"Clayton offers a solid albeit familiar account of the horrors of war in his debut, a Vietnam coming-of-age novel that tracks the fortunes of a young man from Philadelphia named Carl Melcher through his difficult tour. The first half of the book remains fairly static as Melcher drops out of college, ends up in the service and draws a relatively benign assignment away from the fighting, allowing Clayton to develop the various stock characters in Melcher's squad. The action heats up when Melcher begins to go out on patrol, then turns white hot around the time of the Tet offensive as the quiet, affable protagonist goes through a series of tense but predictable close calls. When Melcher falls in love with a local Vietnamese girl, the novel almost breaks from genre formula, but Clayton comes closer to innovation during the closing chapters after Melcher is wounded and mulls the possibility of self-mutilation in a Japanese hospital to keep from going back into battle as his tour winds down. Clayton's simple prose remains balanced and effective throughout, but the novel has far too many familiar scenes, from the obligatory subplot about an experienced GI who gets killed just before his tour ends to the predictable infighting among squad members and some stereotypical material about clueless officers. Clayton's strong character writing carries the book, though, and he gets mileage from underplaying Melcher's reaction to the daily horrors." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
"Echoes of Joseph Heller's CATCH-22, written about an earlier war, are seen in the surrealism of the scene, which Carl himself describes as a comic book cutout, a brutal illumination of his childhood games."
"In this fictional account of the Vietnam War, Clayton shuns drama and political issues, detailing instead the minutiae of one marine's experience. This approach assumes a preexisting understanding of the war. It also allows Clayton to concentrate on evoking the strange balance between the mundane and the unexpected, the routine and the horror that characterized service in Vietnam. The simple language reflects the identity of an uncertain youth drawn involuntarily into a new and unfamiliar world. As the story progresses, protagonist Carl Melcher develops his own ideology about the meaning and consequence of war, greatly shaped by his own experience as well as growing knowledge of Eastern philosophy. Although it offers no new insight into the war, this novel does reveal Clayton, himself drafted in 1968, to be a reflective and strategic writer. Most notably, he has resisted the pacing of a best seller in order to portray more realistically the uneasy monotony of war, broken only by sudden bursts of unmotivated and unresolved action. The layout is manageable, although the text gets blurry at times--not the case with other formats, one hopes. Recommended where fiction on Vietnam circulates well."
"Drawn from the author's own experience as an Army soldier in Vietnam, Clayton deftly portrays an innocent abroad in the development of his protagonist, the likable but naive Carl Melcher."
“The title of Clayton's novel, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, seemed odd and whimsical when I first saw it. I'm used to Vietnam novels with stark, bold titles like The Short-Timers, The Fire Dream, or The Green Berets. But something about the title intrigued me and drew me in.
After reading the novel, I realized that the simple, straight-forward title is the perfect description for a book about a simple, straight-forward boy who becomes a man while fighting in Vietnam. Clayton's book is a coming-of-age story about Carl Melcher, a young man unsure of his place in the world who ends up getting drafted after he flunks out of college.
Melcher has never really experienced anything outside of "white bread suburbia" before he goes to Vietnam. As he tells his tale in plain, unadorned, and highly readable language, Carl frequently flashes back to childhood memories. The only way he can make sense of the confusion and violence surrounding him is to compare it to the games he played in his youth. By making Vietnam out to be no more than a children's game of war, he highlights the grim reality of his situation. Carl's fantasy mind-set makes the horror and death around him all the more poignant.
Clayton's novel has a pathos heavier than most Vietnam novels I've read but it never dips into the maudlin or hackneyed to pull response from the reader. The style is direct and even, evoking emotion through situation and characterization more than through language itself. Because Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam does not insist that your heart should bleed for its characters, the emotional impact is honest and satisfying.
This is a novel for people who like to read about people. Even those not normally inerested in war novels will enjoy this book because it's about the characters first and the war second. It is a sad and beautiful novel of friendship, loss, disillusionment and alienation that speaks as much to our times as it does about its own.” blogcritics.org posting by Sparrow on October 31, 2004