The Killing Zone | The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War

Most authentic view of war from the ground | The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War | Frederick Downs Jr.

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	• The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War Frederick Downs Jr. W. W. Norton & Company, 2007 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This was a terrific read !

If you're interested in getting an idea of what a typical army officer's life in an operational area was like ..... read this book. The descriptions by the author are incredible especially those of his own experiences. His injuries and efforts to overcome adversity are edifying. THIS is an interesting book

The Killing Zone

A no appologies account of the soldier's struggle to do his job, stay alive, and make some sense of it all.

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. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA

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Great Book

The book really puts into perspective what the ground troops endured during the war. It is well written and makes you feel as if you are their with them in the heat of the battle. Highly recommended.

"The best damned book from the point of view of the infantrymen who fought there."?Army Times

In 1967 Frederick Downs arrived in Vietnam as a green but determined twenty-three-year-old infantry lieutenant. In the months of brutal combat to follow, Downs was to face the most lethal and loathsome dangers, all the while following orders, keeping his men as safe as he could, and searching for the conviction and then the hope that the war was worth the sacrifice. He would leave with a shattered body, but a spirit still intact. The Killing Zone is his story, and it stands tall with the best books ever written about men in combat.

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