Fort Benning Blues

by Mark Busby

Book Overview

If you've never even been to Southeast Asia, can you be a Vietnam veteran? In a novel that captures the life and times of a generation, Mark Busby takes us on a journey through an era of hippies, the shootings at Kent State University, integration, and Woodstock. Fort Benning Blues tells the story of Vietnam from this side of the ocean.

Drafted in 1969, Jeff Adams faces a war he doesn't understand. While trying to delay...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875652387
• ISBN13: 9780875652382
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Texas Christian University Press
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

It took me back

The novel took me back to OCS in 50th company from March to September 1970, a few months after the experiences in the novel. I read the book in one sitting; I couldn't put it down. In my experience, we were more of a team. We arrived 2 weeks early, most of us had been to basic and AIT together and had established strong bonds. We never experienced much of the back stabbing related in the novel. There wasn't any punishment administered by one tac officer to two men; the discipline was at the company level...if we couldn't keep in step for the parade during the day, we came back and low crawled the course after supper....the whole company. I thought that our training was professional...although by design, they challenged you to the max in the beginning. I loved the book because it took me back through the whole six months of OCS. Many of the candidates and TAC officers in the novels were just like the guys that I had known. The book woke up a lot of ghosts. Up on your left foot down on your right....

Fort Benning Blues

I have to thank Mark Busby for his description of those difficult times and Infantry Officer Candidate School. I guess it would be fair to say that I am prejudiced to some degree having been an OCS classmate of Mark's as well as a member of his Officer Candidate School platoon. But anyone who lived during those times understands all the soul searching and wondering displayed by the characters in the book. Vietnam dominated our lives after high school and most of us ended up in the military as a result of having no other options. Nobody would hire a young man who had not completed the military. Colleges were only too happy to get students out since they had far more than they could handle. Even the fact that we were in the military made us the subject of ridicule and derision. And the war showed no signs of ever coming to an end! It is hard to imagine this book as a statement against all wars; just the struggles of young men trying to make the best of a very bad situation. Mark's descriptions of the Tactical Officers and other candidates jumped off the pages for me. He dealt with the humor of OCS as well as the harshness, all with Vietnam hanging over the heads of each candidate. Casual Company was always there waiting to receive the next batch of washouts for immediate deployment. Despite Mark's concerns about the War and its validity, he managed to finish at the top of our class. I found the book to be quick reading with very clever intertwining of events and song verses of era. It is not flowery or overdone with description but provides a complete picture of the characters, the place ,and the times.

Thanks to Mark Busby

Being a graduate of Infantry Officer Candidate School, I appreciated Mark Busby bringing a portion of that experience back to me. OCS, like combat, was an experience that cannot be described or explained to anyone who did not live it themselves.There is not a day that OCS does not come back to me in some form. Mark Busby says the same thing. He also states in his Dedication that all of our gereration who lived through the 60's and 70's are veterans of Viet Nam on some level. This is certainly true. Those times were very formative for each of us and also important in the journey of the United States. The novel successfully tries to capture the dynamics of 6 months of intense training; but importantly it struggles with the dilema that all of us faced. How do we balance our sense of duty as soldiers to our country and families with our distaste for any war and particularly the Viet Nam war? It was a struggle that each of our generation faced and each of us took our own personal road depending on our own personal conclusion. Fort Benning Blues concluded with one of those roads. Those were difficult decisions and difficult times. I appreciate the author presenting this work for those of us who can identify with it and also for those who cannot not. I plan on getting the book for my three children. I think it will help them to understand their father and those truly intersting times.

Another Story About Vietnam? Look Closely

Those who feel they do not fit the profile of the typical war novel enthusiast should not let that consideration prevent them from picking up Mark Busby's _Fort Benning Blues_. For in many ways, the novel is atypical of the genre, and it is these moments of divergence that make the novel stimulating and enjoyable. What most distinguishes Busby's efforts from other, similarly-themed offerings, and what serves as the novel's strongest point, is the high level of literary consciousness that the author brings to his narrative. Arguably, all serious writers bring to their work an awareness of their literary predescessors, of being imbedded in context or tradition, but Busby uses this anxiety of influence in a unique way, creating a protagonist who is aware of the bounds and conventions and classic works of the genre in which he is circumscribed. From the beginning of the story, when Jeff Adams relates the collection of fiction he has brought with him to Officer Candidate School, to the novel's Yossarianesque conclusion, books are central to Busby's tale of Vietnam viewed from the margins. This literary consciousness is the heart and soul of the novel, the secret life that compels and inspires the actions and attitudes of its characters. Though the narrative ostensibly depicts the boredoms and stresses and tyrannies of Fort Benning, and though it portrays the by-now standard conflict between one's duty to country and one's moral aversion to war, _Fort Benning Blues_ is actually, if we look closer, a book about books, an exploration of the relationship between literature and marginality, books and the state. Thus, the interesting question that emerges from the novel is this: how much of Jeff Adams's ambivalence and hesitancy about his role in the Vietnam conflict results from the fact that he reads, that he has a deep and personal familiarity with books renowned for their critical perspectives on war and resistance? That Vietnam was morally questionable is by now well-established in literature and film; also patently obvious is the fact that Jefferson Bowie Adams II, grandson and namesake of his proud veteran grandfather, carries the weight of history and familial expectation upon his shoulders. What is less apparent, however, is the fact that Adams's scholarly affiliations make him scion of an equally weighty heritage; he is as beholden to literary forebears Joseph Heller and Ernest Hemingway as he is to a sense of duty engendered on the part of his military lineage. In this way, we can see that what is less apparent about the novel--namely, its literary consciousness--is also its most important and outstanding feature, and that it is this understated and subtle feature which ultimately makes _Fort Benning Blues_ more than just another story among many about the Vietnam era.

It's about the Dues that Cause the Blues

Mark Busby's FORT BENNING BLUES will appeal best to male readers who were subject to the Vietnam War draft, an entire generation of American men who, one way or another, had to wrap their heads around the idea that though there was now such a thing as "limited war," there was still no such thing as "limited death." In other words, they had to confront the very real possibility that they could give their lives for a war with very uncertain goals. Their fathers and grandfathers may have fought in World War II or Korea (or both), but the objectives of WWII were never in doubt, and Korea came early enough in the "cold war" that almost everyone believed Communism both monolithic and omni-threatening. Vietnam was 'way different, and Busby explores that difference via his protagonist, Jeff Adams, a Texan with a proud sense of heritage and common sense to go with it: enough pride to recognize his legacy and responsibility, enough common sense to be fearful and to desire a defensible meaning to the risks he faces. We follow Adams as he takes the route many bright young men of the era took--Officers Candidate School. Adams's "blues," then, have to do with the dues he knows he must pay, and the novel's resonance comes from the way Busby re-creates those troubled times, times that exacted internal wars of conscience among most Americans, regardless of whether or not they were of draft age. Some readers might consider Busby's literary debts ranging from William Faulkner to British World War I-era poet Henry Reed a bit too artificial; still others might think he makes too much use of coincidence (Adams happens to be William Calley's driver during the My Lai trial, and he manages to see newspaper headlines that inform him of the Kent State killings). Adams's resolution of his conflict--his Fort Benning Blues--may not please all readers, but it is a resolution many of that era found, making this as genuine a tale of courage as any told by other "veterans" of the Vietnam War, a war that we now know even our President, Lyndon Johnson, tragically questioned, tragically could not bring himself to stop.