Sergeant Dickinson: A Novel - Hardcover

Gold, Jerome

3.93

14 ratings by Goodreads

9781569471623: Sergeant Dickinson: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569471622 ISBN 13: 9781569471623

Publisher: Soho Pr Inc, 1999

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Sergeant Dickinson is the radioman of a Special Forces A-Team in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The camp is encircled and attacked for nine days by the North Vietnamese Army, anxious to lure larger American units into combat for the first time. Dickinson survives, just. The remnants of the team are broken up, the soldiers scattered among other commands. A unit that battered, goes the thinking, can't be put back together.
The war grows ever larger and darker but Dickinson has the ethereal clarity of a person who has been shot at: "the almost dying and the not dying. Afterwards is the best thing there is."

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About the Author:

Jerome Gold was a Special Forces sergeant at Plei Me in Vietnam's Central Highlands and later at Pleiku.

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.

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