Book Review: Sergeant Dickinson

Sergeant Dickinson 
By Jerome Gold
Soho Press (1999)
180 pp

Sergeant Dickinson brings home the horror of the Viet Nam War wrapped in a tidy, decorative package that reeks of napalm. Sergeant Dickinson, called Dixie, is a flawed hero so damaged by the carnage of battle that he has lost his capacity to be human. He is not a beast, an asshole, or a cowboy, as any one of these singular descriptions would suggest. He’s all three descriptors rolled into one shell of a former human being.

The dark humor of combat runs rampant throughout this story. One battle-worn soldier describes how getting shot is far preferable than suffering an agonizing death by fire. Then there is a hilarious exchange when Roy gets reassigned and he easily parts with his personal mementos, including photographs, that once gave his life meaning. The only thing he wants to hold onto are his crossbows. Wendell is so brain damaged from wounds sustained in combat that his primary enjoyment is chronic masturbation. Then there is the joke: how do you know the Polish nurse isn’t wearing panties? Dandruff falls onto the tops of her shoes.

The only thing clean about the book is its spare, powerful prose. There are glimpses of women that far exceed the usual typecasting of women during wartime as nurses and whores. Dixie has interludes with his wife Elaine that are not fun or heartwarming. And Dixie observes the deterioration of another marriage between Laurel and her bedridden soldier husband who is dying of cancer. In Dixie’s eyes, the dying soldier is nasty to his wife because he knows she’ll outlive him and go on to screw other men. There isn’t ample time to know Stein’s mother and why she wants her son dead.

America never did heal from the wounds suffered in Viet Nam. It’s not fair that our young men were sent to Viet Nam to fight in a war that was unpopular and divided the country. Economic inequality and social injustice has always existed in America, but Viet Nam drove the point home. Rich boys didn’t go to Viet Nam. The poor, working class and working poor were killed or wounded in disproportionate numbers.

A great segment in the books is when a group of battle-weary soldiers banter about making the presidents, kings, or dictators of each country fight to the death, instead of deploying thousands of troops to die on their behalf. The discussion devolves into casting a freak show of the gory and brutally maimed to drive home the horrors of war to regular folk. “See the unwalking dead. Paraplegics. Quadriplegics. Stick pins in them. Kick them. Punch them. They feel no pain. For your entertainment.”

Most of us have never been in combat. We can never experience the cruel intensity of war unless we have lived it. Those who have experienced war are truly different from everyone else. Sergeant Dickinson drives that point home. Driven by a lust for blood, combat and survival, Dixie is overtaken by the psychological condition defined as blood simple. War is hell and there is no hell like war.