Dear Mr. President

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable, but let's not get carried away
Review: By dint of a general lack of Gulf War fiction out there ("Dear Mr. President" being the first instance I've seen), this book has been touted as the equivalent of Slaughterhouse Five or Catch-22 for the Persian Gulf conflict. Hudson has occasional funny parts in his stories, but to consider him the equal of Heller or Vonnegut (or even George Saunders, who blurbs the hardcover) is silly. People are a little too eager to proclaim The Next Big Thing. Equating Hudson to Vonnegut is the equivalent of calling any author who writes a story from the perspective of a disillusioned teen as "the next J.D. Salinger!" (which happens all too frequently)

I also wonder if the book would be held in such high regard had there not been a second Gulf War, started by another Bush. It feels as though at times the book (and resulting media frenzy) is simply bashing Bush Jr. in absentia.

This is not to say that this book is without merit. Hudson has a very clear, concise writing style and I hope to see more from him. It's just that he can't possibly live up to the hype that has been built up (some of which is his fault, such as the nonexistent letter he claimed to have received from Bush calling his book "unpatriotic").

I have a pretty dark sense of humor and the stories made me grin at parts, but rarely actually laugh. The thought of a man growing an ear on his stomach as a symptom of Gulf War syndrome is sort of funny, but I get the sense from reading "Dear Mr. President" that more could have been done with that situation and with the book in general. The book is probably around 130-140 pages of actual writing, with ample spacing and title pages between stories. A few of the stories (particularly in the beginning) end before they can really take off. In the novella, "Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8," Hudson gives himself a chance for his protagonist to develop and for us to grow attached. As the main character renames himself Help People and takes up residence in a bunker filled with chimpanzees, you get a feeling that Hudson may have been holding back a bit of his energy in the other stories. Here's to hoping he lets his mind and pen run more rampant in his future works.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Boy
Review: Do not be swayed by the two negative, clearly agenda-driven reviews below. Mr. Hudson is easily the funniest and most subversive new young male writer in America. He sets his pages on fire with formal innovation, verbal dexterity, dark absurdist humor, satire, and a resonant sense of sadness for the tragedy inherent in the human condition. I study literature, and consider myself to be fairly well-versed in literature from not only the past fifty years, but the past several hundred years. Simply put, there is no book about war that is remotely like Dear Mr. President. It is that rarest of birds, a truly necessary book.

Rating:
Summary: Man how depressing
Review: I got this book because I read somewhere GWB called its author "unpatriotic." No point it getting into an argument over that, but I did not see any evidence of that.

This is a series of first person stories about soldiers who went into and came out of the Gulf war. All of them were quite a bit worse for wear, physically or mentally.

The cover has a review quotation that says "he reminds us war can be funny as hell." Combat trauma-induced hallucinations and dementia is funny? Broken families, psychotic levels of homophobia is funny?

There were a lot of books like this that came out of the Vietnam conflict, and I always wondered if they did a disservice to the majority of veterans that did go there, fight, suffer, and came out without being loony or feeling they were victims. Not that the minority that were destroyed the way this book describes weren't real; their stories do need to be told but this leaves us with no sense of balance.

I suppose it is better than pretending these stories aren't for real, which I guess would be the "patriotic" thing to do according to some.

Rating:
Summary: a clear voice
Review: I picked up this book because I read Hudson's short piece in the New Yorker (from one of the summer fiction issues) and loved it. Gabe Hudson writes with clarity, creativity, and great confidence. Of course, this book is bound to make some people irritated ... but that should not reflect at all the great voice of this young writer. Highly recommended, even for those who are wary of Hudson and his sense of humor (have some of the people ... never heard of sarcasm, wit, and facetiousness?).

Rating:
Summary: Veteran Speaks
Review: I served in the Gulf, and not only has Mr. Hudson completely nailed that war to a tee, he also has a serious bead on human nature. I think it'll be a couple years before people truly see the historical importance of this book, but I am willing to say that this might be the most important book published this year. Mr. Hudson, through dark humor and wild story-telling, addresses issues such as Biological warfare, the little publicized psychological effects of modern war, the Bush administration's lust for war, the tenuous relationship between the Middle East and the West, America's lust for oil, the White House's utilization of mainstream media as a propaganda tool (especially CNN--anyone who served in that war will know what I am talking about), the hypocrisy inherent in America's foreign policy, gays in the military, the failure of American Intelligence, Gulf War Syndrome, the way that each generation heaps its war stories on the younger generation (namely the relationship between the Vietnam generation and the Gulf War generation), and the role that technology plays in modern warfare. Most importantly, though, it shows the human side to a war that was largely censored, and has been perceived by the American public as virtual and sanitary. And while Mr. Hudson is clearly opposed to war, he is just as quick to lampoon the Doves as he is the Hawks. It's rapidly becoming one of the most talked about books in the veteran message boards, a favorite of both young and old. I laughed a lot, sure, but I was also, somehow, very moved. It brought a lot of stuff back. It gave me a way to think about things I had previously not been able to think about. Thank you Mr. Hudson for your courage and bravery--for giving a voice to a group of men and women who have been largely marginalized and swept under the carpet by the government--especially now that Bush II wants to go make more of a mess over in Iraq. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, for civilians and veterans.

Rating:
Summary: They've missed it...
Review: I've been pretty disappointed with most of the negative reviews of this book posted here so far. First, there's the contention that the book isn't funny at all. How is a story about an ear growing out of a man's chest not funny? I think people are expecting this to be some kind of historical account of Gulf War 1. I mean, looking at the "customers who bought this item also bought" section, it seems as though most of the people who are reading this book are expecting some kind of political statement. I think the stories in the collection are stories first and historical accounts second, if not third or fourth. I think the major problem with most of these reviews is that they seem to be written by people who have no familiarity with what's being written today. Sure, this ain't a John Jakes historical novel, but if it were, it wouldn't be as brilliant as it is.

Also, there are many comparisons made between these stories and O'Brian's stories about the Vietnam War, and I think this collection far surpasses The Things They Carried. I, personally, do not consider myself a fan of war fiction, and this book appealed to me nevertheless. With Roth, it's war first and character second, and Dear Mr. President is the opposite. So yeah, if you jarheads wants to read some deep gut military prose, then you won't like this. But if you want to read some beautiful modern writing, I'm talking about really beautiful, near-perfect storytelling, then I suggest you get this book.

Rating:
Summary: Good, But Not Great
Review: There can be no question that there is a surprising deficit in fiction about the Gulf War. In fact, other than James Blinn's out of print 1997 novel "The Aardvark is Ready For War", I can't think of another book of fiction set in Gulf War. However, what seems to have happened is that this utter void has resulted in rather over-enthusiastic praise for Hudson's brief collection of eight short stories. The critics who are calling it the seminal fictional treatment of the Gulf War, on a par with Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" are only right insofar as there is no competition (whereas there are literally hundreds of Vietnam War novels)!

In any event, Hudson is surely to be commended for hitting on the whole range of Gulf War issues, from the dubious reasons for the war, to gays in the military, shaky media coverage, the need to "get over" Vietnam, military intelligence failures, racism, warrior myths, the new technology-laden war machine, Gulf War syndrome, and of course, the terrible psychological toll of the war on those who were in it. All of these are brought forth in stories of soldiers who are physically and psychological scarred-perhaps beyond redemption. In dark and sometimes surreal tales laden with macabre humor, Hudson emphatically drives the message home that this was not the clinical clean victory that was presented on CNN. And while I agree in general with his outlook, his style has a smug, preaching-to-the-choir aspect which will limit the book's audience and impact to the self-selecting literati he belongs to.

There are two stories which really stand out from the rest. Over seven pages, "The American Green Machine" imagines a Marine recruiting effort aimed at high school seniors which involves a brain implant and "Brain-Mail". It wonderfully captures the gung-ho recruiting and military bureaucracy lingo and is a truly funny bit of satire. The other notable piece is the 50+ page story "Notes From a Bunker Along Highway #8" in which a Green Beret deserts his unit, carrying a wounded comrade. They hole up in an abandoned Iraqi bunker populated by five chimpanzees, and get into yoga. Perhaps because it is the longest and most developed of the stories, it is also the most engaging and moving.

On the whole, I find the book useful and necessary, but not the masterpiece it's been proclaimed. The people who really need to read this kind of critique of the war simply aren't going to pick up a collection of absurdist short stories. So, in that sense, the book has very little power or impact. One final note: Amazon.com lists the book as 192 pages, it is in fact 178. And of these 178 pages, 42 are not writing, they are blank dividers, story title pages, table of contents, dedication, etc., so be forewarned that this is a slim book that you will finish in a little over two hours.

Rating:
Summary: Heartbreaking yet funny
Review: These stories are about people I might have gone to high school with. It's so wierd to think that my contemporaries are veterans, and now there's a new bunch of kids going over to Iraq who are younger than my little brother & sister.

But here they are in all their human strength and frailty. Fictional, yes, but every writer uses his experiences and those of his friends to color their fictional world.

This book is far more readable and approachable than Catch-22 or Going after Cacciato, Apocalypse Now, and other war-genre stories to which it has been compared. Perhaps this is due to the contemporary nature of the stories, or maybe it's just because the writer captures character so well with dialogue
and action. This is a very quick, captivating read.

These stories have a huge dose of irony among the realistic snapshots of what the first Gulf War was like up-close. This is not the war we saw on CNN, this is more like Vietnam in the desert, where a confrontation with a few belligerent locals can turn into a landmine and booby-trap ridden massacre.

War veterans come home and can't forget their lives on the front lines. Minds snap, but their hearts are still in the right place. Chemical warfare takes its toll on veterans' bodies in different, horrible ways. Iraquis know just enough of our culture to get it wrong. You kill someone in order to save them. Your life back home goes to hell while you're living in hell on the front lines.

You have to laugh or you'd cry.

Read this.

Rating:
Summary: A REVELATION
Review: Wow, Dear Mr. President is a story collection that heralds the arrival of a great new writer! Gabe Hudson, to me, is the first writer that signals a transition of generations from war fiction about Vietnam to the group of young people who fought in the first Iraqi War. Due to the overinundation of books like Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and the almost God-like worship of writers like Ambrose, the soldiers of wars after that (Korea,Vietnam,Iraq) are not given the attention and respect that they deserve. In Dear Mr. President, we are not treated to the super, almost soviet style citizen of the fatherland that Ambrose glorified in his books, but men and women who are bashed and broken and absurd and humorous and insane and brave and trying to do the best they can.

In "The Cure as I Found It", a soldier returned from the Gulf War must decide if the rules he learned in the special forces, namely to maim and kill, can be used against a neighborhood bully as he deals with the horrors of war in his nightmares.
Among the best stories is "Sneak and Peek Outside Baghdad" about a reconaissance mission which finds that the worst aspects of American hip-hop culture have transferred to Iraq even as one soldier remembers his lover left in the US. "Those Words Were Yours Not Mine" is about a blind woman named Valerie Hackett, whose 19 year old son is killed in the War. On his person is found a letter which she can't read. After asking a lot of people to read it to her, she senses that they are all lying to her, concealing the dreadful contents from her. So she hires someone at the hospital she's staying in to read it and learns about her son's disastrous marriage, of infidelity and betrayal. The last story, a novella called "Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8" is a plea for peace and brotherhood as a Green Beret, shocked by the blood and guts he sees, gathers up a wounded comrade and abandons the war, holding up in a bunker with a bunch of lab apes, venturing out to the surface to help out wounded civilians and keeping his friend a virtual prisoner in his insane fantasies.

This was a great great book. The stories are funny, horrible, psycho, and masterful at times. He writes like Chuck Palahniuk, if Chuck had something to write about. Gabe has a war. With war comes atrocity, insanity, and absurdity. It's about time someone not only caught up to history, but overtaken it. Ironically, just as this book comes out, we are again engaged in Iraq (some would say we were never disengaged) and so the very issues the men and women deal with in this book might as well be set in the present. Hudson might just evolve into a great writer. We'll see.