02 November 2005 10,000 DAYS OF THUNDER: A HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR by Philip Caputo, Simon & Schuster/Byron Preiss Visual Publications, September 2005, ISBN: 0-689-86231-8

"Last electric Sunday morning,

Waiting in the Park for the dawn."

--Paul Kantner (1970)

I arrived at the Park a little while past dawn on Sunday, greeted by vendors who were still setting up, and long lines of blue Porta-Potties that were standing shoulder to shoulder at attention. The morning prayer ritual was just about to commence. Mayor Gavin Newsom had declared it "Chet Helms Day." We streamed into Speedway Meadows by the thousands to spend the day ingesting sights, smells, and musical sets provided by scores of aging musicians who'd played at Helms' Avalon Ballroom back in the Sixties. For me, having been slightly too young and on the wrong coast to have experienced those days first-hand, having snuck into a Long Island drive-in theater in high school (None of us had a car!) to see many of these same musicians (and some of the same audience members) captured in the Woodstock and Fillmore: The Last Days movies, Sunday served as community get-together, musical history lesson, dream fulfillment experience, and peace rally.

"Give me an F!" "F!"

"Give me a U!" "U!"

"Give me a C!" "C!"

"Give me an K!" "K!"

"What's that spell?"

"What's that spell?"

"What's that spell?"

"What's that spell?"

--Country Joe McDonald leading "The Fish Cheer," 10/30/2005

On the long crack-of-dawn bus ride down to San Franciso Sunday morning, I experienced Philip Caputo's 10,000 DAYS OF THUNDER: A HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR, a powerful record of the sights and significance of those days. As with the San Francisco music scene of the Sixties, I was just a couple of years too young to have needed to make any life-altering decisions regarding The Draft.

But just as surely as I grew up listening to that music on the radio and seeing those movies at the drive-in and my first Dead show at the Nassau Coliseum, I also grew up experiencing the War. But suddenly that War is so far in the past.

"Every year they say we're going to get right up to the present, but we always get stuck in the Industrial Revolution. We got to World War I in seventh grade--who knew there had been a war with the whole world." -- main character Melinda Sordino in Laurie Halse Anderson's, SPEAK

10,000 DAYS OF THUNDER is an incredibly timely book for adolescents who could well be looking war in the face in a few years. As a tenth-grade World History student standing in protest on the Capitol steps, listening to Phil Ochs and Coretta Scott King, I looked back at World War II which had ended a quarter-century earlier as if it were ancient history. For today's tenth-grade World History students, as the 2,000th American soldier falls in Iraq and Scooter Libby gets indicted as part of a tangled web of lies about the current War, the fall of Saigon is even further back into the past for them than Hiroshima was for me.

"The Vietnam War has three dubious distinctions: It was the longest and the most unpopular war in American history and the only war America ever lost."

Is it possible for a book about war to be beautiful? If so, this is that book. Designed with a large trim size, every right-hand page throughout the book contains a vivid close-up from the past of the children and adults who found themselves at the epicenter of this defining chapter in world and U.S. history. On the left-facing pages there is a combination of text, "Quick Facts," and smaller illustrations and graphics. The tale told by the text begins all the way back at the beginnings of Communism so that readers are provided with a real understanding of how it came to be that those of my generation watched filmed battle scenes and flag-draped coffins from halfway around the world on our childhood dinnertime news broadcasts.

Some of Caputo's "Quick Facts":

In 1954, following the French departure from Vietnam, President Eisenhower asked the army's chief of staff, General Matthew Ridgeway, to conduct a study of what American military aid would be needed to help the South Vietnamese defeat the Communists in Vietnam. Ridgeway reported that the United States would have to commit between 500,000 and 1 million men. President Eisenhower decided this was an impossible option, so instead chose to send minimal aid in the form of weapons, supplies, economic aid, and military and political advisors.

--Most troops arrived in Vietnam in airplanes. For many, the first memory of Vietnam was the 'wall' of intense heat combined with the pungent smells of sweat, dung, rotting vegetation, food, and smoke that would hit them the moment they stepped out of an airplane's cabin.

--A reliable evaluation of the number of Vietnamese people affected by Agent Orange is almost impossible. But a team of Canadian experts conducted an independent study of the contaminated regions in the Alvoi Valley in 1999. Their findings revealed that children born in sprayed areas were more than 8 times as likely to suffer hernias and more than 3 times as likely to have cleft palates, be mentally retarded, and have extra fingers and toes.

--The Selective Service System was composed of almost 4,000 local draft boards and staffed by unpaid volunteers, most of whom were white males who were veterans of earlier wars. A 1966 survey of 16,638 board members of the draft revealed that only 1.3 percent were African American.

--During the Vietnam War, U.S. Air Force bombers and fighter-bombers dropped an estimated 6.2 million tons of bombs. This amount, which does not include bombs dropped by U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and South Vietnamese aircraft, was almost 3 times the 2.2 million tons of bombs dropped in World War II.

As a kid I learned about those small lakes called kettle-holes that were created when a chunk of ice from one of the Ice Age glaciers that formed Long Island got stuck in the dirt and melted, leaving a round lake that still exists thousands of years later.

There are areas on Long Island's South Fork where you see multiple kettle-holes near one another. One of the small-sized photographs included in Caputo's book shows an arial view of what appears to be a similar but much more intensive phenomenon in Vietnam. Only it was U.S. bombing that did the work of the epic glaciers. There are so many of those "a-ha!" moments throughout 10,000 DAYS OF THUNDER.

"You hold the key to love and fear

All in your trembling hand

Just one key unlocks them both

It's there at your command"

--"Get Together," by the late Dino Valenti, as sung by his son and former bandmates, 10/30/2005

Philip Caputo's background as both a Pulitzer-winning journalist and a Vietnam Vet is consistently evidenced by the combination of wisdom, factual matter, and supporting materials that make 10,000 DAYS OF THUNDER both a great read and a great and essential teaching resource.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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