Book Review: 'One Very Hot Day' by David Halberstam
'One Very Hot Day' first was published in hardback in 1967. In June 1984, to tap into the burgeoning market for Vietnam War memoirs, Warner Books released this mass market paperback edition (230 pp).
David Halberstam (April 10, 1934 – April 23, 2007) was a U.S. journalist and writer, and among the first reporters to travel to Vietnam in the early 60s.
As a liberal, Halbertsam had no qualms about interjecting his political viewpoints into his fiction and nonfiction books about Vietnam. While an advocate for U.S. military intervention in the early 60s, by the early 70s Halberstam was a vociferous critic of the U.S. involvement, and even went so far as to publish a hagiography of Ho Chi Minh, titled Ho, in 1971.
The novel is set in South Vietnam in 1965, a time when the South Vietnamese government was rapidly losing the war in the countryside to the Vietcong. The lead character is a 38 year-old U.S. Army Captain named Beaupre, who agreed to serve as an Advisor to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) less from a sense of opportunity, and more from a desire to escape his deteriorating relationship with his wife.
Along with a young, idealistic West Point graduate, Lieutenant Anderson, Beaupre sets out with an ARVN detachment on a mission to investigate possible Vietcong redoubts, on the eponymous Very Hot Day. The novel's span, occupying no more than that single day, is understood to serve as a microcosm of the U.S. effort in South Vietnam.
'Hot' is not an easy read. Halberstam employs a prose style reliant on a stream-of-consciousness narrative, one featuring lots of run-on sentences and lots of commas. Here's one of the book's shorter passages:
Of all the Americans he was quite sure that Anderson was the best officer he had seen; brave, intelligent, handling himself well with the Vietnamese soldiers, speaking the language better than any American he'd ever seen; similarly he was sure that Beaupre was the worst, sloppy, careless, indifferent to the troops, contemptuous of the Vietnamese, and worse, he was sure he sensed Beaupre's fear.
With the plot preoccupied with relating the physical travails of the march in the hot sun, much of the narrative consists of discourses on the psychological and emotional states of its American and Vietnamese characters. Staples of the Vietnam War narrative are included, such as the obligatory encounters with bar girls while indulging in R & R in Saigon; the segregation between black soldiers and white soldiers; and the deliberate distancing of senior officers from any boots-on-the-ground command posture in favor of relating orders, by radio, from the rear.
The closing chapter tries to redeem with novel with a furious bout of life-or-death action, but it comes so late that it ultimately can't save 'One Very Hot Day' from being underwhelming.
The verdict ? While Halberstam's criticisms of the conduct of the war give 'One Very Hot Day' some degree of validity, when taken as yet another Vietnam War novel in a large inventory of such novels, it's not all that powerful or impressive. I really can't recommend this one.
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