Sergeant Dickinson - Softcover

Gold, Jerome

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0930773985 ISBN 13: 9780930773984

Publisher: Black Heron Press, 2011

Synopsis

Sergeant Dickinson is the radioman of a Special Forces A-team in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam. The camp is encircled and attacked for nine days by the North Vietnamese Army which wants to lure larger American units into combat for the first time. The war grows larger and darker, and Dickinson continues to be drawn back to it, tour after tour, even when he has the opportunity to leave, even though his post-traumatic stress threatens to overwhelm him. Readers of We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, or those who saw the movie, will be interested in the battle that led to the battle in the Ia Drang Valley depicted in We Were Soldiers... Library Journal: Highly Recommended. New York Times: First-rate fiction about battlefield experience. Nelson DeMille: The hard-hitting simplicity of Hemingway and the imagination of Philip Caputo...Truly remarkable and original.

About this title

From the Author:

Jerome Gold is the author of fifteen books, including The Moral Life of Soldiers and the memoir, Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility. Russell Banks said about this book: “I’ve finished reading Jerome Gold’s terrific book cover to cover without a break... It’s a powerful and very tenderhearted book without a soupçon of sentimentality. Unforgettable!” Mr. Gold’s novels include Sergeant Dickinson, about which the New York Times Book Review said: “[It] belongs on the high, narrow shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield experience.” He has published stories, essays, reviews and poems in Chiron Review, Moon City Review, Fiction Review, Boston Review, Hawaii Review, and other journals.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The grim resignation that replaces fear in the psyches of combat soldiers under fire is vividly dramatized in this latest from Russell (The Prisoners Son, 1996, etc.): an in-your-face character study of an American radioman assigned to a Special Forces unit based in Pleiku in central Viet Nam at the height of the late war. Eponymous protagonist Ray Dickinson is an understandably embittered veteran in a story that begins with his unsparing description of the job of sorting out and disposing of dead bodies; that embraces standard-issue vilification of military myopia, doublespeak, and vainglory (a ``Group Commander . . . [is accompanied by] the master sergeant whose job it was to light his cigars''); and that varies its war-weary tone with sardonic pictures of butchery and devastation on and off the battlefield. All the expected things happen. Soldiers woolgather, swap outrageous tall tales, bicker endlessly, bet on how long it will take critically wounded ``personnel'' to die. Disturbingly irrational images surface in phlegmatic barracks-room conversation (``an elephant bombed and strafed by six sorties of American aircraft'')and even penetrates back home, where Sgt. Dickinson recuperates after a severe hand wound and hears of a fellow soldier blinded when a war protestor threw acid in his face. A stab at reuniting with his ex-wife (who's afraid of him) inevitably fails, and he's soon back in Pleiku (for a ``third tour''), just in time for a climactic North Vietnamese attack (exacerbated by misdirected ``friendly fire'') on his unit's camp, which ends the novel on an appropriately inconclusive note. Sergeant Dickinson in fact hits every note quite convincingly: the books hard to take, but it's harder to look away from it. One must ask if there's anything here that we haven't already seen in such classic Viet Nam texts as Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers and Michael Herr's Dispatches. Even so, this brief, swift tales relentless fatalism and narrative momentum identify it as an authentic member of their company. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Heron Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0930773985
• ISBN 13: 9780930773984
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 180