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  BY Fina on August 13th, 2009 at 5:39 am

  I discovered this novel the same day I found that Gustav Hasford, “unreconstructed Vietnam veteran” and author of “The Short-Timers” (the basis for Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”) died in 1993 in a Greek motel, forgotten except by few friends and – even if he never knew it – by me. The inescapable sense of sadness and loss almost became anger when I realised that “The Phantom Blooper” was in every way as good as “Short-Timers” – if not better. I’ll spell it differently: it’s masterpiece, one of the most amazing piece of war literature ever written. Briefly released in 1990 by Bantam – just to be killed by a nervous publishers – this novel is “The Short-Timers” (and thus “Full Metal Jacket “!) sequel, even if written before FMJ was filmed, and as its predecessor it’s divided in three parts.

  The first (“The Winter Soldiers”) finds Joker on Khe Shan, in the very last day of the combat base’s life. Most of his friends are dead, back in the US or missing, maybe captured by The Phantom Blooper, a legendary Marine who has defected to the VC. Even if all the events are apparently compressed in less than 24 hours, as usual in Hasford’s narrative there’s a lot of overlapping violence (including the rough welcome to a New Guy). I’ll not spoil anything, but you’ll be treated with one of the most original, visceral, epic descriptions of a war action ever committed to paper. It’s a sequence that begs to be filmed – but I can’t really figure out who could do it.

  Some American reader will be outraged by part two (“Travels with Charlie”) but it’s really here that Hasford raw genius does shine. Joker is captured by the NVA: instead of being shipped to the Hanoi Hilton, is brought back to a VC village “near Laos”. It could have been easy for Hasford to transform Joker stay with the enemy into a cardboard horror story or in the Vietnam version of “Dance with the Wolves”. But he (somehow working with the Viets, thus becoming “the white front fighter” – and The Phantom Blooper!) becomes a detached, but almost sympathetic observer of the village’s life and the combat routine in the NVA. He even comes to look at a Green Berets compound “with the eyes of an attacker”. He’s not converted (“Communism is boring and doesn’t work”, he observes, too disillusioned to fall from a political claptrap to another one) but he’s deeply affected: if you give the enemy a face, it ceases to be the enemy. The balance with which Hasford invest Joker’s reaction to what he sees is superb, and Joker sharp humour never disappears. “Travels with Charlie” is packed of great vignettes, including a paradoxical moment of voyeurism, the strangest reference to Dale Canergie in the annals of literature and the description of an Arclight bombing run from the receiver’s end that will give you shudders. The shocking violence typical of Hasford’s prose is still here, and some graphic detail will repel the squeamish. But reality was never meant to be a Barbara Cartland romance…

  Finally Joker is “rescued” and sent back to the US. “The Proud Flesh” (the third part) may be Hasford unheralded finest moment – a nearly flawless recapitulation of Joker/James Davis (his real name, not incidentally the name of America’s first casualty in Vietnam) return to humanity and reality. It’s not an happy return – it couldn’t be, as Joker finally realise how war can be more real than peace, and how he feels a POW even in his house. But again Hasford elegantly avoid what could have been a collection of clichés, and gives to Joker’s trajectory back home a poetry of anger and contempt that is both powerful and engrossing – but wonderfully simple and effective. The final image of the book is the last thing you would expect from the man who wrote “The Short-Timers”, but is marvellous.

  “The Phantom Blooper” is “Short-Timers” sequel, but is not “Short-Timers II”. There’s a greater sense of humanity, a greater focus and a maddening rage against a world gone awry. This “unmaking of a soldier” (as someone perceptively had described it) is oozing the frustration of those that really went through all the fight, and didn’t choose to forget. “Once a marine, always a marine”: Joker doesn’t revert to simple pacifism (militarism’s twin brother) but he recognises that soldiers, people who had the unenviable privilege to see history’s most unpalatable truths, are the only ones who know really “how things are”. The walked the walk so they can talk the talk. “Firepower to the people” as Black John Wayne (grunt, squad leader and head of the “Black Confederacy”, one of the book’s most intriguing inventions) would put it. And he means it. The irony of a Marxist speech from someone who’s bound to fight a Marxist enemy isn’t lost on Hasford.

  The fact that such an amazing novel isn’t available to the public since a decade is a deep shame. The full text of the book is available on Gustav Hasford memorial web site, but “The Phantom Blooper” MUST be read on paper. Try to find one copy on the used book circuit, and let’s hope someone in the future will give to Gustav Hasford’s talent its due, maybe re-publishing “The Short-Timers” and this together, as it should be. Too late, unfortunately. How sad.

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  BY Anonymous on August 13th, 2009 at 7:10 am

  1.0 out of 5 stars
  A DISAPPOINTING CODA
  After reading an excerpt from this book in Playboy before it’s release in early 1990, I liked it enough to think that I’d pick it up once it hit paperback. Guess what?

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  BY Heloise on August 13th, 2009 at 7:37 am

  2.0 out of 5 stars
  Dull
  At least the Short-Timers introduced some interesting characters, but the “Blooper” is just too dull.

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  BY Rita on August 13th, 2009 at 8:09 am

  What an odd, ambitious, and ultimately frustrating book. Like its predecessor, “The Short-Timers,” The Phantom Blooper is comprised of three novellas, but each seem to have been written by a different author. The first, “The Winter Soldiers,” is just as great as anything in “The Short-Timers;” the second, “Travels with Charlie,” comes off like “Dances with Wolves” in Vietnam; and the third, “The Proud Flesh,” almost reads like a political book, with long diatribes against the US government. In short, it’s an unfocused novel that might not only grate readers with its unwillingness to be “The Short-Timers, Part Two,” but also with its heavy anti-US politics sentiment.

  What most frustrates me is that the first novella in the book is so promising. In fact, I enjoyed it more than anything in “The Short-Timers.” Starting off with rumors and legends about the Phantom Blooper, it features an apocalyptic, night-time battle that is beyond any of the action in the previous novel. However, the second novella, “Travels with Charlie,” abandons the characters and writing style Hasford previously employed, and instead, as another reviewer so accurately depicted it, comes off as Snow White with guns. Perhaps my main problem with this section of the novel is that I just don’t buy it.

  It’s hard to believe that a village of Viet Cong would so readily accept a US Marine as one of their own. I can’t recall reading about any real-world American POW’s in the Vietnam war who experienced the idyllic, almost hippie-like existence Joker enjoys; it seems to me that most US prisoners were too busy being abused and tortured by their Viet Cong captors. And it also rubs me the wrong way that Hasford can have the VC commit atrocious acts, yet for them it’s justified, whereas when he has US soldiers commit atrocities, it’s just because they’re basically inhuman. Hasford doesn’t paint a very balanced picture, and though he dedicates this book to veterans of the war, he portrays the US soldiers as murdering, uncaring monsters. I can’t imagine too many vets who would be flattered by their representation in this novel.

  Another thing is that the Joker who narrates this novel is very different from the Joker we knew in “The Short-Timers.” Gone is the stone-cold view of the world. Instead, the Joker of the Phantom Blooper is a caring guy, who seems to just want to live off the land for the rest of his life. This is totally against the grain of the blank-slate Joker in the previous book. It really seems to me, especially in the second and third novellas, that Hasford mostly just used Joker to promote his own opinions.

  Whereas the previous novel had several interesting characters, with even more interesting names, The Phantom Blooper only features a few. In particular there’s Black John Wayne, in “The Winter Soldiers,” a black activist Marine who protests the war and refuses to fight. To tell the truth, I would’ve preferred to have seen more of this character than just about anything in either “Travels with Charlie” or “The Proud Flesh.” Fans of the first novel may feel a bit let down that we barely get to see any of the characters from “The Short-Timers.” Even Animal Mother, who most people know from his appearance in “Full Metal Jacket,” only gets a small mention, in the beginning and end of the novel.

  In short, I would say this book should be read by those who enjoyed “The Short-Timers.” However, I wouldn’t say that it’s necessary for anyone else, unless you want to read an unusual novel about the Vietnam War, one that offers a very different message from any other.

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  BY Nuhad on August 13th, 2009 at 8:26 am

  1.0 out of 5 stars
  The Misanthrope
  Gustav Hasford wrote three novels-”The Short-Timers, “The Phantom Blooper,” and “Gypsy Good-Time”-before he died in obscurity in Greece, where he had…

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