MWSA Review

It's 1970, years before the Vietnam War would actually end, and Brendan Leary has a problem. He wants to live in California and go to film grad school, but he's snagged by the draft. Because he has a film background, the Air Force puts him in a combat film unit not in Vietnam, but in Thailand. That location and the comparatively benign Air Force assignment seem like they'd be an easy gig. But things quickly go downhill from there in Vietnam veteran Terence A. Harkin's The Big Buddha Bicycle Race.

Leary quickly gets used to the laid-back Thai vibe, in large measure because film pals from his former stateside unit have also been assigned to the Thailand photo unit due to their vindictive first sergeant. They face terror when riding out in AC-130 Spectre gunships to film attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and face social challenges decompressing in the Thai bars. Growing recreational drug use doesn't deflect the eventual horrors of the shooting war that are visited upon them in their combat backwater.

The titular Big Buddha Bicycle Race was devised as an inter-squadron competition to raise bags of cash for Leary and his co-conspirators, but by the end of the novel the bike race has devolved into a bloody ambush that kills friends and foes, American airmen, and Thai civilians alike. It's how Leary and his friends live their lives along the way that brings home much of the tragedy that bleeds at the end.

This work is a brilliant companion to the most iconic depictions of life in a war zone, including Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H, and Barry Levinson's Good Morning, Vietnam. It depicts the sharply drawn characters, daily work drudgery, combat tragedies, political posturing, and the social upheaval of Americans in Southeast Asia in the heady days before the fall.

The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is smart, detailed, compelling, and occasionally heart-rending, and would make a completely legitimate entry in the canon as a movie.

Review by Daniel Charles Ross (April 2020) 

Author's Synopsis

It’s all working according to plan.  The draft might be keeping me, Brendan  Leary, from going to film school, but I’m getting to ride out the Vietnam War making training films in sunny California with pals like Tom Wheeler, a laid-back pothead, and hipster production officers like Lieutenant Moonbeam Liscomb, a charismatic Air Force Academy boxing champ turned vegetarian Zen Buddhist.  When Wheeler and I impulsively join local coeds protesting Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, First Sergeant Link summarily ships us off to the Rat Pack, a photo outfit stuck at obscure Ubon Air Base on the Thai-Laotian frontier. Danielle, an artist I met at a candlelight peace march, promises to wait for me even though she’s already lost a husband in Vietnam.   

Too quickly, I adapt to an air-conditioned editorial trailer and nights off base filled with drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and a growing interest in an exotic masseuse named Tukadah.  Playing drums in a blues band with a Spectre door gunner named Harley Baker, I fiddle while Laos burns and my commitment to Danielle begins to dim. Ubon might be in the middle of an air war that rages all over Southeast Asia, but my motley mates are determined to keep our heads down—until Liscomb, now a radical black nationalist, shows up and talks us into one more peace march.  

Moonbeam is arrested and I am reassigned—thanks again to Sergeant Link.  The Rat Pack needs cameramen: Liscomb and I are soon flying nightmarish nighttime combat over the Ho Chi Minh Trail with hard-nosed Baker flying along as my guardian angel.  When it’s rumored that Nixon and Kissinger are headed for China to meet Chairman Mao, we figure the war must be winding down. I dream up a bicycle race to the Big Buddha monastery as a wholesome distraction for Ubon’s airmen—and a way for me and my buddies to make a quick buck.  We get the brass on board by promising ambitious officers a last chance to put some feathers in their caps before a screwed-up war grinds to a halt. At Big Buddha I’m surprised to learn that two Americans—a former Peace Corps volunteer and an ex-USAF forward air control pilot—now live as monks at a wat on the other side of Ubon.

The band breaks up and I begin teaching night school to a class that includes the demure Miss Pawnsiri and Tukadah’s half-brother, Sergeant Prasert.  Discovering Tukadah is engaged to one airman, married to another stationed in Korea, and nursing a heroin habit doesn’t deter me from figuring I’m the guy who can straighten her out.  When Tukadah’s husband flees with her young daughter, however, she’s devastated and disappears. I try to commiserate with her brother, buying him a drink at a club filled with GIs and Thai bar girls.  Prasert disappears, and my old friend Wheeler insists the sergeant is part of the terrorist group that tried to assassinate the governor of Ubon province.  

I blame Wheeler’s paranoia on too much ganja.  With the race snowballing, Liscomb and I are made lead cameramen on the official documentary, an assignment that reminds us why we love making movies.  The start of the Big Buddha Bicycle Race is glorious—a thousand entrants from every unit on the base mean tens of thousands of dollars for the Syndicate.  Across the river, Tukadah has nearly OD’d while spending the night at Papa-sahn’s opium den. She survives, dragging herself away to find me and stop her brother, but she‘s too late.  The race ends in a bloody ambush led by Prasert, catching me and Tukadah in a crossfire. Liscomb, who has been filming from a Jolly Green, braves a hail of bullets to rescue us, only to have Tukadah die in my arms.  Lying in my hospital bed, I can hear Baker’s unit taking off, plane after plane. One of their gunners has been killed and he will be avenged.

ISBN/ASIN: Paperback 978-0-8040-1200-3, Hardcover 978-0-8040-1199-0, Electronic 978-0-8040-4090-7
Book Format(s): Hard cover, Soft cover, Kindle, ePub/iBook
Review Genre: Fiction—Literary Fiction
Number of Pages: 400