I finished Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Like in the Vietnam War, which is an interesting first-party account, a platoon leader in 1967-1968 Vietnam.

Short, intense, and revealing of one man’s individual experience as a platoon leader, who seemingly led a charmed life during the war. I enjoy high-level histories, but a personal account which doesn’t claim to see the big picture is refreshing.

A 4 star read, in my opinion. ( )

The very personal story of a young lieutenant’s gradual disenchantment with the war in Vietnam. What especially comes through is the distinctness, often becoming bitterness, the soldiers feel toward the ARVN and the total lack of empathy for the “dinks.” Everything seemed pointless, They would spend days and weeks taking a piece of ground, taking casualties, only to pack up and leave after a period. Just as a company would become familiar with territory and feel like they are making progress, they would be relieved by a brand-new company of recruits who will have to learn their lessons all over, taking casualties in the process. In the meantime, everyone knows the one constant will be the permanence of the Vietnamese people who will be there and return to an area as soon as the Americans leave.

Some relevant selections:

"However, we traveled in a vacuum of understanding among the villagers and farmers because neither we nor they understood the other’s language. Whenever we found a booby trap in or near a village full of people, we were powerless to question anyone or do anything about it. We couldn’t take the whole village prisoner, so we were forced to vent our anger by destroying the hootch closest to the booby trap.

The American strategy was to draw them into a fight so we could use our superior firepower to destroy them. To win a battle, we had to kill them. For them to win, all they had to do was survive.

The trouble with Nam was that we didn’t control anything that we were not standing on at the time. Anything that moved outside our perimeters at night was fair game because the night belonged to the enemy and both sides knew it. The reality of only owning the ground you stood on meant making sure you continued to stay on that ground.

Why did we want to kill dinks? After all, we had been mostly law-abiding citizens back in the world and we were taught that to take another man’s life was wrong. Somehow the perspective got twisted in a war. If the government told us it was alright and, in fact, a must to kill the members of another government’s people, then we had the law on our side. It turned out that most of us liked to kill other men. Some of the guys would shoot at a dink much as they would at a _target. Some of the men didn’t like to kill a dink up close. The closer the killing, the more personal it became... I didn’t believe in torturing or in allowing a dink to die a lingering death. In the jungle we never took prisoners if we could help it. Every day we spent in the jungle eroded a little more of our humanity away. Prisoners could escape to become our enemy again.

I stood alone on the side of the road, smoking a cigarette and thinking, perhaps for the first time, that we could lose this war. Standing alone under the cloudy sky, I felt alien in this land. We had just finished an operation back in the jungle and these men now were going out to a different part of the jungle to play the same deadly game of hide and seek with the enemy, probably with the same inconclusive result. "

Perhaps the most authentic Vietnam War memoir I have read. ( )

Fred Downs does an excellent job at depicting the day-to-day life of infantry soldiers in the Vietnam War. Told through the eyes of a Platoon Leader/Second Lieutenant, we see the war from a different perspective. Using a journal approach, the author leads his platoon - alternating between their tedious duty of protecting bridges to the difficult humps through the jungle on search and destroy missions. The battles are descriptive and you are saddened when one of the well-developed characters is killed or wounded. Although the book only covers six months of the author's tour, he touched upon just about everything that a young infantry soldier would encounter: mines, booby traps, ambushes, fragging, heat, monsoon rains, air assaults, burning down hootches, tunnel complexes, digging up graves, etc.

The story is fast moving and easy to read. As a Vietnam Infantry vet, I have read many memoirs and stories about the war, and find myself always comparing my experiences with those described in the book I'm reading. There are three and a half million different stories that can be told about the war; each is unique in its own way. By reading Killing Zone, Mr. Downs brings the reader right into the fold - up close and personal - to learn and experience his war firsthand.

Killing Zone deserves a five star rating and is highly recommended!

John Podlaski, author
Cherries - A Vietnam War Novel

the killing zone a war our granparents fought in a war that changed life for all americans if you are going to be readin this i gurantee you will fell alarmed. I think the moral of this story is to help others no matter what. One reason of that is when all the soldiers that would get shot or wounded all the others would need to help him survive. ( )

Most authentic view of war from the ground. If Bob Mason's Chickenhawk was the best book about Vietnam from a chopper pilot's seat, then Fred Downs' memoir is one of the best from the grunts' point of view. Downs' story starts quietly and build slowly, in his dry, almost laconic style, to an abrupt and horrifying conclusion. The sheer awfulness and horror of life in the jungle, humpin' the boonies, and taking nameless ridges in fierce firefights at such awful costs (and then giving them back to the enemy) becomes slowly evident in Fred Downs' matter-of-fact descriptions. One scene in particular sticks in my mind - how Downs and his men dig up a fresh grave looking for a possible weapons cache. They find nothing but a rotting corpse, so simply throw the shovels at a couple of wailing Vietnamese women to finish the job of re-burying the body. On the way out of the graveyard, they pull some onions to "spice up their C rations." Downs says he thought briefly about how hardened he had become, but the thought left him quickly. Wounded only slightly three times, earning three purple hearts, Downs begins to think he's got a charmed life. But the fourth ribbon is not so easily earned, as, not quite halfway through his tour, Downs triggers a bouncing betty land mine and this time loses an arm and is horrifically wounded. His war is suddenly over, and ends this, his first Vietnam story. Perhaps almost as moving as the original story is the new Afterword Downs penned for the 2006 edition of The Killing Zone (originally published in 1978). His stories of the fates of his men and comrades - of lives tragically cut short or forever changed by crippling and disfiguring wounds - are enough to make you weep. I am not surprised that this book has stayed in print continuously for nearly 30 years and is now on the reading list at West Point. It needs to be read. There are lessons to be learned in its pages. ( )