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| Category: Fiction:Adventure | |
| About the Book | |
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Free Excerpt From The Book (requires Adobe Reader) Got the name? Play the game. And Frank Warz has the name, no matter how it’s spelled. A recent college grad, he regrets going to school instead of Vietnam. He’s 26 years old with a fresh college degree and can’t find a job. But it’s 1975 in recession-racked Detroit. So, feeling suckered to his blue-collar soul, he perches on steel clothes-line poles in lightning storms to get a sense of combat and poses as a decorated ex-Marine to feel like one, handling the frustration of evading the Vietnam War. He takes great snapshots though. Meanwhile, personal problems build, and Warz decides to take care of everything by leaving the country in order to reclaim lost opportunity in grand style: He will join the French Foreign Legion. A pardonable hit and run car crash chases him to France where he’s introduced to the Legion’s severe world. But then the Legion rejects him.Destitute, facing a fugitive’s homecoming, Warz literally steps on unexpected funds which let him get back on track. He keeps the cash. At least, he returns the plastic. Intent on high adventure, he follows the Legion to Djibouti. En route, he buys an old camera and assumes a second persona, a battle-seasoned free-lance photographer. The work experience he’ll get, as he sees it, will let him begin a new life. Traveling first through Ethiopia, he has close calls from nomads and hyena, and has a frustrated affair with a seductive, and married, Swedish woman. Once in Djibouti, he meets a gun runner with an uncanny resemblance to "dead" rock star Jim Morrison and gets a taste of what he came for while watching the Legion catch trespassers. But the real excitement comes from a caper cooked up by a fellow American and Legion deserter. The deserter, an African-American who fought in Vietnam in the U.S. Navy, has returned to Djibouti to help a legionnaire buddy escape. However, the plan backfires in a bloody siege between legionnaires who catch them and bandits who catch them all, and Warz is forced to undergo a baptism of fire neither his fantasies nor Hollywood’s have prepared him for.
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| Reviews | |
Well done, riveting...a wonderful evocation of Ruark's "Something of Value" and the movie "The Deer Hunter." It's about time, a novel about the wannabe war hero. Green lays this problem on the line. The Play Soldier should be a Book of the Month Club pick and on the New York Times Top Ten. Very enjoyable read. Great book!...Chet Green is a consummate writer with an expertise in description and phonetically vernacular dialogue....A well-writen, -edited and -researched novel with a social-issue message. "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier." - Samuel Johnson - is the intro on the back cover...to which I say, as a woman, we are all warriors at heart...being tested daily, and quoting further: "A counterfeit Vietnam War hero seeks refuge and fulfillment in the French Foreign Legion - until it rejects him. Unable to go home and still intent on proving himself, he follows the legendary force to the Horn of Africa, but now he poses as a seasoned war photographer, too. After adventures in Ethiopia, he reaches Djibouti where people, like events, become more fantastic, particularly an American deserter who takes him to his baptism of fire, and his penance." The Play Soldier is a complex adventure novel about a wannabe war hero, Warz, who dresses for the part, like an actor, to create the image he wants to portray and convey in the play of lifeña problem of our timesñbut don't we all to some degree...dress to play a part? Could this be one of the negative side affects of too many action video games and war movies?...and everyday life does not provide sufficient challenges to test a man's true merit. Chet Green has drawn from his personal experiences as a U.S. Navy journalist in the Vietnam War and freelance photographer/writer in Africa and Sudan to create a novel about the reality of life in such exotic places. He is a consummate writer with an expertise in description and phonetically vernacular dialogue, adding color and quality to his writing style. Daniel Eliseuson, President of the International Combat Camera Association and life member of the USMC War Correspondents Association, has likened Green's writing to Robert Ruark's Something of Value, and I agreeñRuark being one of my favorite writers about Africa. It's always a true pleasure to read a well-written, -edited, researched novel with a social-issue message, and with confidence, I can highly recommend The Play Soldier to anyone interested in contemporary social issues.
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| About the Author | |
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Chet Green was a U.S. Navy journalist in the Vietnam War and freelanced as a photographer/writer in the African Horn and Sudan. His media background also includes appearances in broadcast news, commercial modeling, national ads and a movie with Clint Eastwood. |
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