Good For One Ride

I’m forty-five years from The Tet Offensive in Vietnam, but I remember it as if the bodies in the streets of Hue were still warm. I’ve read hundreds of books about that war and written several, but the one thing that most often eludes these stories, my own included, is the terrifying sense of anticipation that every soldier carries through every day and then brings home to live with for the rest of his life, should he be so lucky. To feel that every second in a war zone holds the origin of your oblivion and to realize once you leave that you are living on time borrowed from corpses is emotionally exhausting and almost impossible to put into words. And yet, Gary McGinnis has managed to do just that with grace and lyricism and great honesty. His book Good for One Ride is a small book in terms of pages, but it is a huge story. If you read it, you will understand the scourge of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that curses combat veterans forever. This is an important work and only enhances the Vietnam War literature that has come before.