Club Saigon

"Robert Martin Grossman’s Club Saigon (Koehler Books, 412 pp. $30.94, hardcover; $21.95, paper; $3.99, Kindle) is a brutally violent murder mystery set in Los Angeles nearly two decades after the end of the Vietnam War. The story line goes back and forth between late-sixties South Vietnam and early-nineties L.A. This is ingeniously represented by the fact that a bar in Pleiku and one in L.A. both share the name, Club Saigon.
The story begins in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam early 1968 when a Special Forces compound is overrun by forces of the North Vietnamese Army. Grossman—who served in the Green Berets himself—writes that six good men died on that night while back home “the hippies were burning the flag.”
The next thing we know it’s twenty-two years later and Jerry Andrews is a detective with the LAPD. He left the Army after three tours in the Vietnam War and is now basically killing time while he waits for his retirement in three years.
He’s investigating the murder of a Vietnamese man in an alley in Little Saigon, a one-square mile area in the City of Angels. One of the dead man’s his ears had been removed by his assailant. That bit of information causes Andrews to recall an incident from his time in Nam.
Andrews lives in a one-room efficiency apartment. His “last wife” had left him, he hasn’t attended church in over ten years, and he spends a great deal of his time at a cop bar called 44 Magnum. Sometimes he has nightmares based on his combat experiences in the Ia Drang Valley. He also suffers from migraine headaches, which are coming more frequently and more painfully.
Additional dead bodies begin showing up in the alleys of Little Saigon. All Vietnamese, each missing an ear. Andrews somehow doesn’t consider the possibility that there’s a serial killer on the loose until after the sixth death. This is also a guy who seems surprised to walk into a men’s room in a bar and notice that it “smelled like piss.”
As he continues his investigation, Andrews comes across evidence that could involve a few of his Special Forces buddies—guys he’s had no contact with since the war. Then one of them becomes his main suspect. There’s a problem though: the man has been dead for years.
Andrews and his buddies don’t seem to be a very enlightened bunch. They’ve apparently always harbored prejudice against Vietnamese. As Andrews puts it: he’s still “slightly racist when it came to Vietnamese.”
During the war Andrews and company spoke of “ARVN assholes” and “fucking farmers,” and were known to urinate on dead enemy bodies. More than twenty years later they wonder why Vietnamese refugees in America can’t “learn proper English,” and think of them as people who typically “eat dog meat.”
Grossman’s novel explores some interesting concepts such as astral projection, dreamscapes, shapeshifters, and “counting coup.” As brutally told as this story is, it’s light reading, falling into the area of testosterone-driven revenge fantasy."