Loon
A Marine Story
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4.6 • 100 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Kids like me didn’t go to Vietnam,” writes Jack McLean in his compulsively readable memoir. Raised in suburban New Jersey, he attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, but decided to put college on hold. After graduation in the spring of 1966, faced with the mandatory military draft, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps for a two-year stint. “Vietnam at the time was a country, and not yet a war,” he writes. It didn’t remain that way for long.
A year later, after boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, and stateside duty in Barstow, California, the Vietnam War was reaching its peak. McLean, like most available Marines, was retrained at Camp Pendleton, California, and sent to Vietnam as a grunt to serve in an infantry company in the northernmost reaches of South Vietnam. McLean’s story climaxes with the horrific three-day Battle for Landing Zone Loon in June, 1968. Fought on a remote hill in the northwestern corner of South Vietnam, McLean bore witness to the horror of war and was forever changed. He returned home six weeks later to a country largely ambivalent to his service.
Written with honesty and insight, Loon is a powerful coming-of-age portrait of a boy who bears witness to some of the most tumultuous events in our history, both in Vietnam and back home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McLean's debut is a perceptive memoir of the Vietnam war that is unique for the author's background: McLean joined the Marine Corps after graduating from Phillips Academy, where George W. Bush was a classmate. Making excellent use of more than a hundred letters he wrote home from the war zone from November 1967 to July 1968, McLean reconstructs his time in the Marines with a sharp eye for detail and very readable at times almost poetic prose. McLean underwent a hellish tour of duty and in the fall of 1968 became the first Vietnam veteran to enter Harvard. He uses a good deal of reconstructed dialogue to tell his war story, a technique that in lesser hands only cheapens a memoir. But virtually all of McLean's dialogue rings true, as does nearly everything else in the book. That includes this passage in which McLean remembers his baptism under fire a few days after he arrived in Vietnam: "It had been eerie, frightening, invigorating, chaotic, and surreal. Welcome to combat. It was not like the movies."
Customer Reviews
LZ Loon
Well written & gripping account of Marines in Vietnam.
Worth the read
Interesting read.
Not bad, but …
Anyone who fought in Vietnam is a hero, but this book is more about training before the war and the boredom & lack of combat McLean’s unit encountered. They basically fought one epic battle, while most Marine units in I Corps during 1967-69 were fighting almost constantly for survival. Not sure why this book won awards, probably because he’s from a wealthy family and got it promoted, but there are far better reads than this, especially if one wants to read about combat.