And a Hard Rain Fell: A GI's True story of the War in Vietnam, Updated Edition

...AND A HARD RAIN FELL, John Ketwig's memoir of his time in Southeast Asia is a crucial book to read for an understanding of the fog of war and the spiritual wounds all veterans face. ...AND A HARD RAIN FELL takes us inside Ketwig's experience with a clarity amazing for a memoir. This book is even more critical today, as Iraq and Afghanistan blaze across our national consciousness. Unlike Ron Kovic (BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY) John Ketwig did not start out as a flag-wrapped patriot convinced of the rightness of stopping the Red Menace at any cost. In the first third of the book, Ketwig speaks frankly of his thoughts of draft avoidance and Canada. He is squarely antiwar from the first word. A few reviewers have derided Ketwig for "whining" about "everyday inconveniences" and for having a generally jaundiced view of the military and "his patriotic duty", but other authors and Vietnam Vets have documented well the miasma of depersonalization that characterized the U.S. military in the middle 1960s. Eighteen year old boys like Ketwig were not volunteer soldiers, they were essentially draftees or forced enlistees, ripped from the familiar and the comfortable to be dropped into a thoroughly alien and brutish environment designed to turn them into killing machines in a matter of weeks. The trauma of such a transformation is hard to understand unless one has lived through it.Therefore, Ketwig's complaints about glassless windows in the winter, sheetless bunks (both ostensibly to prevent suicides), and regimentation by insult seem self-indulgent except to one who has felt (and intrinsically resisted) the same internal twist and torque imposed by an outside force. From the moment of Ketwig's arrival in Vietnam he recognizes (if he cannot yet admit) the futility of the American mission. Transported from Ton Son Nhut Airbase (under rocket fire) in a bus with screened windows (to keep out thrown trash and grenades), and sent to Long Binh to guard an ammo dump (frequently booby trapped by guerrillas), there seems no spot in Vietnam where order reigns or where the American presence has imposed any sort of real peace. Ketwig's transfer "upcountry" to Pleiku is similarly fraught with trauma: He volunteers for a convoy to embattled Dak To, and is nearly killed by a land mine. His compound is shelled by South Vietnamese turncoats. He finds himself in a bunker with other terrified teenagers wondering just what the hell is happening as the Tet Offensive explodes all around him. Unspeakable filth, rats, scorpions, poisonous snakes, booby traps, friendly fire, Vietcong infiltrators, the curses of the local people, and bizarre accidents are a daily ration which callouses him and his fellow soldiers. Dead men, crushed, broken, bleeding and napalmed bodies sear their eyes. Vietnam is a huckster's bazaar, selling death and trinkets to all bidders. Thoughtful, Ketwig wonders why. His answer, to provide seed and farm implements to the peasantry seems like a more sane

Personally I thought the book was amazing. It was quite shocking to hear firsthand what the war was truely like, instead of how the government portrayed it. And in response to the other person's comment... I can imagine that you would have spent alot of your time drinking and doing dope too if you were over there, caught in that type of situation, so get over it. If that's what it took for him to deal with being sent over there, then who are you to judge? I thought the book was outstanding, and would recommend it to anyone who cares to know about what really happened over there...

I joined the Army in 1964. I was skinney hungry, and more interested in three meals a day than the $87.00 a month pay. I was with the 101 at Ft. Campbell when the war started heating up. I was in Viet Nam from Jan. 66 to Jan. 67. I was first assigned to C-2-7 cav. as a PFC grunt. I was there for about 6 and a half months. I than went to D Co. 227 AHB as a door gunner to the end of my tour. I went to Penang in Nov. 66 for my R & R. I was agenest the war before during and after. But I still did what I was sent over there to do. I say Three Cheers for John for having the balls to call it the way he see it. And I see it the same way. THANKS John for expressing the my thoughts exactly!

I was one of the lucky ones. I turned 26 in the fall of 1963, just before Vietnam got serious for Americans. That was the magic age - "they" didn't draft you after 26. John Ketwig was not so lucky. I stayed home and watched the growing horror as it unfolded in all its bizarre varieties - from napalmed kids to lying politicians and generals - Ketwig and millions of others (most of them Vietnamese) lived that horror every day. I've read many, many books about Vietnam; this is one of the two or three best. Had I not just retired from teaching in a college prep school, I would want to make it part of one of my courses. It's a shame - one almost wonders if it's a conspiracy - that it is no longer in print. Probably no one had to silence the book; it's just too real to be "marketable." Publishers don't promote such realism; they prefer the "Rambo" type absurdities. Besides conveying the reality of Vietnam from the ordinary soldiers point of view, Ketwig also devotes much of the book to the subsequent year he spent in Thailand. He was not an "ugly American;" he spent a great deal of time getting to know - and love - the people and their culture. This book moved me to tears for a lost generation of Americans and Vietnamese. Even those who survived bear the scars, both psychological and physical (e.g. Agent Orange) of that war. At the end, Ketwig quotes Vietnam veterans marching at the dedication of the Wall in Washington and chanting: HELL NO OUR KIDS WON'T GO. He's right, HELL NO.

Prior to reading this book I had very little understanding of how the war impacted on the soldier in the middle of it, experiencing it first hand.Through Mr. Ketwig's descriptive and moving details of his experiences, observations, feelings, thoughts and emotions during his tour in Vietnam I felt as though I, too, was there experiencing them first hand.It is a blunt look through the eyes of a young soldier of the sad reality of war.