Pointman by Robert L. Owens | Books in Review

Robert L. Owens’s Pointman: A Novel of Love, War and Drugs (Delizon 310 pp., $12, paper) is that rare autobiographical Vietnam War novel published in France. The title character, the pointman, is Spec 4 Warren Steele, who wishes “he could snort a vial of heroin to relax.”  He also says that “walking point was like taking a stroll with the Grim Reaper.” T his thought comes to him when he is doing his job. 

The reader encounters Steele and this thought on the first page of the book. That’s when I realized this Vietnam War novel was trying to do something very different. 

There’s a photo of Owens on the back cover of the book in a boonie hat and full field gear in 1970. He entered the U. S. Army after graduating from the University of California-Davis and served in the Mekong Delta and in the Cambodian invasion with the 9th Infantry Division. Owens received the Bronze Star, Combat Medical Badge, and Purple Heart Medal. It’s very likely that the details that make Doc Tyson, the platoon medic, come alive are taken from the author’s own experience.

Owens tells us about the characters we’ll be spending time with in this book. “None were truly educated, ” he says. “Most were barely out of high school and none represented the upper echelons of society…poor boys from thousands of little towns, with no power or voice, being shipped to the slaughterhouse.”  Nobody has said it more succinctly than that.

There is a love story at the center of this novel between Butterfly, a Vietnamese girl who works in a bar, and Sergeant Brooks. Forces conspire against this love, none more powerful and malign than Lieutenant Gomez who is “hunting Captain’s bars and glory and success.”  Then there is Major Van Tri Quan, a member of the Binh Xuyen organized crime syndicate that controld the local heroin trafficking and who Steele winds up dealing with.

The ticket-punching Gomez volunteers his twenty men to go into Cambodia to search for the “Commie Central Office, ” (COSVN) a concept that was more myth than actuality. Gomez says that everyone but him is a draftee so even if they all die, no big deal. He places no value on his life as he has nothing going but being an Army officer.

The platoon had been patrolling the flat Mekong Delta rice paddies, but soon they are humping the steep, triple-canopied jungle of the mountains in Cambodia. I’m not spoiling the suspense by saying that they don’t do well, especially the newbie, PFC Arthur “Tiny” Wellington who can’t take it and overdoses on heroin on guard duty when he was supposed to be watching for bad guys creeping up on the platoon.

We encounter many of the same phrases and motifs found in many other Vietnam War novels and memoirs: leeches, Audie Murphy, Roy Rogers, Davy Crockett, fragging, “Don’t mean nothin’, ” the thousand-yard stare, shit burning, baby killers, war mongers, Agent Orange, and getting too short for this shit.

We also get something unusual: well-realized characters, good, bad, and in between, an involving plot, and a story that is compelling and interesting from the first page of the book until the last.

I enjoyed reading Pointman .

—David Willson

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