Laughing War

Bien Hoa airbase, outside Saigon, wasn't a very funny place, but Barney's job had one advantage: he always played to a packed house. The soldiers flocked to his shows, and the war-zone comedian coaxed his battle-weary audiences first into chuckles and then into guffaws of healing laughter with material drawn from the lunacy around them: the little old VC with the single-shot rifle taking potshots at the jets, the international "peace-keeping" mission, the Vietnamese "car wash" racket, the numbering routine of army life, the officers One officer in particular: Colonel Isaacs, the blood-and-guts commander of the base, a driven man whose soldiers pay the price of his obsessions. Barney often ridiculed his authority from in front of the footlights, and after hours he wooed the colonel's woman, Donna, a beautiful singer with a secret. So far, he had gone unpunished But the colonel had included Barney in his plan for a jungle showdown with the enemy, a battle that would turn an abandoned firebase into a bloody killing ground and the scene of Barney's greatest performance. LAUGHING WAR does for Vietnam what Catch-22 did for World War II, laying bare the absurdity of war with a taut, fast-moving, darkly humorous tale of romance and suspense in a combat zone.