POINT & SHOOT

The Vietnam War’s drudgery, horror, and occasional humanity come through in Clevenger’s memoir and photo portfolio.

The author spent most of 1968 in Vietnam as an infantryman and combat photographer in the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division, and his recollections paint a fraught portrait of boredom, tension, and terror. He spent much time slogging through rice paddies infested with ants, leeches, and pythons; crawled into tunnels in search of Viet Cong guerillas, an ordeal that still inspired nightmares 50 years later; and survived firefights with the help of dumb luck. (He suffered a minor hand wound from a shell-burst while peering through his camera—which blocked the shrapnel from taking out his eye.) The book also has high drama: Clevenger had to threaten to shoot a fellow soldier to prevent him from raping a Vietnamese girl, witnessed a stewardess on his flight to Vietnam break down weeping at the thought of ferrying men to their deaths, and turned to faith to weather his predicament. Clevenger’s prose is clear-eyed, down-to-earth, and full of arresting detail in moments of crisis: “The gunfire paused, and Jerry was the first to rise. Fire cracked again, and Jerry dropped…‘It’s only a scratch,’ I told him as blood soaked the dressing and covered my hands.” The author’s black-and-white war photos tell their own riveting stories. In them, Vietnam is a vista of lush paddies as seen from a Huey—but on the ground it’s a sucking morass (in one picture, a soldier struggles to keep his head above the mud engulfing his body) or, often, a dreary stubble razed by napalm and Agent Orange. Soldiers appear poignantly young, at ease with their lethal gear, sometimes relaxed, sometimes raddled with adrenaline or exhaustion. Clevenger’s combat photos are intense and immediate: One spotlights a soldier frozen amid a blur of water churned up by enemy bullets. The result is a vivid, emotionally powerful re-creation of war’s reality.

An absorbing evocation of the Vietnam experience, full of mordant reflections and searing visuals.