Looking for a Hero: Staff Sergeant Joe Ronnie Hooper and the Vietnam War (review)

Biographical studies have deepened our understanding of the Vietnam War, exploring the ways in which Americans and Vietnamese approached the conflict and providing a window into both the high-level deliberations of political and military leaders and the low-level efforts of those in the field to carry out their decisions. Looking for a Hero is a part of this genre, the story of Joe Ronnie Hooper, a Medal of Honor winner and one of the most decorated soldiers of the Vietnam War, who identified with the war and found fulfillment in his two tours of duty there.

For students of the Vietnam war, Hooper is a familiar figure, one of those "troubled, hard-drinking career soldiers who fought so bravely and could not come to terms with peace" (p. 494). A restless, unstable young man from a poor, working-class family, Hooper dropped out of high school, enlisted in the Army, and in December 1967 arrived in Vietnam with the "Delta Raiders," a rifle company of the 101st Airborne Division. Initially stationed at the big American base at Cu Chi, in late January 1968 the Delta Raiders moved from III Corps to I Corps, where they fought North Vietnamese Army troops in the relief of Hue. In the spring of 1968 Hooper left Vietnam, but lacking the skills to survive in civilian society soon reenlisted in the Army. During his second tour, which began in late April 1970, he led a platoon of the 101st Airborne and fought in hill battles northwest of Hue. Returning to the United States in the spring of 1971, Hooper found life in the All Volunteer Army unbearable, was pushed out in February 1974, and died in May 1979, when he was only forty years old.

On one level, Looking for a Hero provides a fascinating portrait of Hooper's turbulent life and of the different phases of the Vietnam conflict. A womanizer, heavy drinker, and unreliable soldier when not in the field, Hooper reached the height of his powers in Vietnam, where he proved to be an inspired leader and a master of small-unit warfare. He was a natural warrior who "thrive[d] in war's climate of danger, hardship, chance, and uncertainly"(pp. 206–7). Maslowski and Winslow provide a superb account, based on personal papers, extensive interviews, and official records, of ground combat in Vietnam, explaining the skills that made Hooper such a formidable warrior and describing in vivid prose the physical environment—weather patterns, triple canopy jungle, and rice paddies—in which he operated. There is no better account of small-unit warfare in Vietnam.

In contrast, for example, to John Paul Vann, Hooper was a man of limited intelligence and education who could never rise above a low-level view of the war. Seeking to compensate for the thinness of Hooper's life and career, the authors interrupt their narrative with long digressions on many aspects of the war, such as the evolution of American policy under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon, the American way of war in Vietnam, the perspectives of Vietnamese revolutionaries, and other less obvious digressions on the nature of courage, the neurobiology of memory, the history of the Medal of Honor, and the myths surrounding the Vietnam War. They are relentless in their criticism of American presidents (Nixon was "bigoted, paranoid, and power hungry" [p. 310]) and of senior military commanders (Westmoreland was filled with "grandiose self-delusions" [p. 182]), providing finely etched portraits and penetrating critiques of the flaws in their conduct the war. They are far more generous, however, in assessing the strategy of Vietnamese revolutionaries, underemphasizing their vulnerabilities and minimizing the magnitude of their miscalculations in launching the Tet Offensive. These digressions, like other portions of the narrative, are exceptionally well-written and full of interest...