Marble Mountain Memoirs

Author's Summary

MWSA Review

In 2005, Robert Romaniello was devastated with the news that he had Stage Four Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a result of Agent Orange defoliant used in Viet Nam.  As he went through the unpleasant chemo treatments to fight the disease, he reflected back on his life, and particularly the year he spent in the war zone during 1969-70.

He felt compelled to write a memoir about his military experiences, not to leave a legacy of a warrior, but as an atonement for his conduct as an 18-year-old soldier with the 633^rd Collection, Classification and Salvage Company, a rear echelon unit he described as the junkyard of the Army located near Da Nang at the base of Marble Mountain.

In reading, you feel Romaniello’s anguish in coming to grips with his mortality, personal failures as a soldier and with the failings of a nation that sent brave men and women into harm’s way, many of whom like him were still paying the price 40 years later.

The memoirs make few references to his official military duties as he described in vivid and lengthily detail about being stoned most of the time on marijuana, opium, LSD or a variety of other drugs with friends in his unit who had little regard for discipline, authority or responsibility.  He described the psychedelic wonderment of watching flares and tracers in the distance, and the misty spray from C-130s coating the countryside.  He wrote of being high during his nights on duty in the guard towers, smoking marijuana and  being oblivious to the fact the enemy could have slipped past him or a sniper could have easily taken aim on glowing end of the joint..

Somehow, despite several instances of going AWOL and threatening his squad leader with his rifle, he got through the war and returned home to an honorable discharge. Romaniello did not write about his life as he matured over the next 35 years except to mention that he had children and ran in two marathons before cancer knocked him for a loop.

“Marble Mountain Memoirs” is a self-incriminating retrospective of brief military career in which he concluded: “I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that no matter how I tried to convince myself that I fought against the madness, I was too busy getting stoned to even think about the big picture.….Cancer taught me what I knew to the core of my being: I was part of the problem, and so were every one of the Dirty Dozen, sitting out the war in our smoke-filled, rose-colored haze. We aided and abetted the enemy with every joint we smoked and with every order we disobeyed….Instead of fighting against the war, we unknowingly took sides with the enemy, and were every bit as treasonous as Hanoi Jane Fonda.”

He also expressed much bitterness in the lack of support for the troops by the American people and government: “It makes me mad, damned mad! Mad that so may lives were lost, that so much of our youth was wasted, that we were deceived into believing we were fighting for freedom, while politicians back home stole our dignity; they didn’t even have the strength of their convictions to declare Vietnam a war.”

Reviewed by: Joe Epley (2012)