River
of Gold
Hoa Long
Perfect Timing
Buddha’
s
Day Off
Riders on the Storm
Streetscene in Saigon
Turnover
Pumpkins
The Chi-Com Man’
s
Revenge
Rightful Places
The Delta Jack-up
Charlie on the Line
The Last Card Game
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Reviews
Other
Voices
Murray Waldren
The Weekend Australian,
9-10
December 2000
In the rush of historic revisions of Australia’s involvement
in the
Vietnam War, scant what-it-was-really-like attention has been paid to
front-line fever. Barry Klemm’s
Running Dogs helps amend that imbalance. Set largely in
South
Vietnam’s then Phouc Tuy Province in 1967-68, this
slice-of-life
account of ‘Pig’ Battalion is moodily energetic.
And quickly engaging,
with its colloquial, gallows-humoured toughness. Beset by hostile
environments, antagonistic officers and logistical snafus,
Klemm’s
company tries to survive with laconic forbearance amid their Apocalypse
Then. In its determined unsentimentality,
Running Dogs both
moves and chills
as it evokes life with a Catch-22 edginess where death is always
imminent. The fears, lunacies and chaos of guerilla war confrontations
are especially vivid; also memorable is the self-protective, jugular
camaraderie of the soldiers.
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Dogs
of an ugly war
Ivy Fleming
The Examiner,
21 October 2000
There’s nothing pretty about Barry Klemm’s story of
the Vietnam War in
Running
Dogs.
It’s a frank account of what the war was like - and who
better to tell
the story than an Australian Vietnam-veteran-turned-author.
The events in the book take place between April 1967 and March 1968 in
Phoue Tuy province, South Vietnam.
The reader takes on the identity of Pte Griffin, or Yogi Bear. Because
the reader is at the centre of the action, it gets very disturbing when
faced with everything from shooting a group of armed Vietnamese kids to
dealing with leeches in the swampy terrain.
And just when you think this bunch of soldiers can kill anything,
there’s the incident where Yogi tries to save a Buddhist monk.
Running Dogs
provides a
picture of the Vietnam War in frank detail. However, it might be a bit
more than some can stomach.
Although the story starts off ferociously (I had to force myself to
continue despite the rough language and too-much-detail narrative) it
does eventually ‘slow down’ as the soldiers come to
grips with what
they are doing.
Shudder, and feel lucky that you’re reading it and not living
it.
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John
Vile
The Sunday Tasmanian,
17
September 2000
Here is an account of the Vietnam War by an Aussie soldier who was
there during one of the war’s peak periods, between April
1967 and
March 1968.
Both tragic and comic,
Running
Dogs
describes the coalface war that the official histories don’t
tell.
Barry Klemm focuses on post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition once
politely known as battle fatigue and defined as a deep-seated
psychological malaise only after Vietnam.
In doing so, he has made a valuable contribution, even if
it’s
fictional, to the literature of the Vietnam War, which has left many
veterans such a tragic legacy.
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In short
new releases
Debra Adelaide
The Sydney Morning Herald,
16
September 2000
Klemm has drawn on his own experiences in the Vietnam war to write this
novel, but there is nothing earnest or self-indulgent, preachy or even
political in any of this - nothing but bold savage writing that grips
us by the throat, thrusts us into the horrors of war and never lets us
go. Written in the second voice, the narrative creates the disturbing
illusion of becoming our own voice, echoing madly. Episodic chapters
chart the gradual disintegration of a platoon, starting with a ruthless
ambush of four civilians, and ending with the last card game before
going home where ‘you didn’t have to carry a rifle
everywhere you went’
but where the nightmares will remain forever. The tone is both cruel
and comic, drenched with irony: ‘Maybe it was a massacre,
maybe it was
a great victory, maybe it was a trivial skirmish in which no-one got
hurt. No-one could ever tell.’ It’s a terrible and
powerful reading
experience.
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Vietnam War
revisited in
veteran’s tale
Peter Pierce
The Canberra Times,
5 August
2000
As the volume of fiction of the Indo-Chinese Wars from the United
States eased in the last decade, Australians - if in small numbers -
are turning to those conflicts. Recent novels have included Christopher
Koch’s
Highways
to a War
(1995), Nigel Krauth’s
Freedom
Highway (1999) and, earlier this year, Peter
Corris’s quickie,
The
Vietnam Volunteer. In addition,
the stream of unit histories and memoirs continues steadily. The
Official History
under the
editorship of Peter Edwards has been completed. It is becoming easier
to see the contours and demolish the myths of Australian remembering,
analysis and fabrication of the wars in which the country was involved
in Southeast Asia, and especially in Viatnam.
The latest novel to appear, Barry Klemm’s
Running Dogs,
intriguingly and
knowingly fixes the familiar with the unexpected. Klemm was a veteran,
unlike the authors mentioned above, and indeed most Australian - if not
American - novelists of the Vietnam War. The novel is set in Phuoc Tuy
province, where Klemm served, from April 1967 to March 1968. He has
therefore had a long time to meditate on his experiences of military
life and - one guesses - to read critically in the fictions of Vietnam.
A sign of that is his recourse to a staple of such writing - the use of
similes that edge towards cliche as they dream of domestic rather than
war settings. Thus ambush victims have heads that look like watermelons
split apart with an axe, another hapless enemy’s spilt brains
resemble
scrambled eggs. More resourcefully, Klemm finds ‘like a
discordant
song’ for the voices of yet unseen Vietnamese as Australians
overhear
them. He also disorders the standard narrative pattern of novels of the
soldier’s tour of Vietnam. Instead of beginning with the
introduction
to members of the platoon, Klemm opens in the middle of an ambush. This
is action typical, dangerous, yet unpredictable, as Klemm’s
anti-hero
Yogi Bear and his mates stand by ready to strike by a track that is
‘narrow and winding through the green shit’.
The pleasantries of telling us something of the platoon wait till the
third chapter, by which time there has also been a botched, almost
comic raid on a village whose people may be sympathetic to the Viet
Cong. Then along they come, with their nicknames, supposed or rumoured
home lives and their liabilities on display. There is Greyman, a
part-Aboriginal conscript who does not know to which world he belongs;
Sniffer Gibson, ‘a freckled lad from Tasmania whose affinity
with
machines was stronger than with men’; Alby Dunshea,
‘a flatout
arse-hole’ who neither merits a nickname nor much sympathy
when he is
killed in action.
Yogi Bear goes through the familiar rites of passage - the first things
of war - seeing an enemy corpse, suffering a wound, suffering the death
of one of his own. The Viet Cong, the notional enemy, are glimpsed,
respected, sometimes killed. The American allies, so often more
despised than the VC in Australian novels of the war, are scarcely seen
or heard in
Running Dogs.
Not
that Yogi and his mates lack for enemies among such vain, dangerously
incompetent representatives of the Australian officer class as
‘Hatrack’ (Major Haddon). The way in which others
will tell of their
war stories is also the object of soldiers’ weary contempt.
Of a
confused, frightening encounter, Yogi remarks that ‘maybe it
was a
massacre, maybe it was a great victory, maybe it was a trivial
skirmish’. In any event, there is a painting
‘purporting to describe
The Broken Hill Contact in the Canberra War Museum (sic)’.
Running Dogs
is a superior
combat narrative to most of its Australian predecessors. It is not free
from banality (‘This is a bloody war, Yogi, not a Sunday
school
picnic’), nor from incipiently and not altogether plausible
anti-war
comments: ‘This relocating populations, burning farms,
destroying
crops. It’s the way the bad guys carry on.’ Our
guys do not pretend to
be good. Yogi’s tour ends in disillusionment. The tenor of
some of the
last words of the novel (‘It was a f------ fiasco,
wasn’t it’) recalls
that of William Nagle’s
The
Odd
Angry Shot, the other veteran’s novel with which
Running Dogs
can fitly stand guard.
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Debut
Mike Shuttleworth
The Sunday Age,
23 July 2000
Private ‘Yogi Bear’ Griffin is a conscript fighting
in the jungles of
Vietnam. Klemm’s story is life-and-death stuff and while
he’s
particularly good at relaying the mechanics of warfare he exposes the
frailties and fears of a soldier. It’s as though the reader
sits at
Griffin’s shoulder as he stalks the jungles and villages,
listening to
his innermost thoughts. Klemm, who served in Vietnam, does not preach
or judge; he has refined his story to the essentials. It’s
classic
Australian realism. The language is as you would expect, loaded with
bitter oaths, but the writing is tightly controlled and poignant. Black
Pepper has something good on their hands with Klemm’s debut
novel.
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For Those In the
Know
Duncan Richardson
Social Alternatives,
Vol. 20
No. 1, January 2001
Barry Klemm provides a convincingly stark portrait of what it could be
like to find yourself fighting in a strange, far off land against a
formidable, elusive enemy, with companions not of your choosing and
officers whom you don’t trust. Anyone wanting an insight into
the
experience of the Australian infantry soldier in Vietnam could do worse
than read
Running Dogs
yet it
would only be necessary to dip into the narrative. Part of the problem
with this book as a novel is the determination with which Klemm
reproduces the repetitive boredom of war, punctuated by flashes of
terror, in chapter after chapter.
The book is episodic, charting the disillusionment of the men in one
small group engaged in searching out the Vietcong on their own
territory. The Vietnamese emerge as tough, inscrutable, hardly human at
times, which no doubt mirrors the views of some Australian troops at
the time but one of the failings of the book is that the narrative docs
not go beyond this perspective. Using a second person point of view
doesn’t help this and gives the effect of an amnesia victim
being
filled in on what happened to him. The soldiers remain nicknames with
one or two character traits and the jumps in chronology are not handled
smoothly.
There is also a wealth of specialised terms used by forces in Vietnam,
that are not explained as if this is a book for those in-the-know.This
is a pity because many readers will miss the important underlying
messages about a key event in our history as this novel is unlikely to
attract interest beyond those fascinated by the ‘face of
battle’.
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John Bryson (author)
The Great Northern Hotel, 22 July 2000
Before I’d read
Running
Dogs
I’d heard others say it is a novel to be read in a sitting,
and I’d
understood they weren’t speaking about a word count here, but
about its
narrative strength. And I’d already been told, by Fran
[Bryson] in
fact, that ‘Barry can really write stories like
this,’ by which she
meant not only scripts. So I said, ‘We’ll
see.’ And when
Running
Dogs was delivered to me I
was told not only to read it, but also that I was to launch it.
It follows that I am expected to speak well of it, and I am happy not
only to do that, as it turns out, but to do better.
Running Dogs is an
important book.
Revisiting the Vietnam War is not an easy task for a writer, not easy
for a reader either. By and large we hate it. So the marketing of
Running Dogs will
be tricky, but
maybe aided at the present time by the fact that we are allowed to hate
it. Barry won’t be surprised to hear me say that, at the time
he was
under fire, I was sitting on the roadway in Bourke street, among tens
of thousands of other protesters.
So here’s a first achievement of this novel. We know that
Barry, and
the others in his section, were hating it too, but without the option
of sitting down in full view of their enemies.
They took rebellious action of their own, and the episodes about this
in his book are for the most part comic, but over a very serious base,
because the spontaneous insubordination could never be allowed to be
subversive of the paramount need to keep each other alive.
Running Dogs
is in the
tradition of Michael Herr’s book and of Joseph
Heller’s. And it joins
them. In the comparisons, it seems to me more affecting than
Catch 22, and
emotionally more
complete than
Dispatches.
And
here’s another strength:
Running
Dogs
uses a cultural tone which allows criticism of wars of invasion. I
suspect this wouldn’t be so readily permitted in the USA.
Joseph Heller is much admired for creating the term ‘Catch
22.’ I’ve
thought rather that he should be credited with purloining the concept
we used to call ‘Dilemma,’ and better marketing his
own product. But,
just as
Catch 22
is about all
feasible options being cunningly closed off, I believe
Running Dogs is
about this
sentence, attributed to Skull Braddock:
No
matter how bad things had got since the day you had entered the army,
they steadily got worse.
Within the writing of this novel, and I won’t spend much time
on style,
that’s for every reader’s judgement, I did admire
the use of delerium,
where the wounded narrator Yogi drifts in and out of real happenings,
to revisit the way events had come to this pass, and also the use of
the 2nd person in place of the 1st, to replace the narrator with the
reader, so that ‘you’ are the person doing this,
and terribly affecting
this device is, to give an example, when you are the soldier in battle
who kills the children.
Running Dogs
is about all
those things, but I deeply believe every war story has at its core a
sentiment like this paragraph:
What
could you say to them, when you got home. How could you explain how it
was? Could you really, in a pleasant suburban lounge room or the pub in
Queen Street near the insurance office, tell any of them of what you
did? How could you give it a context by means of which they could
understand? Tell them you were a primitive predator, good only at
ambushes except usually you rucked it up. Tell them about fragging and
not fragging? Tell them about dead children and friendly fire? What
could you say that they would understand?
Tell them a funny story
maybe.
This novel is Barry Klemm’s response to that problem. He
hasn’t hurried
too much with it, and I suspect this is not a task one can hurry.
He’s given us a very fine book, one which should be read and,
sending
it off on its journey now, we all wish it well.
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