Warrior of the Heart

by Dan A. Barker

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0962852473
• ISBN13: 9780962852473
• Release Date: June 1992
• Publisher: Burning Cities Press
• Length: 275 Pages

Customer Reviews

A true book about war that will change you

The book trade would call this a "personal memoir of the Vietnam War". The author joined the Navy immediately after high school, became a medical corpsman, and volunteered to serve with a Marine unit in Vietnam. The Marines are the guys who run toward the sound of bullets, or so they say; the medics are the guys who run or crawl to the Marines when the bullets have knocked them down, while the bullets are still coming in. And there's no "so they say" about that part. Dan Barker starts with a brief but revealing examination of why he, and many like him, volunteered for the military--and the reasons are still valid for young people volunteering today. If we don't know who we are sending, we can't understand much about how war will affect them. Once he's in-country, we see that this is a young man who notices everything. The narrative is spare but what's included tells us so much. What happens to scared kids determined to be men, dumped into a place of random death, commanded by resigned NCO's and disconnected officers with their own agendas, sent out "on patrol" to be bait and see if anyone shoots at them? How can a soldier just off patrol be so worn down by exhaustion and resignation that he sees a highly venomous bright-green snake in his bunk, crawls in anyway, and goes right to sleep? What's it like to find yourself in constant fear for your life, given no information except that any civilian may be the VC who will kill you, poorly equipped, using the dexedrine the medic gives you to substitute for sleep, unable to exercise either self-preservation or the moral sense you thought you had...And who is this medic, disobeying orders and treating the women and children his squad just dropped mortar shells on? The 1.8 million Americans who've served in Iraq and Afghanistan will see themselves here--jungle war, desert war, geography makes little difference in this reality--and their friends and relatives (which is all of us) will learn things we need to learn. But I am forgetting to say, that The Snake that Became a Tiger is vivid and well-paced, hard to stop reading. It's realistic and courageous, but not dark and hopeless. The narrator is injured and changed, but neither defeated nor despairing. You'll be changed too.