L.A. where he edits combat footage, thinking he has a great assignment until the U.S. invades Cambodia. Brendan and his buddies decide as conscientious objectors to march in a protest with a few thousand others over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia which gets Brendan and his buddies in big trouble with the Air Force. This gets Brandan shipped off to a remote airbase in Thailand. With this assignment, he figures he will still be safe and not anywhere near where the fighting and bombing are going on, but he soon finds out the Air Force has other ideas from him. Now they want him to fly at night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail as a cameraman with The Rat Pack as he photographs the missions they go out on. The killing and fighting he sees drive Brendan to drugs and booze as he tries to hold on to his sanity. With President Nixon coming to China Brendan plans to film the race which coincides with his arrival. But with any great plans, problems arise for Brendan as he his cohorts tries to film his race, will he come of this alive and get his life back on track and return to the woman he loves?
April 22, 2017
A really interesting journey through SE Asia in the 70s. A great read for anyone travelling to Vietnam, or those interested in the history of the area.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews