Why a Soldier?: A Signal Corpsman's Tour from Vietnam to the Moscow Hot Line

As a Signal Corps Lieutenant, I read this book out of both interest and a desire to learn more about the Signal Corps' role in Vietnam. I was not disappointed. Fitz-Enz is witty, descriptive, and full of lessons and vignettes. Fitz-Enz focuses mainly on his days as a Lieutenant and Captain, and any officer of any branch of the Army can learn a great deal about creative leadership. I commend this book to any company grade officer who wants to learn about Vietnam from a different perspective, and urge you not to shy away from it if you are not a Signaleer yourself...you will be pleasantly surprised. Col Fitz-Enz: Write more!

A compelling read that I couldn't put down. He ranges back and forth across the soldiers, generals, his family and his personal reactions to his field experiences during two tours in combat and several other interesting general staff assignments. We feel the humanness of the army, the frustrations and the triumphs of soldiers and officers trying to do their jobs. His narrative cruises through his career with a smooth flow of technical challenges and human issues written in a straightforward, nontechnical style. A great little book. I hope Fitz writes more.

WHY A SOLDIER is a serious book about life in a grim war (make no mistake about that). But it's also a very funny book. If I were a Hollywood producer, I'd snap up the rights and adapt it to the screen as MASH GOES TO VIETNAM. The scenes are all there: for example, (page 14) the pompous major who strutted out to his private latrine and found himself - literally-up to his neck in s**t. Or, (page 243) the up-and-coming lieutenant who found himself-in the line of duty-locked naked in a sauna-hot incinerator room with four equally-naked enlisted females, five sweaty young soldiers working together to safeguard the security of the country! The characters made the original MASH, and there are equally oddball real characters in WHY A SOLDIER? Take the captain (page 324) who suddenly inherited not only money but a prosperous pub in Ireland. But he was only midway through his Vietnam tour, and wanted to live long enough to enjoy his inheritance. His solution? Sleeping in an metal box-until one morning he couldn't get out. I don't want to give away all the good stuff, just one more among many: young Lt. Fitz-Enz, leading a troop of 105 soldiers in battle-garb complete with helmets and (unloaded) weapons arrived at Dulles Airport outside Washington, DC, en route to Vietnam, only to find that somehow the Army and the airline had overlooked them ( page166). That's for starters; then the rumors began among the civilians in the terminal: the soldiers were taking over the airport, the soldiers were about to race downtown and seize the capitol and the TV stations and end the Vietnam War. WHY A SOLDIER? reminds me not only of MASH but also of Winston Churchill's MY EARLY YEARS, both in the sharply written battle scenes, as well as the descriptions of military life at the far end of a supply-chain. As in Churchill's classic, Col. Fitz-Enz brings to life the pressures on junior officers in a rigid hierarchy in which those further up the command chain are not necessarily the best, the brightest, nor even the most psychologically well-balanced. Yet the idealistic young lieutenant we meet early in the book, arriving for his first tour in Vietnam, stuck it out-as he planned from the start-and put a full 30 years into the military. Why? Many reasons emerge as you read here, but one above all: because Fitz-Enz saw the military as a profession-the honorable profession that it has before the abuses of Vietnam-and can be again. So long as there are rogue leaders in the world, we'll need a solid military to protect against them. That, as Col. Fitz-Enz points out, is WHY A SOLDIER.

I found this to be a well documented career story of a young Army Officer on his way up the chain of command. There is an abundance of humor, as well as the sadness that only war can bring. It tells , in depth, of the sacrifices that were made by both the soldier and his family to reach the goals of his Army career. Once I started to read it, I could not put it down. Two thumbs up for this informative book.