Guns Up! is a red-blooded war memoir by a Marine machine gunner. Clark's war was ugly: arriving in-country just after the Tet offensive, he marched through minefields, terrible weather, and endless jungle and mountain patrols. The big M60 that he carried was a life-saver for the squad, but the stream of orange tracers guaranteed return fire, and machine gunners reportedly had a 7.5 second life expectancy in combat (I want to know which RAND analyst figured that out, and who told the grunts.) There's battles, ambushes, and all the stock characters of war. Do the Marines issue giant guys named Red, taciturn Indians, and Boston snobs at a rate of one per platoon? What makes Guns Up! exceptional is the friendship between Clark and his alphabetical buddy since bootcamp, Richard Chan, a brilliant and devout Chinese-American who serves as a kind of moral center in an amoral universe.

This isn't Dispatches or Where the Rivers Ran Backward, and Clark tells his story directly. One thing that stands out is that combat troops were used hard: Clark is either in the field or in the hospital. He lost 40 pounds in six months, from marching, stress, and bad food. His interactions with the country were entirely through gunsights. Friends die or are seriously injured and replaced with boots, and the squad keeps going on after objectives that don't change the course of the war. Authority, such as it is, are corporals and rumors over the radio net about what the rest of the battalion is up to.

This book is also robustly Christian, and Clark is very upfront that Jesus saved his life; page 58 is where his Bible stops a shard of shrapnel from hitting his heart. This leads him to censor some of the language, but not the stories. Sam the Blooper Man carves numbers into NVA dead and carries a dried ear on his helmet. ARVN break under a night assault and get gunned down by the Marines. The squad almost gang rapes a dying NVA nurse. Somehow, the macho Christianity works.