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Lieutenant Dangerous

A Vietnam War Memoir

Lieutenant Dangerous Buy Now
Format Paperback Ebook Audiobook
ISBN 978-1-58642-273-8 978-1-58642-274-5 978-1-58642-278-3
Published Jul 6, 2021
Imprint Steerforth Press
Category
1950 - Present Military History Biography & Autobiography - Memoirs Biography & Memoir

This “funny, biting, thoughtful, and wholly original” Vietnam War memoir captures the fear, sorrow, and absurdities of combat (Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried).

“A must-read war memoir . . . related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene.” —Kirkus Reviews

A conversation with a group of today’s military age men and women about America’s involvement in Vietnam inspired Jeff Danziger to write about his own wartime experiences: “War is interesting,” he reveals, “if you can avoid getting killed, and don’t mind loud noises.”

Fans of his cartooning will recognize his mordant humor applied to his own wartime training and combat experiences: “I learned, and I think most veterans learn, that making people or nations do something by bombing or sending in armed troops usually fails.”

Near the end of his telling, Danziger invites his audience—in particular the young friends who inspired him to write this informative and rollicking memoir—to ponder: “What would you do? . . . Could you summon the bravery—or the internal resistance—to simply refuse to be part of the whole idiotic theater of the war? . . . Or would you be like me?”

Praise

Lieutenant Dangerous is, the author notes, a sad story, full of waste and loss." It's powerful. Put it next to Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" on your bookshelf.”

--Laurie Hertzel, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

An important book . . . at times mordantly funny, at others sparking with anger."

--The Washington Post

By turns funny, sad, horrifying, and thought-provoking . . . reads like a cross between Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the television show M.A.S.H.

--The Christian Science Monitor

As with his cartooning, Danziger pulls no punches with his description of his time in the service and Vietnam."

-- The Florida Times-Union

A must-read war memoir . . . with zero punches pulled, related by one of the most incisive observers of the American political scene."

-- KIRKUS reviews (starred review)

In clear language he [Danziger] describes both the horrors and absurdities of war and the toll it takes on a soldier.

-- The Rutland Herald

Brilliant political cartoonist Jeff Danziger has written a crackerjack new book...The book is a rollicking, honest, cynical and, at times, tragic recollection of that dreadful and deceitful war."

-- Valley News

Danziger's new book isn't merely a recollection of a tumultuous time in his youth; it also passionately engages our political situation now."

-- Seven Days

Lieutenant Dangerous is a forthright, brutally honest memoir of one American’s experiences during the time of the Vietnam War.”

--The North Star Monthly

Danziger’s book is a note to the wise. You can forget about the Vietnam War. Certainly, the past cannot be recovered. But it pays to be on guard not to repeat the same mistakes in the future. Danziger has written a fine book and it is well worth reading.”

--Global Insights

His book, which careens from political satire to wrenching personal history with a highly palatable dollop of social analysis, is as relevant today as it would have been when the events it describes were taking place."

--Who What Why

Mr. Danziger be­longs to a gen­er­a­tion that was shaped by the war in Viet­nam and the po­lit­i­cal up­heaval it caused. He has suc­ceeded in what he set out to do — to nar­rate one young man’s jour­ney through the worst of that mael­strom. And he has man­aged to set it all down with­out so much as a whiff of un­de­served nos­tal­gia.

--The Barton Chronicle

Jeff Danziger's Lieutenant Dangerous is funny, biting, thoughtful and wholly original. This memoir instantly ranks among the best personal accounts to emerge from that war. I have encountered nothing quite like this wonderfully acerbic, go-for-the-jugular book."

--Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

Most readers will know Jeff Danziger as a brilliant cartoonist. Lieutenant Dangerous shows that he is a brilliant writer as well. Full of mordant observations and absurdist escapades, this memoir of his army service reads like a real-life Catch 22 -- with Danziger as the Captain Yossarian of the Vietnam War. Lieutenant Dangerous joins the small shelf of must-read books for a sense of what it was really like to be a soldier in America's most unpopular war."

-- Max Boot, author of The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

From arguably the best political cartoonist this nation has ever produced...wow: words! And what words. Having spent a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, I can certify: this book applies directly to today's wars. Only, in the transition to an all-volunteer army, what may have disappeared from the ranks of our officers is this type of brutally honest skepticism."

-- Sarah Chayes, author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban and On Corruption in America: And What Is At Stake

The Things They Carried, and Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn

--Tom Bodett, Author and radio anomaly

Every West Point cadet should be required to read Lieutenant Dangerous, political cartoonist Jeff Danziger's powerful memoir about his four years in the army, when honor, integrity, and purpose were as illusory as American victory in Vietnam."

--David Cay Johnston Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, an IRE Medal and the George Polk Award

'I am not a weeper, but I sat on the bus to Ft. Dix and wept.' So begins Jeff Danziger's youthful journey to the center of America's Vietnam maelstrom. A 24 year-old Vermonter with a pregnant wife at home, Danziger experienced the full-on nightmare of the Army's Vietnam catastrophe. He saw everything combat -- death, hypocrisy, moral degradation, and the fervid futility of the mightiest nation on earth bested on the battlefield by men and women fighting in pajamas and loincloths. He saw everything, that is, except the nominal purpose of the conflict. There is no evidence of a shared cause with our South Vietnamese 'allies,' no evidence that American soldiers knew or cared about the Communist Threat, and no evidence of the proverbial quest for glory that theoretically animates military endeavors. War, he writes, is 'in an awful way, interesting, if you can avoid getting killed and don't mind loud noises.' Danziger's purpose is to inform, but he and we wonder what the story of the 55,000 squandered American lives has taught us. Then the jungle; now the desert. Then B-52s; now Predator drones. The more America's ill-informed interventions change, the more they stay the same."

--Alex Beam, author of Broken Glass and Gracefully Insane

Excerpt

It has now been over forty-five years since my tour in Vietnam in the army, a period of time in which I thought I would think about the war less and less. The opposite is true. These days I wonder how such a thing could have happened, not just to me but to the United States as a whole. I am reminded from time to time when I am talking with younger people, and I have to force myself to not talk about the war. I have to make an almost physical effort to only mention the war in passing and go on to other subjects. They, after all, have the present to think about.

But if they do bring it up first, that’s a different story. And when they do, their interest is often motivated by their own personal security. For instance, if there’s one thing young people interested in my Vietnam War expe­rience want to know about first, it’s the draft. What if the draft were reinstated? How did it work?

The rules of the draft back then were sneaky and open to local interpretation, not exercised the same or to the same effect everywhere in the country. In these days of gender equality, it seemed strange that only males were required to register at the age of eighteen. Even stranger that they could avoid being called up if they were in college. That immediately struck my listeners as terribly unfair, which it was. Why should young people who were fortunate enough to be in college not have to share the burden of the war? Why should other young people lack­ing the intellect or the money for college be sent off to risk their lives fighting? Didn’t this hint that the thinking at high government levels was that if a young man were thick enough to get drafted, he deserved less from life? He deserved to be an infantry grunt. If you were dumb and poor you were expendable. Even today, I find that hard to explain.

There were other unfair exceptions. If a man was married by a certain date, or had a child by a certain date, the draft boards had to excuse that man from service. That was the law. If you were drafted and you didn’t show up, they came and arrested you. You could go to jail, and then be in the army anyway. It was not only unfair, it was weird. And it got weirder.

For example, there was the somewhat secret stipulation that your draft board could not be changed from the loca­tion where you registered at eighteen. The draft boards were made up of local people in local communities. How they were chosen remains a mystery. But they had a normal inclination to protect the young people they knew locally, and choose for service people they didn’t know. They had to supply so many draftees a month from the lists of those who had registered in their communities. A friend in my basic training company, John Stephenson, was from Montana and had attended Dartmouth College. He was in Hanover, New Hampshire, when he turned eighteen. After graduation he moved back home to Montana. The Hanover draft board, probably reflecting the townie sensibility, drafted him, and called him back from Helena. He was angry, unhappy with Hanover and with the beggar-thy-neighbor attitude of the New Hampshire people he had come to dislike anyway. Of course, the draft board in Helena probably did the same thing, drafting men not from local families, but from away. To John it seemed to be a perversion of the idea of everyone sharing a national burden equally. And it was.

What if you really didn’t want to go? I had to think. What if? But no one wanted to go. I found it hard to explain that a huge percentage of American soldiers didn’t want to be American soldiers.

My draft board was in Peekskill, New York, and they did the same thing to me as they had done to John Stephenson. I had moved to Vermont after college. The Peekskill people were just as eager to protect their local sons, and since I was no longer local, they put my name on the list. For a year I had a job in Vermont at a GE plant that made machine guns for fighter aircraft, and the job had a deferment. My exact job was to produce indus­trial films to illustrate the destructive power of miniguns. Miniguns were Gatling-style guns used to strafe the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army troops. They were very effective. Fired down from small planes and helicop­ters, they supposedly protected US Army troops, or so I felt at the time. It did not occur to me that miniguns were very high-technology weaponry used against an enemy who had just rifles, and no aircraft. I did not want it to occur to me.

The deferment ended. The arrival of a draft notice had a strange effect. My father had served in World War Two during some hellish island fighting in the South Pacific. He counseled . . . well . . . nothing. If I wanted to go to Canada or Sweden, he offered financial help. In the mid-1960s the arguments for and against the war were at best inconclusive and at worst highly suspect. Young people who were against serving may have been legiti­mately against violence and war and in favor of peace for all mankind. Or they may have been against the idea of them individually and personally leaving their lives of American ease and privilege for hot, dangerous, and demeaning military duty. I could have gone to Canada because I had the family backing, but not everyone could do that.

I had been raised in middle-class comfort, and the trade-off was obedience. You didn’t necessarily do what you were told, but you did what was expected. The most powerful influence on a young person was the conviction that there were well-thought-out rules and everyone followed them. Wise heads had concluded that America had to fight communism. The only way to stop commu­nism was to fight against it, whereas in fact the cure for communism was plain. The real cure for communism was communism.

Second after that conviction was the widely accepted idea that the United States was guided to do the right thing given enough time and opportunity. God had some­thing to do with this — we believed in right and wrong. Our version of ourselves was a combination of the World War Two victory, the Marshall Plan, and Louis Armstrong.

About the Author

Jeff Danziger

Jeff Danziger, one of the most widely recognized political cartoonists of his generation, is syndicated by the Washington Post News Service and is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army 1967-1971, one year in Vietnam in the First Air Cavalry, the 11th ACR and other units. He received the Bronze Star and the Air Medal.


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