From its opening pages in Marine boot camp on Parris Island to the excruciating suspense of its climatic finale during the jungle battle for Khe Sanh, The Short-Timers is a brilliant and savage reenactment of the descent into barbarism that formed the bottom line of the American intervention in Viet Nam.
    Terse and brief as a scream, The Short-Timers traces the career of a sardonic narrator ("Joker") through the organized sadism of basic training, into a distasteful assignment as a combat reporter, and finally to the command of a platoon of "grunts" in the chaos that followed the Tet offensive.  It is a story about some of the most harrowing experiences Americans have ever been made to endure, the story of a gallery of young Americans who are turned into violence freaks while still remaining individuals--comic, pathetic, repellent, proud and caring.
    Sometimes surreal, sometimes all too realistic, and, without warning, funny, here is a novel that is--like its subject--as incongruous and undeniable as an exploding booby trap.  It is a brutal novel because it is about the brutality of men trained to violence; but it is a book filled with the very rare and great compassion available to men who have survived the loss of their humanity in combat.  This is a truly remarkable accomplishment for a first novel--which it is--or a tenth.
 
 

"Many are already forgetting the Viet Nam War.  Actually, it is only now being discovered.  Americans (except for the few who were in it) are only now learning what Americans did in that war--and what they will be doing in any other war that may 'break out' in the near future.  To those who refuse to forget, who, instead, wish to know, I recommend Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers.