Soldiering: Observations from Korea, Vietnam, and Safe Places (review)

Those of us who know Henry Gole are delighted to have his rich cache of anecdotes and "lessons learned" in written form. Those who do not know Colonel Gole should be even more grateful for Soldiering since it is a no-holds-barred, November Sierra account of one man's career in the Cold War army. Where Henry trods, boredom flees.

Beside the posturing army officers turned memorialists, David Hackworth and Tommy Franks come to mind, Henry Gole writes about other great soldiers he has known, not his own manifest accomplishments. He also portrays an army he loved for the comradeship and adventure it provided, and which he disliked for its institutionalized meanness-of-spirit and duplicity. Sometimes it was not much of an army, but it was the only one Gole had or wanted. It certainly provided an opportunity: Henry Gole began his service as an enlisted recruit and BAR-man in Korea and ended it thirty-six years later as a Special Forces colonel widely admired as a leader and teacher.

As a historic document, Soldiering has special value as a participant-observer's account of the rise of Special Forces under the erratic patronage of John F. Kennedy. Having left the army in 1954 to attend college (three degrees), take a bride, and teach high school, Henry Gole returned to the army in 1961 as a twenty-seven-year-old second lieutenant of infantry. Service in Germany made him wonder if he had made a bad career choice. He escaped the pettifogging army he did not like by escaping (by virtue of his combat skills, linguistic ability, and education) to the 10th Special Forces Group, Bad Tölz. He had found his little "home" in a big army.

Part IV of Soldiering is Henry Gole's account of his two tours in Vietnam in the 5th Special Forces Group and the shadowy Studies and Observation Group (SOG). Like other SF officers of my acquaintance and of that generation, Gole and the 5th Group faced many enemies, including the South Vietnamese army and much of Military Assistance Command Vietnam. There is plenty of "cowboy" in Gole's Vietnam tours, but the dominant picture is of very brave, very skilled, very imaginative seasoned sergeants and officers (many foreign-born) making the Civilian Irregular Defense Group of Montagnards an effective force to impede Vietnamese Communist cross-border expeditions. The battle ground was the Central Highlands, a topographic nightmare and sweltering test tube of diseases and biting things. The mountains and the war made extreme personalities even more outrageous, and Gole is at his best in describing his American and "Yard" comrades in admiring but brutally realistic terms. Gole is not so naïve as to believe that the SF-CIDG alliance could have reshaped the war, but he certainly believes he and his comrades rendered valuable service for relatively little cost, principally by their ability to acquire targets for air strikes.

Memoirs are memorable for two reasons, the first as historic testimony to important times, people, and places, the second as literary marvels, "what oft was thought but ne're so well expressed." (Gotcha, Hank!) Soldiering rates a big bulls-eye on both counts.