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Search and Destroy
by Dean Hughes
Atheneum, 2005. 216 pages.
Reviewed by Sam Wilt
Dean Hughes’s novel Search and Destroy is about a young man, Rick, who has just graduated high school. He doesn’t have enough money to go to college and he ends up dumping his girlfriend. She always said that all his life he was going to just hang around with his friends on the beach playing volleyball and going to parties. After thinking long and hard, though, he finally decides to join the army. Maybe, he thinks, the army will help him shape up. Maybe the army will help him become a man. Maybe the army will help him become a great writer. And although he is concerned that if he leaves his dad will beat his mom or his little sister, he still joins.
When Rick gets to Vietnam he is trained to fight in the jungles as part of a special unit called the Charlie Rangers. While out on patrol a sniper shoots at them. They run for cover, but one of Rick’s squad mates is shot. When he finds cover, Rick manages to shoot the sniper, but when they return to camp he can’t stop shuddering. His best friend in the squad tries to talk it out with him, telling Rick about the first time he killed a man. But it doesn’t really help Rick, and when he gets home from Vietnam he is still confused about all the reasons he joined the army.
Rick was a changed man when he came back from Vietnam. He doesn’t want to do anything fun or hang out with the friends he left behind to join the army. I learned from this story that even though to most people war is just a video game or something to watch and joke about, it is dangerous, and the men and women who have to serve in the armed forces to protect our country should have our respect. This book tells us that war isn’t just a video game or movie. It shows the sort of events that actually happen in war, and makes it clear that it is really bad. War changes people. It changes how they act and how they feel.
Sam Wilt is in seventh grade going on eighth at Ottoson Middle School in Arlington, Massachusetts.
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