BROYLES : Brothers in arms (fülszöveg)
In 1969, William Broyles was a young Marine lieutenant leading a platoon in the hills near Da Nang. Fifteen years later, he would leave his job as Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek and return to Vietnam, one of the first combat veterans to revisit the major scenes of America's longest war. Brothers in Arms is the story of that remarkable journey – of a soldier's quest for the meaning of the war, of the enemy, of himself.
Broyles had tried to put the war behind him, but its memories kept coming back, bringing sadness, pride, anger, even laughter. But there was always something missing, the part that would make the experience whole. Broyles returned to Vietnam to find that missing piece the man he never knew, his enemy.
His first stop was North Vietnam, where the men and women who had fought the war for so long brought it vividly to life for him. There are stories from a MiG pilot, anti-aircraft gunners, ammunition haulers, from a woman whose husband was away fighting for nine years, from a driver on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Broyles visits Ho Chi Minh's old hideout in the mountains, a former prison for American POWs, and a hospital bombed by B-52s. He meets ordinary soldiers as well as the generals who planned the strategies that allowed a peasant nation to defeat the most technologically sophisticated army the world had ever seen.
But it is when we return with Broyles to the places in the South where he himself had spent the war that Brothers in Arms achieves its greatest power. For here Broyles meets the men and women of the Viet Cong against whom he had actually fought and with whom he can now share common memories of battle. Near Da Nang, Broyles encounters an officer who had planned attacks on Broyles' old base, and a woman whose husband his own platoon may have killed. With an ex-captain of the Viet Cong, he revisits the ruins of his old battalion headquarters, and as they depart, Broyles comes upon a soldier's grave that, had the fortunes of war and the paths of bullets run only a little differently, could well have been his own. With these one-time soldiers of the Viet Cong – enemies then, fellow veterans now – Broyles can share recollections of the terrible beauty of war, of its horror and terror and tedium, but also of its sensuality, its intensity, its unselfish comradeship – and even its humor.
Throughout Broyles' travels the war is never far away, and as he meets his old enemies, memories of his comrades keep coming back. Woven into the narrative of his contemporary journey is a memoir of the war, informed and deepened by what he has learned on his return.
Broyles finds much to trouble him in the new Vietnam: political dogmatism, a repressive police state, and a highly selective vision of history. Yet ultimately he comes to realize that in certain essential ways he has more in common with his former enemies than with anyone except the American soldiers who had fought at his side. Brothers in Arms thus becomes not only an invaluable account of Vietnam ten years after the war's end, but also a profound and moving meditation on the nature of war and the brotherhood of combat.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
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