Helms tells it like it was in 'The Proud Bastards'

Yesterday, I finished reading “The Proud Bastards: One Marine’s Journey from Parris Island through the Hell of Vietnam” by E. Michael Helms.

This book is the best first-hand account I’ve read about the Vietnam War, and I highly recommend it if you have an interest in the Marine Corps or the Vietnam War.

Here’s how the book’s publisher, Simon and Schuster, describes the book.

“In 1967, a young E. Michael Helms boarded a bus to the legendary grounds of Parris Island, where mere boys were forged into hardened Marines -- and sent to the jungles of Vietnam. It was the first stop on a journey that would forever change him -- and by its end, he would be awarded the Purple Heart Medal, Combat Action Ribbon, Presidential Unit Citation, Navy Unit Citation, and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry.

“From the brutality and endurance-straining ordeals of boot camp to the endless horror of combat, Helms paints a vivid, unflinchingly realistic depiction of the lives of Marines in training and under fire. As powerful and compelling a battlefield memoir as any ever written, Helms's ‘grunt's-eye’ view of the Vietnam War, the men who fought it, and the mindless chaos that surrounded it, is truly a modern military classic.”

In my mind, the thing that Helms does best is write battlefield action scenes. He writes these in a stream-of-consciousness style that whips up the pace and casts punctuation to the four winds. You can almost feel the hot rounds sizzling through the air and mortars shaking the earth.

Decorated Marine and Vietnam veteran, Sid Lambert of Evergreen, recommended the book to me, saying that Helms’s book tells it like it was in those days. He said that Helms especially nailed down the way that Marines talked back then and said that the book was a very accurate depiction of how things were during that time in Vietnam.

In the end, I enjoyed “The Proud Bastards.” Have any of you had a chance to read this book? What did you think about it? What other Vietnam era books would you recommend? Let us know in the comments section below.