At times it seems like every Vietnam War platoon leader has written a memoir. Tripp has written a better than average one, elevated by literary ambitions and simultaneously expanded and tangled up by an attempt to link this peak experience of his life to his father and his son.

When this book is on, it is extremely on. Tripp writes about the feeling of being plugged into the war with an electric vividness, of the organic wholeness of his 'Mike Division' platoon moving like a superorganism through the jungle, alive with vibrations and hiding signs, trying to tune in on the Viet Cong and knowing they were trying to do the same to you, and that failing in this ESP test meant ambush and death. He get almost as close describing the waste and brutality of the American war, the armored and flying death machines, bulldozers, arbitrary destructiveness, top to bottom hypocrisy, the cowardice of the REMFs, and the secret separate peace the Michelin company cut with the Viet Cong to keep their rubber plantations safe. But Tripp's main emotion is love, even love for his enemies, and the necessary hatred is just out of his reach. The stories are true war stories, as poet-laureate of the war Tim O'Brien would put it, and while there is little actual combat, there is lots of slipstream weirdness around combat, a kind of nightmare-turned-real aspect that really works.

Tripp also tries to place himself in some kind of chain of being, from his harsh Yankee patriarch of a grandfather, to his half-mad failure of a father, and to the hope for peace for his own children. The psychodrama doesn't quite hold together, too reserved and too open at once, though a passage on coming to grips with the trauma of war with his fellow veterans did.

This is a solid memoir, with parts that rise to greatness, but it lacks the unitary perfection of a classic.