The story of Canada’s involvement in the Vietnam War is not widely known outside of Canada. Indeed, for large swathes of the Canadian population, it is something that is rarely spoken about—and then only in hushed tones. With THE WAR MACHINE, Barry W. Levy seeks to restore some of that cultural memory, and in large part succeeds.
The year is 1988. David Tacker, known as “Kick,” is a grizzled veteran (of four tours, no less) of Canada’s clandestine Vietnam operations, now seeking to expose the truth about the country’s involvement in the war. He does so against a backdrop of the seedy, run-down districts of Vancouver. The mood is noirish with a dash of Lee Child thrown in, but with an emphasis on the former: the rain, the drains, the lowlife of “Van” are subjected to lengthy excurses, all in the present tense. Such passages, heavy on atmosphere, often work better than the more workaday references to Kick’s shady dealings with the CIA—for whom he has worked but has now gone rogue, or something very much like it. When they make their occasional appearance in the narrative, the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans would make for a poor fit but for the fact that Kick is no Jack Reacher: he suffers from hallucinations, a by-product of his PTSD, though he can still throw a punch and spot an operative at a hundred paces.
The plot is slow to get going, but when it does, the reader settles into a race-against-time in which Kick strives, with the help of a local journalist, to reveal his story before being killed by an agent of one of the shadowy organizations—the “question mark” in the middle of his imaginings—who sought to benefit financially from the war. Some of this material is somewhat telegraphed (the conversation regarding the geopolitics of war between journalists is a little too transparently for the reader’s benefit), but otherwise the material is clinical. The combat scenes are related with verve, and the reader’s ride as jolting and unpredictable as the soldiers’ must have been. War is hell, but it is so much more hellish when one is not supposed to be fighting it.
Barry W. Levy’s THE WAR MACHINE comprises a mixture of Vietnam War story and Jack Reacher-esque prose in pursuit of the little-known story of Canada’s part in the Vietnam War.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader