Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam

Fred Reed enlisted in the Marines in 1966 and went to Viet Nam as an Amtrac crewman in what he calls a "barbecue battalion." (First Amphibian Tractor Battalion, Third Marine Divions, Danang.) He describes an Amtrac as "a 37-ton barely armored death box with the gasoline tank in the bottom, so land mines could blow it up and barbecue the crew. Great mine detector. I think it was a design feature." So he knows about Viet Nam and the Marines.Having gotten a faceful of shrapnel and a Purple Heart ("A Viet Cong shooting medal. Why did they give it to me?") he spent a year on the eye ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital, became a reporter ("the moral equivalent of a used-car salesman") and covered the military for thirty years. From this he learned many things of note to a former country boy. ("When you have done a cat-shot off the deck of an aircraft carrier, you gain a whole new perspective on drag racing.") Over the years he acquired an intimate familiarity with all levels of the military. ("An asylum with guns. How much sense does that make?")"The military," he says, "is a mix of absurdity and, among officers, cultivated mental retardation, punctuated by interludes of ghastly barbarity. The only way to bear up under the barbarity without strangling someone is to focus on the ludicrousness, of which there is an abundance. So I did."Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go has been described by Fred's friends as "the most accurate and least factual book ever written about Viet Nam, and one of the funniest." Since his friends include former door-gunners, three-tour Special Forces guys, tunnel rats, and Phantom drivers, they probably know what they are talking about.Fred now lives in Mexico, on the north shore of Lake Chapala, an hour south of Guadalajara. He has a glorious Mexican wife and superb teenage stepdaughter (ask him) who somehow put up with him. ("High-octane models, large IQs, very Latin, slightly nuts.") His two gringa daughters, Emily and Macon, ar