The Best of Medic in the Green Time
by Marc Levy Winter Street Press £19.24

Marc Levy is a much-decorated US military veteran whose Medic in the Green Time website since 2007 has recorded his own and fellow vets’ experiences of the Vietnam War, a grotesque conflict that, owing largely to Hollywood (425 Vietnam war films listed online), still registers in the public imagination as a paradigm for the unspeakable savagery of modern warfare.

Levy divides this collection into three sections – War, Poetry and Postwar(sic). Inevitably these descriptions of the daily horrors fuelled by fear, anger, even jaundiced graveyard humour, are retrospectively remembered and virtually all these voices reflect varying states of ongoing nightmares which the label PTSD does little to capture.

Films, however “realistic,” are essentially artistic fantasies, easily compartmentalised, whereas verbatim reportage can invest the statistics – 58,000 Americans and three to four million Vietnamese slaughtered – with something of what it was like to survive in the midst of this apocalypse.