Blood Trails: The Combat Diary of a Foot Soldier in Vietnam

"Reenacting "Pickett's Charge" at Gettysburg Using

In reading Christopher Ronnau's book, "Blood Trails", I came across a stunning gem! I have read literally hundreds of Vietnam memoirs, but "Blood Trails" does more to define "the fog of war" more vividly than most autobiographies put together! Read this book, and you will discover why I named this review in the manner I did! Ronnau, in January, 1967 volunteered for the Army at the height of the Vietnam War and was promptly deployed to S.E. Asia. Smartly deciding to bring a camera and a journal, as part of the "Big Red One" Ronnau chronicled patrols, ambushes, B-52 airstrikes and search and destroy missions along the hotly contested areas of the "Tay Ninh Province" as well as the "Iron Triangle" Not quite 21 years years old, Ronnau kept a running journal of this book from January, 1967 to it's disasterous conclusion four months later, where an N.V.A. bullet truncated this story with a bullet to his jaw, thus ending this memoir. However, within these four months, Ronnau packed in a scathing description and powerful indictment of the folly of this conflict, giving the reader glimpses of this war rarely told! After being shot on the battlefield, Ronnau was airlifted to the Kishine Barracks at the American Military Hospital on Yokohama, Japan, and finally the now defunct Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco, California. Ronnau needed 6 surgeries to repair the left side of his jaw, rebuilt using one of his ribs. After his recovery and subsequent discharge from the Army, Ronnau heroically went back to college, then medical school, graduating from the "University of Guadalajara", Mexico in 1978. He then practiced "Emergency Medicine" for the next 30 years, with stops as an emergency room physician and director in St. Louis, Mo., and at last look, at the penal institution "California Institute For Men" in Chino, California.

Penned in 2006, Ronnau qualified his book by stating that he was very grateful for the diary he kept while he was in Vietnam, and that without it he would no longer remember accurately what happened from January to April, 1967 with any degree of reliability. In creating this memoir from his diary, he had to meticulously purge from it numerous derogatory terms for ethnic groups, as well as negative comments about gays. Although it is a Vietnamese custom of normalcy, upon observing 2 ARVN soldiers holding hands, Ronnau wrote in his memoir: "The sight of 2 ARVN holding hands as they walked down the street made me stare like a shocked child. It made me wonder if VC or North Vietnamese soldiers held hands. Maybe they did, but somehow I just couldn't picture it". Blaming it on his incomplete social development at the time, it was the way a 20 year old infantryman spoke and thought then, and all negative comments as such were expunged.
However, when the reader looks deep within the lines of this book, behind all the endless and futile search and destroy missions and unproductive ambush deployments, there is a story of a less than noble conflict, and a waste of 60,000 American lives in a war doomed from the start. Ronnau starts early in this book, when he writes that after 4 months of basic training, he went AWOL for his departure date by 3 days to see Purdue defeat So. California in "The Rose Bowl", on January 1, 1967. Ronnau wrote: "My thinking was the Army was so desperate for fresh troops, that they wouldn't dare lock me up. The worst they could do was send me to Vietnam and that was already happening". Before being processed at "Travis Air Force Base" in Oakland, California and boarding a Continental Airlines flight to Vietnam with a refueling stop in Honolulu, Hawaii, Ronnau and a few thousand GI's had to get immunization shots for typhus, influenza, bubonic plague, small pox, cholera, tetanus and yellow fever. He lamented: "How could people live in a country with this much sickness? Who would want to?"

Then Ronnau recalled in his journal that while his flight was halfway between Hawaii and Vietnam, the pilot announced that the Viet Cong had blown up the runway at their final destination, Pleiku, with mortar fire, and that until the runway was repaired they would be temporarily diverted to "Clark Air Force Base" in the Philippines. Since the Pleiku airstrip could not be repaired quick enough for a commercial jet to land in such a short period of time, Ronnau's jet was rerouted to "Tan Son Nhut Airbase", the busiest airport in the world in 1967. Similar to other accounts, upon disembarking from the plane Ronnau remarked: "Air that was too wet and too hot met us at the exit, forcing me to hold my breath for a second and wonder if I could actually breathe this atmosphere. Thoughts of no air-conditioning for a long time, unless General Westmoreland invited me for dinner, crossed my mind". Before getting on a bus with windows blackened out with protective chicken wire to prevent enemy grenades being tossed in, Ronnau quipped as he walked on the tarmac: "It was surprising to see an F-100 Super Saber take off right next to us with a 10 foot cone of fire coming out of it's rear that was so close you could have roasted marsh mellows as it passed. I thought we had stopped using the F-100 after the Korean War. I had read in a magazine that the war was costing a million dollars an hour. The sight of all those jets and jet fuel flames made me think that maybe that amount was correct".

After taking a bumpy bus ride to the massive military complex at Long Binh, the largest U.S. military base in Vietnam, Ronnau wrote in his journal that when filling out "casualty reporting forms" (which family member is to be notified if he was wounded or killed) he was the only one in his group to check "no one" as he couldn't put his mother through such an ordeal. Clearly explaining the process of having his American money replaced with MPC's (military payment certificates) and/or "Dong's (the South Vietnamese currency), Ronnau ironically predicted the following: "Most of us took half and half. Our military stores accepted only MPC. Vietnamese merchants wanted piasters. However, most would accept MPC after feeling it carefully, holding it up to the light, and wondering what it would be worth if the U.S. military ever skipped town".

Ronnau's description of his very first impressions of the Vietnamese countryside are memorable. Ronnau wrote: "There were rows of beat-up cinder-block houses without doors. Pigeons perched in windows without glass. Unattended children played perilously close to the traffic zooming by. Laundry flapped in the breeze over too much domestic animal feces, which was everywhere, The yards were small, barren and unattended without any flowers to be seen. Pigs and chickens were everywhere. There were more dogs in some yards than there were children and often the dogs were cleaner. It appeared as if what we were fighting for was a giant Oriental Tijuana". The reader wonders from Ronnau's memoir if this status quo was worth fighting and dying over! Who were we saving these people from?