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A Different Kind of Justice BLUE'S BASTARDS: A True Story of Valor Under Fire. By Randy Herrod, Regnery Gateway, Washington, DC, 1989, 215 pp., $17.95 (Member $16.15)
Hemingway wrote: "Memory, of course, is never true." This self-serving and purposely misleading book demonstrates the truth of Hemingway's aphorism.
Randy Herrod arrived in Vietnam at the age of 19 and was assigned to Company K, 3d Battalion, 3d Marines. His platoon commander was Lt Oliver L. North, the "Blue" of Blue's Bastards. Clearly, Lt North is held in awe by Herrod, who devotes much of his book to extolling North's personality, leadership, and courage.
Herrod was in heavy combat and was awarded the Silver Star Medal for his heroism. But he was later transferred to the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines and moved from the demilitarized zone to a diffirent, but just as deadly, kind of war near Da Nang. Herrod now found the enemy frustratingly difficult to recognize, let alone engage.
In February 1970, Herrod's life was irrevocably changed when he and the other four members of the patrol he led killed 16 unarmed Vietnamese women and children. It is Herrod's account of the killings, the war's worst mass murder involving Marines, and the subsequent courts-martial that distinguishes this book from other "whatI-did-in-the-war" volumes.
From the opening page, however, there are troubling questions. In depicting long-past events Herrod recreates every conversation in the form of a direct quotation. Obviously, they are reconstructions. Though not on the title page, the copyright lists Tom Landess as coauthor, leading one to ask if Landess' creativity may have supplanted Herrod's recall.
There are a great many factual...