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Myths, War Stories, and Adventures in Fred Rivera's "Raw Man"

By R. G. Cantalupo (reviewer)

Raw Man
By Fred Rivera
(A Word with You Press, 2015)

I'm probably not the best person to be reviewing memoirs posing as Vietnam war-based novels. The experiences I bring as a thrice-wounded combat veteran, a grunt, an RTO, a draftee, a PTSD survivor, and ultimately a VVAW protester/leader who was targeted by the FBI and went underground in 1972, often run counter to the myths, clichés, and false or inaccurate notions about the Vietnam war perpetuated by many autobiographical novels.

Such was my difficulty reading Fred Rivera's novel "Raw Man." As a novel, it doesn't have the narrative arc essential to keep the reader engaged. As a memoir, it perpetuates many of the false myths and stories about the Vietnam War I have spent much of my life debunking.

In the very first chapter, for instance, we're greeted with a series of ultra racist white guys. I don't remember a single white guy in the book that wasn't racist or some kind of crazy psychopathic killer. We meet a psycho with a string of cut off ears, and a number of cliché characters right out of John Wayne's "The Green Berets."

The rest of the book is a series of adventures and misadventures as the narrator journeys through Vietnam on various errands for his company. He picks up a mechanized track, interviews for a musician's job to get out of the bush, parties with Australians who seem like characters out of "Mad Max" more than the Vietnam War, and goes on tour as a musician.

In the last chapter, the narrator is spit upon when he returns home and called a baby killer. He is given a large welcome home party by his family, but hides in his bedroom to escape the festivities. He doesn't feel right about the war and decides to attend a protest march and is talked into throwing away his medals. He decides to throw away his Vietnam Service Medal but not his Combat Infantryman's Badge because he values it, it's something special.

All the usual suspects are there, VVAW, SDS, Black Panthers, a La Raza-like Hispanic group. He's beaten by "pigs," tackles a police officer and starts fighting with him. He is hand-cuffed and arrested. Later that night he is bailed out by his father.

Again, all this runs counter to my own war and anti-war experiences.

I never saw anyone either cut off ears or wear a string of ears around their neck or in the sweatband of their steel pot.

I never saw soldiers indiscriminately kill men, women, and children.

Cruelty. Brutality. War crimes. Yes. On both sides. But just blowing people away for no reason? No, that, fortunately, I never saw or experienced. Very few of the soldiers I fought with in the 25th Infantry were psychopaths. Crazy from the war, sure, but sado-masochists, no.

My three best friends in Vietnam were two black men and one white man. My best friend and bunker mate when we were in Fire Support Base Pershing was Lonny, a black man from San Francisco. So, although I saw a lot of racism around me, mostly in the fire support base camp among the REMFs, I didn't experience much of it myself, nor have a lot of preconceptions or biases about blacks and Hispanics before I went to Vietnam. I guess, growing up in the Brooklyn projects with so many colors, cultures, and ethnicities around me, I was oblivious to the kind of racism Rivera expresses as being rampant in Vietnam.

Nor was I spit upon, screamed at, or even remember one confrontational experience with anti-war protesters because I was a Vietnam vet. When I joined VVAW in 1970, I organized, led and worked with many different anti-war groups and college kids in protests without feeling the kind of animosity so many Vietnam memoirs recount as fact. And, had I beaten up a cop and been arrested for it, I might still be languishing in jail. The FBI tapped my phone and staked out my house simply because a photograph of me standing over a fallen motorcycle cop during our "blockade" of the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey was published in The Herald.

Beyond the perpetuation of old war stories, the good aspects of "Raw Man" are Rivera's, the narrator's, adventures travelling around Vietnam as a band member. These journeys described places and experiences I never knew were even possible in war-ravaged Vietnam and were very interesting.

For me, "Raw Man" would've been a much better read, and maintained a higher level of integrity, if it had focused more on these personal and rare experiences as a soldier. I found those stories, and the intimate details of a world I never knew, richer, more valuable, and offered a larger perspective about the Vietnam War. I wish there would've been more of them.

R. G. Cantalupo's (Ross Canton) work has been published in over a hundred literary journals throughout the United States, Canada, and England. He was awarded three purple hearts and a bronze star with a combat V during his tour in 1968-69 with the 25th Infantry Division.