On the day before Veterans Day, we discuss a new book about one man’s Vietnam War epoch

By Ed Goldman

I’m not referring to Afghanistan, the latest example of America’s blundering into a country it didn’t understand, supposedly on behalf of people who never stepped up, and for a cause that was dubious at best—and which, over the course of 20+ years, cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

Hile’s own pointless war is depicted in his book, “Keeping Each Other Alive—A Vietnam War Memoir” (available at www.iuniverse.com). It’s adapted from letters Hile sent to his family—he includes copies of the handwritten originals in the book’s appendix—when he served as a U.S. Army artillery forward and aerial observer in South Vietnam for 10 long months, starting in August 1970.

“I started dictating the book in the 1980s,” Hile tells me one recent morning at Pachamama, a coffee shop near the home he shares in East Sacramento with his wife, attorney Belinda Beckett, and two very doted-on dogs. The home is also a favorite venue for his grown daughters and four grandchildren, who range in age from “not quite two” to “not quite four” years old.

At 76, Hile is a senior counsel at the international law firm, Orrick, which has offices in California’s capital. He’s a soft-spoken, trim man with a tidy mustache and an enviable head of thick hair. But his affable manner barely conceals, as he warms to his subject, his lingering anger for, and perplexity at, the military “and its entire way of doing things.”

He says that writing the book—which I found to be candid, heartfelt but unsentimental—”had a cathartic effect. While working on the first part of the book, which had a lot about the actual fighting, I found myself dealing with some PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] issues. But as I continued along, and started reliving some of the less awful stuff, I started to enjoy the (writing) process.”

He wrote and published the book, Hile says, “for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted my family to know something about the things I never like talking about. But two, I wanted to show just how badly things worked in the military, and maybe even caution readers to never allow this kind of war to happen again.” 

In the field, Hile was injured when he caught some shrapnel in his leg. “It was, as Monty Python says, ‘Just a flesh wound’ [I’ll explain that reference in a moment] and it didn’t even get me out of combat that day. We had some great medics, and one came to me immediately, removed the shrapnel and gave me a shot to prevent infection, then moved on.” About that tongue-in-cheek reference: As a knight is progressively dismembered in “Monty Python and The Holy Grail” this is one of the things he says, thinking it will torment his torturers.

Hile received a Purple Heart for being injured, and thereby hangs a brief tale of vainglory: His captain recommended him for the honor, then recommended himself for not only a Purple Heart but also, down the line, a Silver Star, which is the U.S. Armed Forces’ third-highest combat award for valor. “I was quite surprised to find that people could nominate themselves for some of these awards,” Hile says. His grin borders on a grimace.

Because Hile is a lawyer, I half-expected reading his prose to be akin to trudging through molasses. The pleasant surprise about “Keeping Each Other Alive” is that it’s a pleasing read: Swift-paced, accessible and, as aforementioned, candid. At coffee I mention that its dispassionate immediacy reminds me a bit of Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” the 1977 book in which the no-nonsense/no-gorgeous prose of the author, who was covering the war for Esquire magazine, not only garnered high praise and sales but also drew the attention of director Francis Ford Coppola, who was looking for someone to help him bring an organizing coherence (which became Martin Sheen’s narration) to his screenplay for “Apocalypse Now.” (It should be noted that Herr later admitted he’d invented a couple of key characters in “Dispatches.”)

“Actually,” Hile says, “my inspiration, or influence, was a book called ‘The Things They Carried’ by Tim O’Brien, which told what it was really like to be a grunt.” (Grunts are infantrymen. The term stands for General Replacement Unit, Not Trained.)

The most moving part of Hile’s book depicts what it was like, upon completing his military service, to come back to a country that maltreated or even joked about Vietnam veterans. “It also seemed as though every TV show featured a murderer who was a psychotic Vietnam veteran,” he recalls.