Not All Heroes
Not All Heroes: An Unapologetic Memoir of the Vietnam War, 1971–1972 by Gary E. Skogen. Review by James R. Smither, Grand Valley State University.
Forty years after the Vietnam War, many hundreds of American veterans have published accounts of their experiences in that conflict. While many of these memoirs are worth reading, most were written by combat soldiers, who constituted less than 20 percent of the over 2.3 million Americans sent to Southeast Asia during the war. The other 80 percent had experiences often quite different from those of the "grunts" in the field, but just as important to the study of the war as a whole. Far fewer of them, however, have published their stories. All this makes Not All Heroes a welcome addition to the field. Gary Skogen, who served in the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID), was about as far from a conventional combat soldier as possible, and his unvarnished account of life in the rear as the Americans were withdrawing from Vietnam provides a valuable counterbalance to more typical memoirs…