Mark Busby

Mark Busby's FORT BENNING BLUES (2001) has been sitting on my shelf for about a dozen years now. As a fairly detailed look at Benning and the grueling OCS experience, it's a very enjoyable read. However, set in the Vietnam era (1969-70), with protests raging in the streets, Nixon under pressure to end the war, Lt Calley on trial for war crimes, and, finally, the Kent State debacle, it is less successful as fiction, despite its likeable narrator, young Candidate Jeff Adams. Raised in Texas by an overly religious, widowed mother and a crusty old grandfather who was a cavalryman in the Great War, Adams was nourished on a diet of Randolph Scott and John Wayne westerns as a kid, but finds himself increasingly disillusioned with the Army's role in Vietnam. There are some nice touches here, with flashbacks to Jeff's childhood and adolescence, and a love interest, a girl from an Atlanta nursing school who comes to Benning as his date for a military dinner and dance. Echoes of the film, AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN, or perhaps Pay Conroy's LORDS OF DISCIPLINE, but without he dramatic tension of those two fine works. The ending is quite unexpected and seems "tacked on," as does an Epilogue.

I have read dozens of novels from the Vietnam War era. This one, while told from a military point of view, and from the home front, has a kind of "peacenik" flavor which, for me, does not quite succeed. But, as I said earlier, Busby's book does offer a quite fascinating inside look at the trials and tribulations of Officer Candidate School as it was conducted in a particular time. Recommended highly for military lit buffs.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (mehr)