PHILLIP E. JENNINGS
Author

About the Book

What Joseph Heller did for World War II, what Richard Hooker did for the Korean War in M*A*S*H, no one has been able to do for Vietnam, until now. Phillip Jennings is a true patriot, a decorated Marine Corps Captain who served three years in Vietnam and Laos, including flying for Air America, and then worked for the CIA. Like Heller and Hooker, he did his duty, but he did it with his eyes open. Now, transformed by his wild imagination, he shows us what he saw. Never before has the insanity of the Vietnam war been so scathingly and entertainingly depicted..

Join Marine lieutenant Jack Armstrong and his unpredictable buddy Gearhardt as the Vietnam War is cooked up at a White House pizza party, Jack has to break off his romance with Mickey Mouse when they ship out for Nam, and the boys are promoted to "Almost Captains" by their Commander in Chief and sent on a mission to stop a war that has quickly gotten out of hand. Their trip to Hanoi is anything but a direct one, taking them through fearsome combat in South Vietnam and a series of wild misadventures that propels their story forward in a boisterous satiric rush. The cast of wonderfully imagined, strange characters they meet -- President Larry Bob Jones, anti-war movie star Barbonella, Juanton the Cuban, and Hoche and the Jeepster, leaders of the North Vietnamese -- has a fractured comic energy that almost glows in the dark. Not since Catch-22 has there been such a hilarious anti-epic that captures so brilliantly the absurdity of modern war.