Grady Myers was a big, artistic teenager with a poor grade point average and a yen for adventure. It was 1968, the height of the Vietnam War, and the U.S. Army was desperate for troops. It overlooked Grady's extreme nearsightedness and transformed him into Hoss, an M-60 machine gunner. He did find adventure in Vietnam, but also a world gone very crazy -- or, as the locals put it, beaucoup dien cai dau. 

"Boocoo Dinky Dow: My short, crazy Vietnam War" is by turns funny and sobering. In this memoir, illustrated with his drawings, Grady recounts his military initiation at Fort Lewis, where there could be a fuzzy line between training and torture. He describes the intensity of Vietnam, where an old man carrying a bundle of sticks posed a moral dilemma and a young man would weigh the burden of his virginity against the dubious pleasures of riverbank prostitutes. Grady's explosives-happy comrades in Charlie Company sometimes posed the greatest danger. But, in a dramatic ambush, that same bunch of crazy soldiers risked their lives to save his.

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