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  • Road of 10,000 Pains: The Destruction of the 2nd NVA Division by the U.S. Marines, 1967
  • Andrea Gustavson
Road of 10,000 Pains: The Destruction of the 2nd NVA Division by the U.S. Marines, 1967. By Otto J. Lehrack . Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2010. pp. Hardbound, $30.00.

In his fourth book on the Marines and the military, Otto Lehrack chronicles the struggle in the Que Son Valley in which nearly nine hundred American soldiers and over six thousand members of the North Vietnamese Army lost their lives over seven months in 1967. Road of 10,000 Pains offers a close look at the chaos of the war and the quick decision-making and brave actions of several Marines, chaplains, and medical corpsmen. Building on the oral histories of more than 150 Marines and corpsmen, Lehrack recovers a narrative of a campaign often overlooked by media and historians who have instead often focused on the siege of Khe Sanh, the logistical build-up toward the Tet Offensive, or the attack on the U.S. Embassy. It is Lehrack's decision to restrict his focus—to one campaign and to one company per chapter—that provides the reader with a detailed look into the thoughts, emotions, and interactions of American Marines in the moment of battle.

Throughout Road of 10,000 Pains, Lehrack weaves his own contextualizing narratives with brief passages from the oral histories of Marines to create a polyphonic account of the campaign. He moves from the narratives of men struggling to take a tree line in the lowlands of the valley to those of men perched at a distant viewpoint on a hill held by an artillery battery attempting to support the troops below. The effect of Lehrack's layering is a sense of the multiplicity of perspectives in recounting a battle as well as a sense of the disorientation that comes from the limited perspective of being in that battle. The reader struggles to make sense of the battle along with the Marines who recount details such as "and all of a sudden I heard John off to my right. There was a guy down the hill that I couldn't see who was screaming for help. Somehow, John and I started talking as I was sitting there playing dead" (70). Passages like this are strung together alongside third-person stories of Marines and corpsmen risking their lives to drag wounded buddies to safety or to administer last rites to dying men. We learn, for instance, about Smitty's (Cpl. Ernest Smith) actions on [End Page 220] " /> the battlefield from several different members of his platoon. The movement between first- and third-person passages—the necessarily limited personal experiences of the battle and the many retellings of Marines helping one another—provides scholars with a recounting of the Vietnam War from the perspective of the individual and the collective unit.

Road of 10,000 Pains highlights the intensity of war by bringing together some of the most dramatic moments experienced by Marines during the Que Son campaign. There are few stories of downtime that might offer a picture of the more mundane aspects of the Vietnam War. This is a war story that ends with a victory in early 1968 on the cusp of the Tet Offensive. Lehrack often hands the narrative wholly to his subjects, and the stories they tell oscillate between terse or scattered recollections of the frightening hours on the battlefield and descriptions such as Lance Cpl. John Lobur's that read like prose poetry: "They came four at a time, each guy holding the corner of a plastic poncho, grunting and struggling with the weight of their friends. Dead friends. Heavy dead friends. They scrambled more than walked, in a sort of crab-like shuffle, the corpses face-up, ass dragging, sometimes an arm hanging over the side, looking like pale wax" (30). Coupled with Lehrack's intervening passages that provide context and situate the reader, these rich fragments of oral testimony help us to understand the many affective responses—fear, confusion, pride, bravery—to the war by those who fought.

Although Lehrack's concentration on the moment-by...

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