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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Element of Surprise: Navy Seals in Vietnam
by Darryl Young
These days, the Navy SEAL memoir is practically a cliche. For 'silent warriors', the SEALs sure do write a lot. Young's 1990 memoir is an earlier example of the genre, an action-packed adventure let down by some repetitive writing.
Young served his six month tour in the Mekong Delta, raiding in the canals around Dung Island with Juliette Platoon. The 14 men of this unit owned the night, making silent aquatic patrols, prisoner grabs, and infiltration raids. The SEALs were self-consciously elite, immune to traditional military discipline and grooming standards, and using a host of tricked out weapons and vehicles to get the job done on their missions.
Young emphasizes the quiet tension of the raids, lurking in pitch black jungle in absolute silent, wading through neck high canals to avoid booby-traps, and then the desperate and overwhelming fire of an ambush and evacuation. He has a good sense for both the quiet and the action. There's also a lot of fooling around at base camp, water-skiing, smoking weed to relax, playing football in the tidal mud with the Seabees, and stealing supplies from REMFs. It may be flip for me to say this, but after BUDS (SEAL training), Vietnam seemed pretty easy for Young and Juliette Platoon. No multi-day missions, no NVA heavy artillery, and none of the tensions and incompetence that more mundane units experienced.
This book is written in a "1970 mindset", as the afterward explains, and there's a lot of racism. More than calling the Vietnamese "gooks" or worse, there's an attitude of casual mayhem towards the country. The SEALs use a cemetery as a firing range, demolishing it with grenades. They spend a truck ride stealing the hats off of men riding mopeds. In a strategic sense, it's hard to see what the SEALs accomplished. Dung Island was VC territory before and after the intervention of the SEALs. The griping about not knowing why they were fighting seems more obligatory than real--Young was there to prove he was the deadliest animal in the jungle, and he did. That was enough.
I believe that all the men on the SEAL team were consummate professionals, but Young can't seem to find the words to write about his brothers in arms. There's more love for the Stoner machine gun than there is for any of the fellow SEALs.
Young served his six month tour in the Mekong Delta, raiding in the canals around Dung Island with Juliette Platoon. The 14 men of this unit owned the night, making silent aquatic patrols, prisoner grabs, and infiltration raids. The SEALs were self-consciously elite, immune to traditional military discipline and grooming standards, and using a host of tricked out weapons and vehicles to get the job done on their missions.
Young emphasizes the quiet tension of the raids, lurking in pitch black jungle in absolute silent, wading through neck high canals to avoid booby-traps, and then the desperate and overwhelming fire of an ambush and evacuation. He has a good sense for both the quiet and the action. There's also a lot of fooling around at base camp, water-skiing, smoking weed to relax, playing football in the tidal mud with the Seabees, and stealing supplies from REMFs. It may be flip for me to say this, but after BUDS (SEAL training), Vietnam seemed pretty easy for Young and Juliette Platoon. No multi-day missions, no NVA heavy artillery, and none of the tensions and incompetence that more mundane units experienced.
This book is written in a "1970 mindset", as the afterward explains, and there's a lot of racism. More than calling the Vietnamese "gooks" or worse, there's an attitude of casual mayhem towards the country. The SEALs use a cemetery as a firing range, demolishing it with grenades. They spend a truck ride stealing the hats off of men riding mopeds. In a strategic sense, it's hard to see what the SEALs accomplished. Dung Island was VC territory before and after the intervention of the SEALs. The griping about not knowing why they were fighting seems more obligatory than real--Young was there to prove he was the deadliest animal in the jungle, and he did. That was enough.
I believe that all the men on the SEAL team were consummate professionals, but Young can't seem to find the words to write about his brothers in arms. There's more love for the Stoner machine gun than there is for any of the fellow SEALs.