Jorgenson is a real soldier and journalist by his bio, seven years in the Army and then a stint as editor of a Special Forces oriented magazine Behind The Lines in the 90s. In Very Crazy G.I., he collects tall tales of the Vietnam War, the kinds of yarns soldiers would tell each other at a bar. Some are well attested to, as in the punched up description of Joe Hooper's Medal of Honor. Many of them feature canny GIs, getting even with stuffed shirt pogues and tricking bar girls, with turnabout for soldiers who pay $50 for a pair of Ho Chi Minh's sandals, or who tested the stability of C4 (very stable, fortunately for the guy jumping on a flaming chunk of it).

I'd have to say that my absolutely favorite though were when Jorgenson puts an almost Fortean lens on the war. Ape-men unknown to science lurking in triple canopy jungles and dragons swimming in the Gulf of Tonkin. Viet Cong ghosts creeping through the wire before an attack. A Marine who figured out that God's first name is Frank, and divinely dodged death in a dozen ways at Dong Ha.

I'll leave it to Tim O'Brien to deliver the lecture about true war stories. Some of these try and find moral lessons or punch lines, but the best of them glory in the strangeness and absurdity.