With a curious blend of convincing detail and men’s adventure fantasy, this account of a Massachusetts “country boy”’s experience as a paratrooper in Vietnam charts a childhood of fallout shelters and science-lab bombmaking, training at Fort Dix and elsewhere, much vigorous lovemaking, and at last the experience of leaping from a CV-2 Caribou and into action. In country Shannon—either the author himself, or a fictionalized version—will face deadly wildlife, Viet Cong patrols, disgraced Foreign Legion mercenaries, and women eager for his amorous attention. One mission results in 27 confirmed kills but also a major’s declaration that “I regret that we cannot report on your success or the body count.” (That’s in spite of an introductory note carping at Hollywood movies that present soldiers as “fantastic super-heroes.”)

Whether readers buy that or not, Shannon’s an amusing, engaging storyteller, attentive to technical detail and ironic twists, especially when the tale turns on showing up blowhards, authority figures, or enemies. That’s true of the memoir’s first third, too. The funny, often dangerous stories of youthful hunting hijinks, car racing, gas-siphoning, and encounters with the police—including a doozy of a revenge plot against his town’s chief—honor a bygone era of childhood troublemaking.

Shadow Dancer is classified as fiction, though introductory notes insist it’s based on a true story. Either way, for all the persuasive detail about military life, many stories here are quite literally incredible, such as the narrator’s account of his first “burial duty,” in which he informs a young mother that her son was killed in paratrooper training—and then shares with her several days of passion. (Sex scenes include terms like “love lava.”) A cloak-and-dagger episode involving Shannon—or some version thereof—getting the drop on rogue CIA agents potentially involved in the Kennedy assassination is too hard to follow to assess its credibility. Page-long paragraphs and a tendency toward run-on sentences also diminish narrative clarity and momentum.

Takeaway: This pulpy account of a country boy’s experience in Vietnam is quite literally incredible.

Great for fans of: John Ringo, Gregory A. Daddis’s Pulp Vietnam.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: B+
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: C+
Marketing copy: B-