Brief description:
From the dust jacket:
“This book is a novel, not a history," Major Bunting writes, and it seems necessary to stress this point for at times his story reads like a fascinating report of precisely what goes on in the chain of command from division headquarters down to the “real sharp individual" in combat, the low man on the totem pole.
The Lionheads is the first serious novel about the American army in Vietnam written by a man who was part of it. The author is that comparatively rare character, a soldier-scholar, an enlisted marine at seventeen who six years later became a Rhodes scholar after he had graduated as first captain from the Virginia Military Institute and was commissioned into the infantry.
Major Bunting, who is presently teaching English history at West Point, writes: “What l observed during my own tour of duty provides some of the background for the story: the geography, the organization of military units, the ‘hardware,’ some of the tactics. But no ‘Twelfth Infantry Division’—the ‘Lionheads’ of the title—fought as part of the American army. Similarly the directives, operations orders, the formal battle analyses, the combat ‘after action’ reports, the appendices and map - are all fictional.
If the primary concern of the troopers was to survive and come home, that of the career officers was usually success in the military system-“getting their tickets punched." The members of this cadre, the young officers and sergeants excepted, suffer ’ relatively few casualties. It is a condition of war: those who least comprehend the purposes of organized fighting to which the state commits them those least attracted to military service, suffer most, most often the supreme price.
Implicit in the story of The Lionheads is a modern commentary on this continuing condition.The three principal characters are George Simpson Lemming, the general commanding the division; George Robertson, a colonel commanding one of
Lemming's brigades; and Paul Compella, a private soldier. Each does his job according to his lights, though the lights of one can spell darknessfor the others.
The action takes place in the spring of 1968, when Robertson’s Riverine brigade is dispatched in search of body counts. The General, whose enormous competence is surpassed only by his ambition, orders the attack but refuses the necessary helicopter support; he survives and is promoted. The Colonel, a brave man and a good soldier, yet a hindrance to the fulfillment of theGeneral’s ambition, must carry out the order he knows is faulty; he, too, survives and is ruined. The trooper dies. The one who dies is the youngest by twenty years. He comprehends least what
he is fighting for.
Housman’s “Epitaph,” written many years ago, could serve as well for Pfc Compella:
Here lie we because we did not choose
To shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young
“This book is a novel, not a history," Major Bunting writes, and it seems necessary to stress this point for at times his story reads like a fascinating report of precisely what goes on in the chain of command from division headquarters down to the “real sharp individual" in combat, the low man on the totem pole.
The Lionheads is the first serious novel about the American army in Vietnam written by a man who was part of it. The author is that comparatively rare character, a soldier-scholar, an enlisted marine at seventeen who six years later became a Rhodes scholar after he had graduated as first captain from the Virginia Military Institute and was commissioned into the infantry.
Major Bunting, who is presently teaching English history at West Point, writes: “What l observed during my own tour of duty provides some of the background for the story: the geography, the organization of military units, the ‘hardware,’ some of the tactics. But no ‘Twelfth Infantry Division’—the ‘Lionheads’ of the title—fought as part of the American army. Similarly the directives, operations orders, the formal battle analyses, the combat ‘after action’ reports, the appendices and map - are all fictional.
If the primary concern of the troopers was to survive and come home, that of the career officers was usually success in the military system-“getting their tickets punched." The members of this cadre, the young officers and sergeants excepted, suffer ’ relatively few casualties. It is a condition of war: those who least comprehend the purposes of organized fighting to which the state commits them those least attracted to military service, suffer most, most often the supreme price.
Implicit in the story of The Lionheads is a modern commentary on this continuing condition.The three principal characters are George Simpson Lemming, the general commanding the division; George Robertson, a colonel commanding one of
Lemming's brigades; and Paul Compella, a private soldier. Each does his job according to his lights, though the lights of one can spell darknessfor the others.
The action takes place in the spring of 1968, when Robertson’s Riverine brigade is dispatched in search of body counts. The General, whose enormous competence is surpassed only by his ambition, orders the attack but refuses the necessary helicopter support; he survives and is promoted. The Colonel, a brave man and a good soldier, yet a hindrance to the fulfillment of theGeneral’s ambition, must carry out the order he knows is faulty; he, too, survives and is ruined. The trooper dies. The one who dies is the youngest by twenty years. He comprehends least what
he is fighting for.
Housman’s “Epitaph,” written many years ago, could serve as well for Pfc Compella:
Here lie we because we did not choose
To shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young
Publication
George Braziller,(1972) 1st,Hdbk,DJ,,Good