The Enlisted Men’s Club

The magazine grows heavy in his hand as it grows full. It is designed to hold twenty rounds of ammunition, but he inserts only eighteen because everyone had been told in basic training that twenty rounds could jam an M-16 during combat, an error brought to light not by the blueprints rendered by college-educated civilian engineers but by the men who had to carry the weapons into the field at the beginning of the war and put them to practical use. Something to remember if he ever gets sent to Vietnam.

Gary Reilly has written a masterful account of serving in the U.S. military. He perfectly captures the interior and exterior life of an American soldier during the turbulent Vietnam era. The Enlisted Men’s Club nails the essence of a young man waiting to be shipped out — and staring down war.

I highly recommend?The Enlisted Men?s Club?to those?who wish to enjoy a book about the last weeks before a young man ends up in Vietnam, convinced he will die there.

Gary Reilly draws a deeply true and convincing portrait of a soldier and his time in this wonderful novel about the Vietnam era. A flawed man on the verge of leaving for war struggles to find his place in his unit and in the world, in a story so well told that we can all relate to his search for human connection.