Uniforms by David G. Duchesneau | Books in Review

“This book speaks from the heart and mind of everyone who has ever had the experience of attending a Catholic school with nuns, all those who were ever so fortunate to be a member of a drum and bugle corps, and all those combat veterans who served in Vietnam and experienced the rigors and sorrows of that war, ” David Duchesneau writes in the Introduction to Uniforms (Xlibris, 150 pp., $22.70, hardcover; $19.99,  paper; $3.99, Kindle).

As the title suggests, uniforms were the key to Duchesneau’s early life. He dressed in the slacks, white shirt, and blue blazer of Catholic schools and a bugler’s glittering attire before graduating to the uniform of the United States Marine Corps.

Duchesneau is graphic. He delivers his memoir in the vernacular of an eighteen-year-old Boston wise guy. His fuck-all attitude is what kept me reading.

His blow-by-blow description of a 1968 Marine boot camp should have been titled The Theory and Practice of Hell . (I know—that title has already been used.) Two sentences perfectly summarize the rigor of the training: “We had three marines who committed suicide in the latrine. Two hung themselves, and one boot cut his wrist and bled to death.” At that time, boot camp had been reduced from thirteen to nine weeks to shorten the pipeline between induction and Vietnam.

Hard times were nothing new for Duchesneau. Physically abused and bullied by his father, Catholic nuns, and his grandmother, he survived childhood by learning to go his own way. Duchesneau found freedom after his father forced him to join a drum and bugle corps at age eight. As a teenager, he became the bugle soloist in a corps invited to perform across the Eastern United States and Canada. He also worked part-time after school and became night foreman in a shoe factory.

His Marine Corps life included AIT before going to Vietnam, where he served from March 1969 to August 1970. Duchesneau says that this book is his first “recollection of the Vietnam War as [he] experienced it as a marine infantryman, a grunt. The dates and locations may be out of sequence, but the events are factual and actually occurred.”

He spent March to mid-September 1969 in combat, operating out of Vandergrift Firebase north of Con Thien. His company conducted operations mainly along and into the DMZ. The enemy was primarily NVA, the best fighters from the North.

Duchesneau’s squad was mostly guys drafted into the Marine Corps who couldn’t believe that he had enlisted. With them, he participated in walking point as an FNG; search-and-destroy missions; day patrols; night patrols; ambushes; manning listening posts; getting in skirmishes; destroying villages; blowing up bunker complexes; surviving heat, bugs, and snakes; humping and sleeping amid monsoons and mud; and enjoying a three-day R&R at China Beach.

On one mission, he and his buddies were issued their own body bags. “Now that was a real morale booster, ” he writes. The large number of American deaths caused by friendly fire or by accidental shootings and detonations upset him as much as anything else.

Reward for his combat came mainly from a sergeant major who admired Duchesneau’s “sweet-sounding sound of those twenty-four notes of taps.” The book ends with Duchesneau turning down an opportunity to become a member of The Commandant’s Own Drum and Bugle Corps in Washington, D.C. Instead, he returned to civilian life.

Uniforms contains about thirty pages of photographs without captions. The pictures of Duchesneau speak for themselves, but readers might benefit from captions for the many pictures of otherwise unidentifiable landscapes.

—Henry Zeybel

 

 

 

---

---

---