A war of the spirit in real time

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—Photos courtesy Frank Partell

Down In Laos: heroism and inspiration during the Vietnam war, by Francis J. Partel Jr. Published by Navy Log Books, Vero Beach, Fla. Copyright 2012-2014 by Francis J. Partel Jr. Hardcover, 298 pages. $29.95.

With his third novel of historical fiction, seasonal Island resident and U.S. Navy Vietnam vet Frank Partel has stepped up his literary game to deliver a suspenseful and noteworthy book that offers an insight into the events and into the minds of U.S. servicemen in America’s most controversial war.

Down in Laos is a boots-on-the-ground look at the Vietnam War, centering on events in 1968,  a pivotal year in a conflict that both sides came to know they could not win. The central protagonists are U.S. Navy Lt. JG Bob Cannon, a rising star in the deep water Navy and combat pilot Lt. Augustine (Ti) Campbell. Both men are presented within a context of their strong Judeo-Christian religious tradition that is shaken by their experiences in war.

Mr. Partel set himself a high bar for this work. Drawing on his own experiences on the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga and as a U.S. serviceman in a confusing and unpopular war, the author adds the threads of moral conflict among the men and women charged with executing a strategy about which some of them have doubts. Finally, Mr. Partel offers an acute appraisal of the realpolitik of Vietnam: that it was a proxy war involving the U.S., Russia and China that took place in a southeast Asian country named Vietnam.

Ever-present in the book are the attempts by the protagonists to personally justify their work and their suffering with their religious and moral belief systems. To his credit, Mr. Partel has managed to marry the moral and ethical discussion with an action-suspense format.

For Bob Cannon, the tests are more textural than they are for Ti Campbell, who is shot down over Laos and imprisoned and tortured by Pathet Lao insurgents who are working with North Vietnam interests. During a long captivity, Mr. Campbell lives a modern-day version of the biblical Book of Job. (Job was beset by indignities by his God, leading him to question the justice of his Higher Power).

Mr. Campbell, lying in a filthy hut, beaten, tortured and sick from tropical disease and malnutrition, must endure the heat of Job’s crucible, make his decision about his Godhead, and decide whether to survive and to rally his five-co-prisoners for an escape attempt.

For Bob Cannon, a busy, ambitious young watch commander, the decisions are different. He is not lying in a hut in the jungle nor is he in debate stateside about the justness of the war, as is his fiancé. He is supporting air strikes against 15,000 North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars who have encircled 7,000 Marines holding high ground in and around Khe Sanh, a key resupply route for the North Vietnamese. He decides his focus has to be on saving comrades who are in harm’s way while holding on to his reservations.

Mr. Partel deftly draws two grizzled ship senior officer warriors, veterans of World War II and Korea and long past spiritual debate. They want to save U.S. lives and to smite their enemy. Mr. Partel offers us a counterpoint in Capt. Ogilvy Osborne, every bit as grizzled a combat warrior but who came out of the Chosin Reservoir nightmare in Korea with a different idea and became a chaplain ministering to troops in harm’s way.

Of particular value to this reader was a heightened sense of understanding that Mr. Partel’s characters provide about what the hell really happened during Vietnam, which for many Americans was and remains a welter of overload — images and stories of events in the war without texture or understanding.

Now, Mr. Partel is a Navy man. He went on to become a successful New York banker, but he is a shipshape, squared-away guy. That’s where he lives, so to speak. But in three historical naval novels about the Vietnam era, he has shown an ability to write books that humanize the experience and provide greater understanding of the 1960s cauldron.