DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle

By Doug Bradley

DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle presents a unique, fictional montage of the wartime and postwar experiences of Vietnam support troops. Structurally based on Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, this riveting collection of sixteen short stories and sixteen interlinears portrays the GIs who battled boredom, racial tensions, the military brass, drugs, alcohol—and occasionally the enemy. (The acronym DEROS stands for Date Eligible for Return from Over Seas.) From cooks and correspondents to clerks and comptrollers, DEROS Vietnam distills the essence of life for soldiers in the rear during the war and, later, back home in a divided America. Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley, a former army journalist who served in the air-conditioned jungle at US Army Headquarters near Saigon from 1970 to 1971, tells these compelling stories with wit, intensity, and empathy. In doing so, he provides a gateway to a Vietnam experience that has been largely ignored and whose reverberations still echo across America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warriors Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480401167

Reviews for DEROS Vietnam

[joeldinda_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bradley and I were in Nam at pretty much the same time, and I really wanted to like this book. But it just wasn't that interesting. This is a collection of short stories, mostly with the same characters. Bradley's intro tells us that some of the stories are "true" and some are fiction, and all are fictionalized. Within the work he goes out of his way to blur that line; I'm not sure why.The book's main point is that many of us who served in Vietnam had non-combat jobs--supply clerks, nurses, communications techs, mechanics, mail clerks, and so forth. Doug Bradley wrote press releases and edited a newspaper, and his book's about the people he worked with and how their work didn't square with the image you might have of our war.One (irrelevant) oddity: Bradley tells us about the Teletype Room, where he and his colleagues read wire service news and press releases. His Teletype Room and the teletype room I worked in seem not to have been much alike. We were handling real messages--though I confess we tended to think the battle reports were fictionalized. We took the Amcross (American Red Cross) messages seriously, though, and gave them much higher priority than the system did.