Loon

A Marine Story

By: Jack McLean

Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla

"Kids like me didn't go to Vietnam", writes Jack McLean in his must-listen memoir. Raised in suburban New Jersey, he attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, but decided to put college on hold. After graduation in the spring of 1966, faced with the mandatory military draft, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps for a two-year stint. "Vietnam at the time was a country, and not yet a war", he writes. It didn't remain that way for long.

A year later, after boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, and stateside duty in Barstow, California, the Vietnam War was reaching its peak. McLean, like most available Marines, was retrained at Camp Pendleton, California, and sent to Vietnam as a grunt to serve in an infantry company in the northernmost reaches of South Vietnam. McLean's story climaxes with the horrific three-day Battle for Landing Zone Loon in June, 1968. Fought on a remote hill in the northwestern corner of South Vietnam, McLean bore witness to the horror of war and was forever changed. He returned home six weeks later to a country largely ambivalent to his service.

Written with honesty and insight, Loon is a powerful coming-of-age portrait of a boy who bears witness to some of the most tumultuous events in our history, both in Vietnam and back home.

©2009 Jack McLean (P)2019 Tantor

One of the Best Books about life of a Marine

The book is very well written in the first person and the narrator is par excellence.

Well written

This is the most engaging story of the Vietnam experience that I’ve read. It gives a different view from most that I’ve read as it deals with social class.

Loon

I’ve read about 25 books on the Vietnam War.
This is by far one of the best I’ve ever read.
I couldn’t put the book down.
Very well narrated also.

If I had to give one criticism.

Being that the book was published in 2009.

I wish Author Jack McLean would have filled us in on how some of the guys he served with at LOON are doing now, including himself.

I would like to know what happened to Captain Negron and if he made it out of Vietnam.
Along with guys like Matthews, Tillery and Camacho, just to name a few.

But all in all, it was a fantastic book.

A very good true story

Although there wasn’t a lot of action in this story, it was still very good. The narration was excellent !

Loon

Jack McLean is a very good author, his account of his late teens, his experience the Marine Corps and Vietnam are vivid, insightful and heartfelt. Loon is worth reading.!

Besides a production issue, excellent.

Story -
The author was the first Vietnam vet to gain admission to Harvard. But it's not all roses; he was exposed to Agent Orange on top of having buddies get killed before his eyes.

Performance -
Top quality storytelling skills by Chris Ciulla.
Production quality was problematic. You need to alternately raise and lower volume in places. When you don't raise volume fast enough, you need to go back 30 seconds to catch it.

Overall -
This is a real easy listen, the type of book one finishes. One finds out about NVA use of long-range heavy artillery, and how this rendered U.S. operations ineffective in some areas toward war's end. Heavy artillery isn't like mortars. It helped me understand what went wrong for the U.S. at Khe Sanh.

Great book. Horrible narration.

sensitive honest account of one Marines odyssey completely ruined by the narrator wannabe actor who felt that he had to dramatize the prose.

Narration ruined it

Great story, but the narrator ruined. Constantly talking in this weird grumbly, breathy, whispery voice that makes the book seems like he’s doing a script read for an audition of a movie. Do yourself a favor and read the book instead of listening to

Didn't hook me...

I was hoping for a new engaging take on Vietnam. Felt like id heard it before. Same old same old. But if you've never read a true war story you might like it. I quit after 2.5 hours.

Cuilla gave an okay read.

So so

Any personal account of time spent in Vietnam is valuable; however, the choice of narrator ruined the book. The narrator came off as flippant.