Pullman author will read from war memoir

Julie Titone will read from the memoir that she co-authored with the late artist Grady Myers, “Boocoo Dinky Dow: My short, crazy Vietnam War,” March 21 at 5:30 p.m. at Neill Public Library in Pullman.

Joining her will be WSU professor of English and Vietnam veteran Victor Villanueva Jr. The book takes its title from soldiers’ slang pronunciation of “beaucoup dien cai dau,” meaning very crazy. A reviewer for the Vietnam Veterans of America called the memoir “Lucid ... well-told, beautifully illustrated and infused with humor.”

Washington State Magazine praised it as “Part ‘M*A*S*H’ and part ‘Full Metal Jacket.’ ” Myers was an aimless Idaho teenager, when, desperate for troops, the U.S. Army overlooked his extreme nearsightedness and transformed him into an M-60 machine gunner. He recounts his military initiation at Fort Lewis, Wash. He describes the intensity of Vietnam, where an old man carrying a bundle of sticks posed a moral dilemma and where his explosives-happy comrades in Charlie Company sometimes posed the greatest danger.

Myers returned from four months in Vietnam with a Purple Heart and spent the rest of his Army career recovering from his war wounds. He went on to a professional art career. His employers included the Idaho Statesman in Boise, the Spokesman-Review in Spokane and the Idaho Panhandle National Forests in Coeur d’Alene. He died in 2011.

Myers and Titone were newspaper colleagues when they produced the first manuscript of his memoir in the late 1970s. They eventually married, had a son, divorced yet remained friends. When he became bedridden several years ago, they revived the manuscript to give him a project.