Jack McLean. Loon: A Marine’s Story. Presidio, 2009.

The Loon of this book’s title is not the aquatic bird or a lunatic. It was the name the military gave to a hill in South Vietnam near the North Vietnamese and Cambodian borders. So, yes, part of this is a war story, but it is more. It is a nearly unique perspective on a way American culture changed in the 1960s. This is the author’s own story of how he enlisted in the Marines in 1965, served and fought in Vietnam, and how he attempted to adapt when he returned to the United States in 1968 and entered Harvard as a freshman.

Very simply, when McLean joined the Marines in 1965, there was a sense of patriotism and pride both about the military and the country. No one was using the word war to describe what was happening in Vietnam. When he was released in the summer of 1968, patriotism had died for many Americans, and the military was looked down upon if not reviled. In telling his own story, McLean shows us how this change in the country was happening.

On the draft, he writes:

If you were called, you served.
In the fifties, it was that simple.
The change began in the 1960s. The escalating war in Vietnam played a role, as did a feeling of privilege and entitlement among many in the baby boom generation. (11)

McLean himself came from what we would call an elite background. His grandfather was a Congressman. His father worked for John D. Rockefeller III. He attended the exclusive Phillips Andover Academy, where George W. Bush was one of his classmates.

By staying in school, manipulating the local draft boards, and exercising political influence, the country’s educated class was able to avoid war service almost completely. Thereby, the coming war in Vietnam would be the first American conflict fought almost exclusively by the lower classes of American society. (12)

College admissions back then was more elitist, too. Of the 251 boys in his academy’s graduating class, over 50 went to Harvard, 25 went to Yale, 20 to Princeton, and 12 to Stanford. Most of the others went to other prestigious schools such as other Ivies like Dartmouth, the “little Ivies” like Amherst, MIT, Duke, and so on. You get the idea.

McLean admitted he was not ready for more college. It took him five years to graduate high school, and he barely passed math even in the fifth year. He wanted to do something else. Because he knew he would be subject to the draft, he looked into the military. A good family friend and administrator at Andover had been in the Marines. McLean said that this friend not only supported him but “made a consoling telephone call to my stunned father” (25).

This friend wrote him a letter congratulating him and giving him a sense of what he was getting into. The Marines would turn him into “a vehicle to their own ends.” The Corps had been making marines for two hundred years. They knew how to do it.

To achieve these ends, it was necessary—critical—that each recruit be immediately and fiercely torn down as far as he could be taken and then slowly—ever so slowly—brought back up as an operating unit of the larger whole. (36)

I had a similar experience as I went through training in the Coast Guard. I recall writing a friend to tell him it was as if the first 21 years of my life did not matter. Whatever branch you enter, they want you to become one of them. It is important that you are able to work together. McLean would observe several times that a single marine was no different from anyone else, but two marines “are capable of anything,” that the “whole was considerably stronger than the sum of its parts.”

He shares an experience that was nearly identical to one I had. In 2002 the area in and around Washington, D.C., was subject to a total of 17 apparently random sniper attacks. News outlets and people I knew speculated that the attacks must have been done by a trained military sniper. Both McLean and I would try to explain to people that anyone in the military who used an M-16 or similar modern rifle could have done it. It turned out that most of the actual shooting was done by a seventeen year old high school dropout. It is not rocket science.

Most of the book is devoted to McLean’s experience in Vietnam. He saw some fighting shortly after he first arrived, but not much. Most of his tour he was stationed at an outpost near the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone, the wide border between North and South Vietnam) that the North Vietnamese did not seem interested in. Still fighting was never far away. Always in the background were exploding ordnance, flying aircraft, and shooting firearms. When he returned to the States, he found the relative quiet, even in cities, unsettling and taking some getting used to.

If there is a recurring theme in this book it is simply this—from the perspective of one of the men on the ground, it seemed that America had lost its desire to win. Indeed, the North Vietnamese would admit they lost their Tet Offensive in early 1968, but the news reporting made it appear America had lost. At the same time as the Tet Offensive, the USS Pueblo, a U.S. Navy spy ship, was captured by North Korea and its crew held for ransom.

What was up? we wondered. Those in command wouldn’t let us go up to Hanoi to finish the job for which we’d been trained, and now eighty-three of our navy and Marine Corps brothers were being held somewhere in North Korea with the United States powerless to take action. (123)

The focus, though, is on three days in June 1968. Both McLean’s company and his battalion were taken over by experienced men who wanted to win. So the brutal battle on Landing Zone (LZ) Loon those three days was an American victory.

It came at a price. Of the 180 men in McLean’s company, about 100 were killed or seriously injured. Still, many more North Vietnamese were killed, and their attack was completely thwarted. The details are intense, to say the least. In McLean’s words, it was nothing like the movies.

McLean takes some time to describe his new company commander, a Captain Bill Negron. He had enlisted in the Marines in the 1950s, attended college on the GI Bill. While in college as a civilian, he was recruited to take part in the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He and a few others managed to survive and escape back to America. Perhaps that was a sign of things to come—the United States did not provide any backup at all, let alone the support it had promised for that Cuban expedition. After graduating from college, Negron rejoined the Marines as an officer. When he took over the company, the marines knew things would be different—more serious but also more professional and more personal.

The marines were aware of things going on back home. Most of them did not understand the antiwar sentiment. The protestors to them were long-haired children of privilege. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were stunning and puzzling. Although all marines regardless of background, trusted each other in the field, he noted that after Dr. King’s assassination, the black marines distanced themselves a bit from the others. His death affected them in a distinct and different way. He noted that it was becoming nearly impossible to finance both “an increasingly costly war” and Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs.

There is almost a surreal quality about his return to the United States and entering college in 1968. While home on leave near the end of 1967, he had applied to two colleges in Boston, Boston University and Harvard. His family was now living in the Boston suburb of Brookline, and he thought that would work out. He could continue to follow the Boston Red Sox as well. (Bleacher seats were only a dollar back then.)

He described two college interviews he had, one at Columbia and one at Harvard. The Columbia interviewer said they did not like admitting freshmen who were older than nineteen. He also told him he was not impressed with his high school record. The interview lasted about fifteen minutes.

The Harvard interviewer asked him questions about the Marines and Vietnam, and wanted to learn what he thought about his experiences and what else was going on in the world. The subject of his high school grades or subjects he took never came up in the hour-long conversation. In April, while still in Vietnam, before LZ Loon, he was accepted at Harvard.

He arrived back in the states in San Francisco where his older sister was living. There was no support for the war there. People knew little of nothing about the military. Unlike when his parents’ generation returned from World War II,

…there were no crowds. There were no parades. Perhaps, we thought, all of that would come later. So all waited. Several million of us. It never came. (208)

From my experience, one who just missed Vietnam, it came in a small way after the September 11 attacks. People began to understand a little the need for a military. From that point till now, occasionally I will get a well-meaning, “Thank you for your service.” That never happened before. Still, as our mutual experience trying to get people to understand the D.C. Sniper shows, most people know even less about the military today. No, military men are no longer “baby killers” as they were called during Vietnam, but now it is as if everyone has PTSD or missing limbs.

Back then,

I did not have to be called a baby killer more than once to know that to openly discuss my military service in civilian circles in 1968 was a terrible idea. (211)

Shortly after he arrived at college, he tried to strike up a conversation with a girl he was sitting next to. When he said he had recently returned from Vietnam, she just said, “Oh.” End of conversation.

I had learned a valuable lesson. Few, if any, people at Harvard cared about military service—particularly Vietnam service. From that point on, for the next four years, and well beyond, I barely mentioned it. (230)

In some ways, he kept it in for years until he began writing this book.

Politically, he sums things up this way:

I am sad that Vietnam went the way it did, but in a country run by politicians, it fell characteristically, apathetically. We gave a weak body a false high so many years ago and…after the addict had reached a multimillion dollar a day habit, the supply was cut off—no public stances, no firm policy decisions—indeed, it occurred through the absence of any decisions. As the body began to shake with withdrawal, the pusher was far away enjoying spring recess at home with family and constituency, struggling for his tenuous tenure on national economic issues seemingly so far removed and yet so directly attached to that horror they created long ago. (223)

I did have to chuckle with understanding at one thing McLean shared; I do not entirely agree with him on this point. He described the outdated and substandard materiel that the Marines often had to work with. He writes that the Marines “were at the bottom of the military supply chain.” (151) I understand, but, no, the Coast Guard is lower still. The Coasties have a saying, “They want us to do more and more with less and less. Soon we’ll be doing everything with nothing.” And, for what it is worth, usually Coasties and Marines respect each other for any number of reasons including that sense that they are taken for granted by others.

That is about my only quibble with this book. It is a great and personal review of a rough time in our nation’s story. The battle scenes are intense. Perhaps Loon can get some of Americans to understand a bit more about the military in language they can understand.