Most Vietnam memoirs have the same structure based on the year long tour of duty: bootcamp, cherry, old salt, short, home. 364 days and a wakeup. What we forget is that going home after a year was a luxury only afforded to American troops. For the Vietnamese, far more of whom fought and died, the war ended when it ended. Their stories have mostly not been told.

Ben Cam Lai is the exception, and this is his memoir. He spoke a little English, and when he turned 18 in 1965 he volunteered to be a military translator because he'd be safer with an American unit than with the ARVN. Cam served for 6 years with the 101st Airborne, where he met the author Thomas Taylor (Taylor, by the way, is a fascinating figure in his own right. He was a Captain with the 502nd Infantry Regiment in 65 and 66, left the army and earned a Masters in Sociology at Berkeley in 68 and 69, and then went on to write books and run triathalons. His father is General Maxwell Taylor, who was Ambassador to Vietnam immediately prior to the introduction of American ground forces). Cam spent time in the field, dodging bullets on hot LZs, and then commanding the small army of intelligence translators back at base. When the Americans left, he was commissioned as an officer in ARVN and assigned to the Delta, where he was gravely wounded while commanding an infantry company. The surrender of South Vietnam brought a decade of horror and misery for Cam. He spent 5 years in Reeducation Camps, doing hard labor on a starvation diet as the Communist government exacted its revenge. Cam escaped, and spent 4 more years as an outlaw, undertaking 18 failed escapes before finally sailing a boat to Malaysia. Then it was another year or so in refugee camps, and with the help of a officer from the 101st, General Hank Emerson, ret, Cam and his son made it to America.

The human story is incredible. I cannot even begin to contemplate the strength of character it took to survive the war, reeducation camps, and years on the run. Communist Vietnam ran a program of extermination by starvation in its reeducation camps and New Economic Zone villages, which is not widely known only because of America's collective amnesia over the war, and the historical accident of being overshadowed by the Great Leap Forward and Khmer Rogue. Merely starving a few hundred thousand people on the losing side of a civil war and turning millions into refugees kinda gets lost in the clutter of people being horrific to each other.

I do have some quibbles with this book from a literary standpoint. Taylor injects his own opinions too much, rather than providing historical context. As might be expected from a memoir covering two decades and emotionally raw experiences, the thread of the story is sometimes dropped. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good book. I just feel that there's a great book in the vein of A Bright Shining Lie in the material, which doesn't quite make it through.

There was one moment in the Vietnam War FUBAR-fractal that stood out. As an officer in the Delta, Cam's unit captured Viet Cong prisoners on multiple occasions. His commander back at headquarters would order Cam to interrogate the prisoners for tactical intel and then 'convert' them--illegal executions in the field. Cam did so, since disobeying orders like that was a good way to have your commander assassinate you. Much later, he ran into his former commander in a reeducation camp and ask why he'd been ordered to execute the prisoners. The commander replied that he'd been selling his mens' weapons on the black market to these very same Viet Cong, and he was afraid if they were sent to a prison they'd inform on him. Extrajudicial killings to cover up a criminal conspiracy to sell weapons to the enemy! Welcome to ARVN in 1973.