Jack McLean was not the average Vietnam grunt. Raised in suburban
New Jersey, he attended the esteemed Phillips Andover Academy
alongside George W. Bush, all the while pursuing a predictably
privileged path. Nearing graduation in the spring of 1966, however,
McLean decided on a different direction. At a time when his
classmates were making plans to attend the country's most elite
colleges, McLean was more interested in taking a break. Since there
was a compulsory draft, he decided on the Marines, given their
brief two-year obligation. Few at the time gave Vietnam a thought.
It was still considered a country and not a war.
From his first night at the Marine Corps boot camp at Parris
Island, McLean felt circumstances begin to outstrip his ability to
deal with them. During the ensuing year, while serving in stateside
duty stations, he acutely observed the growing changes between his
new life and the lives of his former classmates, who were
increasingly caught up in the campus antiwar movement. The Vietnam
War had escalated from the moment of McLean's enlistment, and by
the summer of 1967, any hope of remaining stateside diminished as
every available marine was retrained in the infantry and sent to
Vietnam.
Nothing, however, could have prepared McLean for the horror of
Landing Zone Loon: The battle took place over three days in June
1968 on a remote hill tucked into the border of North Vietnam and
Laos. On a long knoll with little relief from the pounding sun and
no cover from the lurking enemy, McLean and his company endured a
relentless artillery and ground assault that would kill
twenty-seven men, wound nearly one hundred others, and leave
several dozen survivors to defend an ever-shrinking perimeter with
little water or ammo. McLean returned home weeks later to a country
that was ambivalent to his service. Having applied to college from
a foxhole the previous fall, he became the first Vietnam veteran to
attend Harvard University.
Written with honesty and thoughtful insight, Loon is a powerful
coming-of-age portrait of a privileged boy who bears witness,
through an extraordinary perspective, to some of the most
tumultuous events in our history, both in Vietnam and back home.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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