Fort Benning Blues: A Novel

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Summary: Thanks to Mark Busby
Review: Being a graduate of Infantry Officer Candidate School, I appreciated Mark Busby bringing a portion of that experience back to me. OCS, like combat, was an experience that cannot be described or explained to anyone who did not live it themselves.
There is not a day that OCS does not come back to me in some form. Mark Busby says the same thing. He also states in his Dedication that all of our gereration who lived through the 60's and 70's are veterans of Viet Nam on some level. This is certainly true. Those times were very formative for each of us and also important in the journey of the United States. The novel successfully tries to capture the dynamics of 6 months of intense training; but importantly it struggles with the dilema that all of us faced. How do we balance our sense of duty as soldiers to our country and families with our distaste for any war and particularly the Viet Nam war? It was a struggle that each of our generation faced and each of us took our own personal road depending on our own personal conclusion. Fort Benning Blues concluded with one of those roads. Those were difficult decisions and difficult times. I appreciate the author presenting this work for those of us who can identify with it and also for those who cannot not. I plan on getting the book for my three children. I think it will help them to understand their father and those truly intersting times.

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Summary: It's about the Dues that Cause the Blues
Review: Mark Busby's FORT BENNING BLUES will appeal best to male readers who were subject to the Vietnam War draft, an entire generation of American men who, one way or another, had to wrap their heads around the idea that though there was now such a thing as "limited war," there was still no such thing as "limited death." In other words, they had to confront the very real possibility that they could give their lives for a war with very uncertain goals. Their fathers and grandfathers may have fought in World War II or Korea (or both), but the objectives of WWII were never in doubt, and Korea came early enough in the "cold war" that almost everyone believed Communism both monolithic and omni-threatening. Vietnam was 'way different, and Busby explores that difference via his protagonist, Jeff Adams, a Texan with a proud sense of heritage and common sense to go with it: enough pride to recognize his legacy and responsibility, enough common sense to be fearful and to desire a defensible meaning to the risks he faces.
We follow Adams as he takes the route many bright young men of the era took--Officers Candidate School. Adams's "blues," then, have to do with the dues he knows he must pay, and the novel's resonance comes from the way Busby re-creates those troubled times, times that exacted internal wars of conscience among most Americans, regardless of whether or not they were of draft age. Some readers might consider Busby's literary debts ranging from William Faulkner to British World War I-era poet Henry Reed a bit too artificial; still others might think he makes too much use of coincidence (Adams happens to be William Calley's driver during the My Lai trial, and he manages to see newspaper headlines that inform him of the Kent State killings).
Adams's resolution of his conflict--his Fort Benning Blues--may not please all readers, but it is a resolution many of that era found, making this as genuine a tale of courage as any told by other "veterans" of the Vietnam War, a war that we now know even our President, Lyndon Johnson, tragically questioned, tragically could not bring himself to stop.

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Summary: Another Story About Vietnam? Look Closely
Review: Those who feel they do not fit the profile of the typical war novel enthusiast should not let that consideration prevent them from picking up Mark Busby's _Fort Benning Blues_. For in many ways, the novel is atypical of the genre, and it is these moments of divergence that make the novel stimulating and enjoyable. What most distinguishes Busby's efforts from other, similarly-themed offerings, and what serves as the novel's strongest point, is the high level of literary consciousness that the author brings to his narrative. Arguably, all serious writers bring to their work an awareness of their literary predescessors, of being imbedded in context or tradition, but Busby uses this anxiety of influence in a unique way, creating a protagonist who is aware of the bounds and conventions and classic works of the genre in which he is circumscribed. From the beginning of the story, when Jeff Adams relates the collection of fiction he has brought with him to Officer Candidate School, to the novel's Yossarianesque conclusion, books are central to Busby's tale of Vietnam viewed from the margins. This literary consciousness is the heart and soul of the novel, the secret life that compels and inspires the actions and attitudes of its characters. Though the narrative ostensibly depicts the boredoms and stresses and tyrannies of Fort Benning, and though it portrays the by-now standard conflict between one's duty to country and one's moral aversion to war, _Fort Benning Blues_ is actually, if we look closer, a book about books, an exploration of the relationship between literature and marginality, books and the state. Thus, the interesting question that emerges from the novel is this: how much of Jeff Adams's ambivalence and hesitancy about his role in the Vietnam conflict results from the fact that he reads, that he has a deep and personal familiarity with books renowned for their critical perspectives on war and resistance? That Vietnam was morally questionable is by now well-established in literature and film; also patently obvious is the fact that Jefferson Bowie Adams II, grandson and namesake of his proud veteran grandfather, carries the weight of history and familial expectation upon his shoulders. What is less apparent, however, is the fact that Adams's scholarly affiliations make him scion of an equally weighty heritage; he is as beholden to literary forebears Joseph Heller and Ernest Hemingway as he is to a sense of duty engendered on the part of his military lineage. In this way, we can see that what is less apparent about the novel--namely, its literary consciousness--is also its most important and outstanding feature, and that it is this understated and subtle feature which ultimately makes _Fort Benning Blues_ more than just another story among many about the Vietnam era.