WEST DICKENS AVENUE: A Marine at Khe Sanh

Few Americans had it rougher in the Vietnam War than the 6,000 or so Marines who were caught at Khe Sanh during the infamous January–April 1968 siege by the North Vietnamese Army. Corbett was one of them. He had seriously considered fleeing from his hometown of Nyack, N.Y., to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. He abruptly changed his mind, though, and on a dare enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in the summer of 1967. By early January of 1968, Corbett found himself at Khe Sanh in a mortar platoon with the 26th Marine Regiment. Within days of his arrival at the remote outpost near the borders of Laos and North Vietnam, Corbett and his fellow Marines (along with a unit of South Vietnamese Army Rangers) were surrounded by elements of three divisions of North Vietnamese Army troops. The NVA soon launched three months of almost nonstop combat assaults and countless artillery, mortar and rocket bombardments, at one point succeeding in blowing up the Marines' huge ammunition supply depot. There also were intermittent sniper attacks. Corbett narrowly escaped death twice. Once, a sniper's bullet whistled through his hair; another time he was blown into a bunker by an artillery blast, but was miraculously untouched by the rain of shrapnel. In this short, readable account, Corbett describes his days at Khe Sanh in almost dispassionate prose and in great detail. His brief, staccato sentences effectively convey the siege from a Marine grunt's point of view. Corbett skips lightly over his last nine months in Vietnam, during which he saw plenty more combat action. His brief description of his less-than-overwhelming homecoming reception rings true. The book's odd title comes from a discarded American street sign Corbett found while digging his personal foxhole at Khe Sanh. (Feb.)