Barnes, H. Lee.  When We Walked Above the Clouds: A Memoir of Vietnam. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.  299 pages, $29.95—It is almost a requirement that wartime memoirs come loaded with pictures: pictures of the author, pictures of the people discussed in its pages, and pictures of the local landscape.  Every reader wants to know what the enemy and the locals look like, what soldiers who are only known by nicknames and last names could really look like within their context, and what natural barriers they are up against.  It is so common in fact, that the absence of pictures in H. Lee Barnes’ extraordinary wartime memoir, When We Walked Above the Clouds: A Memoir of Vietnam (University of Nebraska Press, $29.95), seems to suggest that Barnes is trying to do something different with his book.

Barnes starts his memoir from his difficult childhood and ends it in the deadly and rigorous jungles of Vietnam, the half-century that elapsed allowing the memories of both to settle.  As a kid, his blended family followed his stepfather from broadcast job to broadcast job around the west and southwest.  The brutal life lessons, or the man who delivered them, forced the young H. Lee Barnes to decide to define manhood in his own way: as a soldier who accepts the hardest challenges and excels at them.  First it was joining the military without waiting for the draft.  Then it was qualifying for Special Forces training and the vaunted Green Berets.  Finally, it was volunteering for Vietnam when the low-intensity conflict was the only game in town.

Before the real troop buildup in the mid-1906s, Barnes and his team deployed to a mountainous outpost named Tra Bong.  As one of the youngest on the team, Barnes was relegated to the jobs no one else wanted or would do: cleaning, building, dealing with waste, and working on the team’s weapons.  In addition to not being fully accepted into the inner circle of his team, he also was an outsider with respect to the hodgepodge of inhabitants in their encampment, from Aussies to Montagnards.  But, as with many long-term military deployments, Barnes was able to rise to the inner circle by both proving his competence and becoming one of the team’s old timers due to the high personnel turnover for a team in country.  In other words, for a young soldier trying to define and prove his manhood, it was an ideal scenario.

Some of the reasons for the high turnover rates were normal, such as team members rotating out as scheduled, but others were more tragic.  One such event was when members of Barnes’ team, including the commander and several other respected members, happen into an ambush during an ill-timed patrol.  The lost patrol not only proves the devastating power of the enemy forces, but the absolute isolation of American forces in the early days of the Vietnam War.  As the replacements come in, Barnes is less than impressed with what he finds.

Whatever challenges he faces with respect to his peers, many of whom he shows real contempt for, Barnes realizes himself to be a truly rare warrior, the kind that is cut out for the harsh and lonely conditions and situations that face the Special Forces soldier.  He manages to lead indigenous and American soldiers on countless patrols through the high mountain passes of Vietnam, the walks that gave him the title of his book so many years later.  The stories are personal, powerful, and at times violent and heroic, although Barnes never presents them as such.

In fact, Barnes writes that there was nothing extraordinary about the things that he experienced in Vietnam.  Compared to some of the more action-packed Vietnam memoirs on bookshelves today, especially those written later in the war after the troop buildups and the high-intensity conflict, that may be the case.  But what is extraordinary about this book is the way it is told.  It is unsentimental to its core, it examines his combat experiences as a continuation of his difficult childhood and rise to manhood, and it offers no real hero or heroic cause.  Barnes pulls back the curtain on his life and the lives of others, and he spares no one, not even himself.

Perhaps the best aspect of the book, though, is the attention Barnes pays to the words he puts on the page.  Each one carries with it a meaning and a weight that makes his story far more than a war memoir or even a coming of age story.  Perhaps that is why Barnes and his editors chose not to include pictures within the pages of this beautiful and exceptional memoir.  Pictures, when compared to Barnes’ writing, are so limiting, literally, a snapshot of clues with no context.  Barnes paints a better picture with his words than a few grainy reprints ever could.

Caleb S. Cage

The Nevada Review