PERMISSION TO KILL: Brian Wizard

Wizard's book is the story of war. In itself that does not seem especially remarkable; such stories, after all, are as prolific and endless as wars themselves.

Neither is this book remarkable for the issues and questions it raises about the conflict in Vietnam. It does not purport to apologize for the horror of battles, nor to indict the righteousness of those enmeshed in them.

Rather it is the honesty, albeit brutal, of Brian Wizard's tale that makes it both remarkable and highly readable.

"Permission to Kill" loosely falls into the category of a novel, but there seems no escaping the conclusion that it is substantially factual, with only the barest gloss of fictitious invention.

It is the tale of Willy Maykett (a bad pun?), a peacetime loser who becomes a somebody simply because he can kill Vietcong faster and better than most others; and it is this talent that keeps him and his crew alive a little longer.

In Willy's world, survival is the only consideration and making it through the next mission is the barest compensation for a maelstrom of M 60's, enemy ground fire and butchery. It becomes an exhilarating "trip" outside and beyond human responsibility for Willy and his colleagues.

When there is no action, Willy's world becomes a colourless collage of getting stoned rock'n'roll, Jack Daniels and beer, the fear of VD and drab supply runs simply called "pigs and rice".

But his war is not what we often mistakenly believe wars to be. There is no room for honour, morality or even courage, simply because there is no leeway for it. There are only two states of being - life and death. Willy is gunner on the helicopter "Pollution" so named because it uses smoke canisters to mark enemy positions. His war is fought form the air, spewing out a stream of tracer; there is no guilt because he is outside reality and above the recriminations of killing face to face.

Maykett himself says he is "flying through he air in a capsule of security". His war seems at times like all the fun of the fair, an exhilarating game of death, with stomach churning roller coaster rides, shooting at clowns and throwing balls at bottles; except that the earth below is littered with blackened corpses.

The targets on the ground are merely objects to destroy, before they can destroy him. Willy says he only kills when he has to, to keep himself alive, to stay sane.

Essentially this is the simple man war; absent from it are politics, questions, morality and God. This is the harshest reality of all where there is no real option but to kill or be killed, where all human dignity is overwhelmed by the one desperate pursuit of life, which becomes in turn a frenzy of killing.

But to dismiss Wizard's story as simply a barbaric romp through 220 pages or so of blood, guts and fun would be dramatically wrong.

Wizard is simply painting a clear picture of a reality that is very true to him and leaves the implications understated. The readers must draw their own interpretations, and that is the greatest challenge the book offers.

The author ultimately leaves one pondering the overwhelming suspicion that the single truth of war is that men enjoy it, and that Willy Maykett could be anyone of us.

-Tony Anderton