Bac Si: a novel by Tom Bellino

Reviewed by Gerti

“Bac Si” is a “good news, bad news” scenario. First the good news for author Tom Bellino. His story, of protagonist Tommy Staffieri’s time as a Navy psychologist thrust into the intrigues of the Vietnam War is fascinating. For someone only acquainted with the war as the subject of TV news stories, it was interesting to hear a first-hand account of those trauma-inducing times. It was also wonderful the way Bellino introduced the words of that culture, like “Bac Si” (meaning doctor) and “Cam on” (meaning thank you). I enjoyed reading how compassionately Staffieri dealt with patients, even Vietnamese ones, whether on American soil, or on the “Angel of the Orient”, the hospital ship Repose.

Also interesting were the details about naval life for an officer, including terminology like BOQ (for Bachelor Officer’s Quarters) and BuPers (the Bureau of Personnel). Since I knew ROTC officers back in college, some terms were familiar to me, and others completely foreign. But watching the highly-biographical character progress from being a naïve Junior Lieutenant in the Navy to a man honored with a Silver Star because of being stabbed while gaining intel in Vietnam, was largely a rewarding trip. I also enjoyed hearing about the Montagnard’s, the native mountain people of North Vietnam, and how they helped US soldiers there survive during the war against the Viet Cong.

Bellino has interesting insights. He feels, for example, that the conflict in Vietnam was their Civil War, with brothers often fighting on opposite sides, comparing it to the American conflict that occurred roughly a hundred years earlier. That helped put things into perspective for me. It was also a revelation that our military used LSD in order to extract information from enemy combatants, because apparently one can’t lie when one is under the influence of that drug. Those passages in the book were both humorous and mild-blowing in many different ways.

But the bad news is that this book needed the firm hand of an editor, which is supposed to be part of the package when you work with vanity publisher “Outskirts Press,” but this author got gipped. I caught a number of misspellings, and the comma usage was crazy. There were a lot of them, and they weren’t always in the right places. Some sentences suffered from too many, others from too few, and that poor flow ultimately detracts from the book’s storyline.

My other critique, and it is common in first books by male authors, is that there is too much sex! I understand about PTSD in soldiers, but I’m stressed out from reading about the hero’s love affairs. It’s almost always self indulgent, whether its John Grisham writing about how young attractive women fall for lawyers (“Pelican Brief”) or Michael Connelly detailing how young ladies get the hots for cops (in his early Harry Bosch novels). In the end, I just don’t care who’s in bed with the protagonist, whether it’s a sexy French model or his long-time love. The real emotional impact of the book comes from the terrible days spent “in country”.