Suicide Charlie: A Vietnam War Story

Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1993. First American Edition [stated], First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Beverly K. Duncan (Map). [12], 189, [7] pages. Contains poem and author's note. Contains one page map of South Vietnam. Based on the true story of the author, a naive nineteen-year-old who evolved into a combat-scarred soldier, this book about the Vietnam War captures vividly the psychology of combat. The author is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and a writer. He has written and produced, for example, a PBS TV program entitled Fathers and Sons: Two Generations of American Combat Veterans. This worked has been recognized with numerous awards. Drafted in the spring of 1968 from a job as a sportswriter for a small, New England daily, six months later Norm Russell found himself serving in the infantry in Vietnam in an outfit nicknamed Suicide Charlie and fighting for his life against some of the North Vietnamese Army's top units. In a remarkable journey that takes the reader from a time of innocence and protest back in the States to the battle of Mole City where, in the author's words, he makes his acquaintance with the Devil, and then beyond into the despair and depravity of combat, the reader experiences the Vietnam War in gripping and graphic detail. For Russell, an unlikely soldier caught up in a war in which he did not believe, an outsider who grew up in a single parent home because his father committed suicide not long after returning from infantry duty in Europe during World War II, surviving the war meant learning to accept his own mortality, preparing to die, and then going on . . . Suicide Charlie is the true story of the evolution of a naive 19-year-old into a combat-scarred, Universal Soldier whose search for meaning speaks to questions asked by nearly all concerned citizens in the late 20th century.