Review of Deadly Waters: The Vietnam Naval War And Its Aftermath
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Review of Deadly Waters: The Vietnam Naval War And Its Aftermath
[Following is a volunteer review of "Deadly Waters: The Vietnam Naval War And Its Aftermath" by Randy Miller.]
While I was reading Deadly Waters, I kept circling back to the image of rain—acidic, relentless, and falling over land that would take generations to heal. Miller doesn’t go out of his way to announce the environmental horror of Vietnam, which I think makes it feel even heavier. It just sits there in the background, creeping into the story the same way Agent Orange crept into lungs and riverbeds. There’s a moment where a deck chief looks up at the sky and jokes about how much of “that sh*t” the planes must’ve dumped that day. I remember pausing there. Because behind the joke, there’s a sick kind of recognition: they knew. Not fully maybe, but enough to understand that the jungle wasn’t the only thing being poisoned.
And that’s something this book does well—letting things unravel without a lecture. It shows you the damage instead of spelling it out. You see it in how Zack deteriorates, first physically, then in spirit. You hear it in the casual tone of the crew, who’ve already learned to normalize the strange and the wrong. They talk about the defoliants like they’d talk about the weather. I’m not sure if that makes it more tragic or more human. Maybe both. Either way, it works.
What I also found really affecting, in a way I didn’t expect, was how the book handles trauma. Zack’s PTSD isn’t some tidy subplot—it’s a slow bleed. It shows up in his silences, in his reaction to things that don’t seem dramatic on the surface. Even early on, standing guard in the rain, you can feel something stretching tight inside him. His dreams later, his sense of detachment—those moments aren’t shouted into the narrative. They slip in, which is exactly how they slip into the lives of real veterans. At least, from the stories I’ve heard, that’s how it sounds.
But I did stumble a little on how the book moves through its emotional terrain. Some transitions feel jarring—like going from a firefight to a funeral without time to really sit with either one. I found myself rereading a few pages just to catch up emotionally, which pulled me out of the story. It’s not that the scenes themselves lack power—far from it. The problem, in my opinion, is rhythm. The emotional beats don’t always get the breath they need before something else hits. Like Zack’s illness and death, for example. It’s incredibly moving, especially how the crew reacts and how his wife, Tally, endures the loss. But the pacing around that part felt off. I wish the book had lingered a bit longer in those quiet spaces between suffering and response.
Still, I think the emotional honesty more than outweighs that imbalance. Zack’s deterioration is handled with such dignity. You can feel the betrayal in his bones—not just by the war, but by the country that turned away once the uniforms came off. The funeral scene, especially with Bill and Gerd processing everything in their own quiet ways, left a real weight behind. It’s not clean grief. It’s tired, messy, unglamorous. And I can say that it felt painfully real.
So I’m going with 4 out of 5 stars. The book earns nearly all of that with its raw humanity, its refusal to tidy up war into something narratively convenient, and its blunt acknowledgment of what chemical warfare really meant—for the land, for the people, and for those who survived long enough to be forgotten by the system. The missing star, for me, is about those abrupt shifts in tone that occasionally made it hard to settle fully into the story’s rhythm. If some scenes had been given just a little more room to breathe, I think they would’ve hit even harder. But the strength of the material is still there—sitting in the mud, in the rain, in the bodies of men who were used up, then denied.
******
Deadly Waters: The Vietnam Naval War And Its Aftermath
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
While I was reading Deadly Waters, I kept circling back to the image of rain—acidic, relentless, and falling over land that would take generations to heal. Miller doesn’t go out of his way to announce the environmental horror of Vietnam, which I think makes it feel even heavier. It just sits there in the background, creeping into the story the same way Agent Orange crept into lungs and riverbeds. There’s a moment where a deck chief looks up at the sky and jokes about how much of “that sh*t” the planes must’ve dumped that day. I remember pausing there. Because behind the joke, there’s a sick kind of recognition: they knew. Not fully maybe, but enough to understand that the jungle wasn’t the only thing being poisoned.
And that’s something this book does well—letting things unravel without a lecture. It shows you the damage instead of spelling it out. You see it in how Zack deteriorates, first physically, then in spirit. You hear it in the casual tone of the crew, who’ve already learned to normalize the strange and the wrong. They talk about the defoliants like they’d talk about the weather. I’m not sure if that makes it more tragic or more human. Maybe both. Either way, it works.
What I also found really affecting, in a way I didn’t expect, was how the book handles trauma. Zack’s PTSD isn’t some tidy subplot—it’s a slow bleed. It shows up in his silences, in his reaction to things that don’t seem dramatic on the surface. Even early on, standing guard in the rain, you can feel something stretching tight inside him. His dreams later, his sense of detachment—those moments aren’t shouted into the narrative. They slip in, which is exactly how they slip into the lives of real veterans. At least, from the stories I’ve heard, that’s how it sounds.
But I did stumble a little on how the book moves through its emotional terrain. Some transitions feel jarring—like going from a firefight to a funeral without time to really sit with either one. I found myself rereading a few pages just to catch up emotionally, which pulled me out of the story. It’s not that the scenes themselves lack power—far from it. The problem, in my opinion, is rhythm. The emotional beats don’t always get the breath they need before something else hits. Like Zack’s illness and death, for example. It’s incredibly moving, especially how the crew reacts and how his wife, Tally, endures the loss. But the pacing around that part felt off. I wish the book had lingered a bit longer in those quiet spaces between suffering and response.
Still, I think the emotional honesty more than outweighs that imbalance. Zack’s deterioration is handled with such dignity. You can feel the betrayal in his bones—not just by the war, but by the country that turned away once the uniforms came off. The funeral scene, especially with Bill and Gerd processing everything in their own quiet ways, left a real weight behind. It’s not clean grief. It’s tired, messy, unglamorous. And I can say that it felt painfully real.
So I’m going with 4 out of 5 stars. The book earns nearly all of that with its raw humanity, its refusal to tidy up war into something narratively convenient, and its blunt acknowledgment of what chemical warfare really meant—for the land, for the people, and for those who survived long enough to be forgotten by the system. The missing star, for me, is about those abrupt shifts in tone that occasionally made it hard to settle fully into the story’s rhythm. If some scenes had been given just a little more room to breathe, I think they would’ve hit even harder. But the strength of the material is still there—sitting in the mud, in the rain, in the bodies of men who were used up, then denied.
******
Deadly Waters: The Vietnam Naval War And Its Aftermath
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
