5.0 out of 5 stars Raw Man is compelling as Hell., September 6, 2014 By Amazon Customer Verified Purchase(Whats this?) This review is from: Raw Man (Paperback) In the mid-1970s I was in high school in Connecticut. Fred Rivera, the author of Raw Man, was in California, playing bass in a band that opened concerts for the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service. The same bands I was listening to, 3000 miles away, late at night and stoned on cheap ass Mexican weed. I was 17 and there were three separate clocks ticking away in my mind. The first clock counted off the hours of life being utterly wasted without getting laid. The second clock counted off the days until I would turn 18 and be forced to register for the draft. The third clock counted off Richard Tricky Dick Nixons slow waltz to wind down the war and stop feeding 18-year-old men into the Vietnam meat grinder. I got laid, I turned 18, and the war ended. I was lucky. Fred Rivera was not. On the same day that Freds band released an album on Mercury Records--he got drafted. ...my life had changed in just a matter of days. On Friday I was out with my friends cruising down Hollywood Boulevard, looking for girls. On Tuesday I was here. On Wednesday I saw my first dead body. A visit to Hell can be exciting, terrible, awe inspiring. If someone else goes for you. And lives to tell the story. Fred Riveras memoir-novel can be uneven, unpolished, at times clumsy. This book is not artful; the author has no intention, no desire, to manipulate his reader. Rivera is your guide, and like Dantes guide, Virgil, he is an honest, trustworthy guide. He will show you Hell. What you make of it is all up to you. If you thrill to the carefully crafted sentences of an MFA graduate writer who always has the perfect words and uses them to write about nothing, dont read this book. When you read Fred Riveras Raw Man you will know, feel, see and hear, what it is to be a 20-year-old California chicano on the edge of your own American dream in 1969--only to wake up in the jungle of Vietnam with a war machine inspired by Kafka ripping apart the men around you. You will be an unwilling soldier drafted to fight an unseen enemy in an indifferently murderous world--while stoned, drunk, tripping on LSD--without anyone even pretending to know--Why. We inch forward, always firing...We steadily fight them for a good two hours before I notice it is raining...Dont move out in front of everyone else or you will be shot. Dont fall too far behind or you might fire on friendlies...Deeper into the jungle we go. Blam! Dizzys track takes a glancing blow from a rocket propelled grenade. I see the two NVA troops who shot it and bring my own grenade launcher to my shoulders and blast them out of existence. Bobby lays down heavy fire from the fifty and we move forward. I look over at Diz and he glances back and mouths, Thank you and grins. Still the bullets keep flying. I can hear them ricocheting...The fourth hour makes this the longest firefight anyone of us has ever been in. As we crawl forward I pass dead bodies lying in the heavy downpour. Their bodies are swelling in the pools of mud, water and blood. Lifeless they lay, as if they are waxen images emerging from the soaking red earth. Raw Man is compelling as Hell.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 02:21:02 +0000
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