`Into the Green: A Reconnaissance by Fire,' by Cherokee Paul McDonald; Plume.(South Florida Sun-Sentinel)

A quarter-century after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War is unfashionable again.

In the '80s and early '90s, America tried to come to grips, in literature and film, with LBJ's dirty little "police action," but the national attention quickly tired of the subject. World War II, the "good war," is the war we've decided to celebrate, in lavish, big-budget Hollywood movies, and books with titles like "The Greatest Generation."

In that light, Cherokee Paul McDonald's impressionistic memoir of combat in Vietnam, circa 1968, is impertinent in both its timing and its insistent clarity. His anecdotes of the brutality, valor, irony, humor and pointlessness of the war offer a cumulative gesture of defiance. This, he seems to say, is what …