Book Review: 'Sand in the Wind' by Robert Roth
3 / 5 Stars
‘Sand’ was author Roth’s first novel; he served with the 5th Marines in Vietnam, and the book is based, to some extent, on his experience of the conflict.
At over 600 pages, ‘Sand’ is by no means a quick read, and trying to synopsize it is difficult as best. It’s set time-wise in 1967 and early 1968 (the Tet offensive and the battle of Khe Sanh are referenced in the closing chapters). Location-wise, ‘Sand’ is set in the I Corps region, and the Marine combat base in An Hoa. Also featuring prominently in the novel is the so-called ‘Arizona territory’ of I Corps, where the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army operated with varying degrees of impunity.
Without disclosing any spoilers, the novel centers on the adventures of two men serving with the Marines out of An Hoa: Lance Corporal and college graduate Mark Chalice, and Lieutenant David Kramer. There is of course a large cast of supporting characters, including the enlisted men, who simultaneously hate and revere the ‘Crotch’, or Marine Corps.
Much of the narrative deals with the day-to-day struggles of the Marines to survive a war that bestows death and mutilation with a disturbingly arbitrary absence of logic. The book’s centerpiece is an extended operation by the Marines in the Arizona Territory, where the unit’s incompetent officers are as much a threat to one’s welfare as the VC and NVA. This section of the book is the best at communicating the gritty nature of the Marine war in the jungles of the northern regions of South Viet Nam: the reader gets a sense of what it means to exhaustedly tramp through jungle and rice paddies in 90 degree heat and suffocating humidity, too fatigued to be sufficiently watchful for the ubiquitous booby traps lacing the terrain, nor the VC snipers waiting and watching from impenetrable cover.
This part of the book is an understated but effective criticism of the tactics employed by US forces at this stage of the war, and articulates the causes of the growing resentment between the ‘lifers’ issuing the orders, and the conscripts carrying them out (resentments that would come to poison the American military in Vietnam before the end of the decade).
What keeps ‘Sand’ from becoming a great novel is the author’s insistence on regularly inserting passages intended to deal with the moral and psychological issues of the war. These are awkwardly written and burden, rather than enhance, the narrative:
Luck, something he had always thought about in terms of curses, now seemed to be promising what he could never have really hoped for – too much to be doubted. It all seemed no more than a matter of time, while time rushed him towards it. The impossibility of what was happening prevented him from doubting its culmination in that final impossibility.
Upon finishing the novel I observed that more than a few of its scenes, such as those involving boot camp at Paris Island, are portrayed in the 1987 Stanley Kubrick Film Full Metal Jacket, which in turn is based on ‘The Short -Timers’, a 1979 novel written by Gustave Hasford. This has raised questions as to what extent Hasford’s novel ‘borrowed’ content from Roth’s novel. Roth has not publicly commented on the issue, and Hasford – since deceased – obviously is in no position to comment for himself.
Summing up, while it has its weaknesses, ‘Sand in the Wind’ remains one of the more readable novels of the Vietnam War. If you are a fan of the literature of that conflict, then this novel is one that you will want to have on your bookshelf.
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