Of Rice and Men
A Novel of Vietnam
Spreading democracy takes more than cutting-edge military hardware. Winning the hearts and minds of a troubled nation is a special mission we give to bewildered young soldiers who can’t speak the native language, don’t know the customs, can’t tell friends from enemies, and–in this wonderfully outrageous Iraq-era novel about Vietnam–wonder why they have to risk their lives spraying peanut plants, inoculating pigs, and hauling miracle rice seed for Ho Chi Minh.
Brash, eye-opening, and surprisingly comic, Of Rice and Men displays the same irreverent spirit as the black-comedy classics Catch-22 and MASH–as it chronicles the American Army’s little known “Civil Affairs” soldiers who courageously roam hostile war zones, not to kill or to destroy, but to build, to feed, and to…
Richard Galli was a member of GIs for Peace, learning Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute in El Paso, Texas, when the brand-new draft lottery assigned the call-up number "330" to his birthday. A lucky draw would have required his entry into the armed forces only if the North Vietnamese had established a beachhead in California. He wasn't so lucky. For more than 20 years Galli was a litigator in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1999, he closed his law office so that he could spend more time at home helping to care for his son, who had become paralyzed in a swimming accident on the Fourth of July, 1998. Galli's first book, Rescuing Jeffrey, is an unconventional memoir about the…
