Grunts Summary

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Grunts is historian Longley's first book on the Vietnam War. The focus is on the 300,000 to 500,000 infantrymen in Vietnam ("grunts"). It describes the effects of Vietnam service, including homesickness, boredom, fear, heroism, brutality, and homecoming, on the soldiers and their families. Masculinity, race, and class are organizing principles. Grunts includes experiences of soldiers from various ethnic groups and geographical areas. Similarities of experiences are stressed in order to give continuity. A major goal is to stimulate more research on various topics that are presently underdeveloped in the literature. According to Longley, time is a precious commodity in this research as the Vietnam veteran generation ages and dies.
Longley offers broad coverage, including chapters on the decisions soldiers made to enter the military, induction and recruit training, American infantrymen in Vietnam during the periods 1961-1968 and 1968-1975, and reintegration into society and the public memory of American infantrymen.
While the draft provided an increasing …show more content…
Longley acknowledges the challenges inherent in using oral histories and memoirs as source material. Some stories are hard to believe (a human head kicked until it exploded, a man shot 74 times before being rescued). Some accounts are erroneous (Cam Lo is referred to incorrectly as a coastal area; Chu Lai, on the coast, is referred to as being at higher altitude; it took one month, not "months," to expel the enemy from Hue). Longley includes the account of one person who was exposed as a liar and phony by B. G. Burkett in Stolen Valor (1998). The author uses provocative statistics on the number of soldiers who died on their first (997) and last days of service (1,448) in Vietnam. His source, a website, indicates the statistics are unconfirmed. In these and other cases the author seems too willing to uncritically accept the veracity of his
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