Sweet Reason

by Robert Littell

A Vietnam era Catch-22 by the author of The Company

Robert Littell is often compared to John le Carre, Alan Furst, and Len Deighton. But in Sweet Reason, this master of the spy genre takes a dramatic departure to brilliantly satirize career militarists and other absurdities of war.

Somewhere off the coast of Southeast Asia, the U.S.S. Eugene F. Ebersole-a rusted World War II relic whose best days are far past- patrols the waters on a mission to protect American values in this suddenly-not-so-Cold War. The decrepit destroyer's mission is to apprehend or annihilate anything suspicious, but someone on board is preaching peace and the ship's motley crew is not quite as motivated as its ambitious commander.

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

An American author residing in France. He specializes in spy novels that often concern the CIA and the Soviet Union. He became a journalist and worked many years for Newsweek during the Cold War. He's also an amateur mountain climber and is the father of award-winning novelist Jonathan Littell.

Reviews

[Sandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Due to a slip of an administrative pen, the USS Ebersole is assigned to the war zone in Vietnam even though it is a leaky, rusting, undermanned WW 2 era destroyer. Depressingly realistic seeming though not without some dark humor provided by the wildly eccentric crew and their mostly incompetent officers.

[Dennis McClure · Rating 1 out of 5]

This man can write exquisitely crafted suspense. Now I know that he can write sloppily crafted nonsense. Don't bother. I only finished it because I'm a bit obsessive.

[Eric Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could have given that fifth star if I wasn't constantly reminded of "Catch-22" every other page...

[Jim Leckband · Rating 4 out of 5]

Black humor at its blackest. A decrepit WWII destroyer is deployed by a clerical error to "Yankee Station" just off the coast of Vietnam. The "Captain" (a leader in name only) is in charge of a boat that has lost all sense of duty or purpose. The blurb relating it to Catch-22 is apt. Whereas in the WWII book the war could be considered necessary - it was the military's madness the book was concerned with. In "Sweet Reason" not only is the military crazy, but so is the war and the society that pays the taxes (like the "Good Germans" in WWII) to make the craziness possible.

I haven't seen such broad and cutting humor in Littell's fiction so far. I've come across the fatalistic and sarcastic in his Cold war books, but nothing like the absurdities in this book. My favorite was the incident where the Congressman from North Carolina is highlined to the destroyer for a PR opportunity. A comedy and tragedy of errors results in a helicopter and innocent Vietnamese village being destroyed - all so the idiot can keep being re-elected because of the military contracts he brings to his district.

In this book, the "domino theory" was not a political theory of the dangers of international Communism, but a system where everybody along the line from the worker in a munitions plant, to the owner of the munition plant, to the Congressman of that state beholden to the owner, to the military bigwigs beholden to the Congressman, to the soldiers under the bigwigs are all invested in keeping up their little domino from falling - at whatever cost to whoever doesn't have a domino in the game.

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars. This off-beat military satire is a cross between Catch-22 and M*A*S*H. A 2,200-ton rust bucket of a destroyer, the U.S.S. Eugene F. Ebersole is manned by a skeleton crew and dispatched to Vietnam. Needless to say, the sailors and officers are a hodge-podge of eccentrics. The irreverence is fine without sounding bitter or shrill, and I got more than a few chuckles from the read. Some naval technical stuff and jargon might appeal more to old sea dogs, but I just skimmed over those parts. Ultimately, Sweet Reason is an anti-war novel probably written as a protest against the folly of Vietnam like many other books I've read set in the same vein.

[Elmwoodblues · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read while in the Navy, perhaps 1979-80-81? So true to the bureaucracy and anit-meritocracy of the time. Jimmy Carter and Beckwith and the fiasco of the hostage rescue, replete with charred C-130's in the desert, the oil crisis and tiny Honda's and Toyota's on the streets: this is a message out of time, an artifact.
Second read, 2013, rings less solid, a Jefferson Starship concert played back on a flat screen in a living room, minus the pot but adding the bifocals and the backache: not a story that holds up in retrospect, but more a frozen moment in time. Less permanent or universal than Heller's 'Catch 22', but a shading from the same school nonetheless.

[Ron Welton · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Sweet Reason, Robert Littell departed from the conventional spy novel to write a farcical, yet not remarkably fanciful, narrative of the ship and sailors of the U.S.S. Eugene F. Ebersole a WWII vintage destroyer assigned by "a slip of a pen" into action during the Viet Nam war. The three days of action off the Vietnamese coast could well stand as a metaphor for the entire war - incompetent leadership, racial conflict, distractions from Washington, drug use. For me, the writing was so compelling that once begun it required a work of will to put it down.

[Jason S · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slow start and an add ending, but overall a worthwhile satire of the US navy in the Vietnam war.