Sappers in the Wire is a detailed historical account of an American military debacle. It was late in the war, the spring of 1971, and the U.S. was gradually disengaging. The moral of the soldiers still on the ground was understandably low. Belief that there was any real purpose to what they were doing was scarce, and nobody wanted to die in a purposeless war. Drug use had grown, resentment of officers was often strong, and racial divisions affected the soldiers, as well. Firebase Mary Ann was a fortified encampment on the top of a hill in the jungle in the northern part of South Vietnam, put there to allow the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces to try to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines into the country. The solders were still going on dangerous patrols in the surrounding jungle, inflicting and receiving casualties. But up on their firebase refuge, they felt safe, and between this feeling of safety and the enlisted soldiers' low morale, it became very difficult for the officers to impose security protocol standards. One night, after a confusion-inducing mortar attack, Viet Cong soldiers snuck past the camp's guards and ran through the camp tossing grenades into bunkers and shooting soldiers who tried to escape the explosions. Thirty U.S. soldiers were killed and 82 were seriously wounded.

Keith William Nolan, a military historian, does an excellent job setting the scene for the American disaster. He starts with a brief description of the event itself, and then goes back several weeks to describe individual patrols that the solders of this division had undertaken in the leadup to the battle. Often the soldiers performed admirably, but it was not unusual for soldiers to refuse orders they thought were inordinately foolhardy. Usually, threats of court martial would get them moving.

The battle, especially when word of the lax security came out, became a scandal within and without of the Army. The Army conducted a thorough investigation of the battle (which Nolan describes in the book's final chapters) and the failings that led up to it, interviewing every surviving soldier in depth, and Nolan was able to access these testimonies. He also conducted phone interviews with dozens of soldiers will to talk to him. The book was written in the 1990s, and Nolan reports that many of the soldiers told him a version of, "We've been waiting 20 years for somebody to tell this story." Between the official testimonies and these interviews, Nolan was able to construct a minute-by-minute account of the terrifying action, and he does so. It is, not surprisingly, very hard reading.

I read this book now, I guess, to remind myself how horrible and tragic this war was, and all war is. Sappers in the Wire certainly accomplishes that. The only flaws in the writing are 1) the fact that he seems to me to identify too closely with and/or wishes to glorify the soldiers themselves. He commonly uses their own slang, referring to the soldiers as "grunts" and speaking of shooting someone as "firing them up" (but only when a U.S. soldier shoots a Vietnamese soldier); and 2) for some reason, Nolan insists on specifying when soldiers he's referring to are black. Having described the racial tensions running through the Army at this point, especially in the rear, perhaps Nolan was trying to stress the fact that these tensions more or less evaporated when it was time for everybody to go into action. I hope there was some such logic, anyway.

At any rate, this is mostly a very good book, for anyone interested in revisiting, or learning about, the daily crazy hell of the Vietnam War. By now, I would assume that's a very small subset of my LT friends. ( )