Donohue & Molloy, The Greatest Beer Run Ever

Following the usual Beer & Books club trend of having to read things I wouldn't have chosen for myself, the past few days have seen me happily ensconced in John "Chick" Donohue and J.T. Molloy's nonfiction The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Crazy Adventure in a Crazy War.

It was a great read for a small family reunion, in that I didn't need to pay it much attention, but it grabbed me every time I had a little time for reading. There's nothing complicated whatsoever about this book, and I mean that more as a compliment than anything else. Genuinely, this just reads like a pure story, with almost everything else pared away, that comes from a good person who wishes the world was a better place.

As a character, Chick Donohue is a good-hearted 26-year-old New Yorker in 1967, a merchant seaman and former marine who's between jobs and spending his evenings at the neighbourhood bars he's always known. As narrator/author, Chick is in his 70s, after returning safely from the "crazy adventure" cited in the book's title and then completing a career as a seaman and labour organizer.

In essence, the Inwood neighbourhood of New York City was a very special place, egalitarian and nature-adjacent and tight-knit, and it had sent quite a few of its young men to fight in Vietnam. By 1967, protests against the war were everywhere, and especially before some of the more egregious actions had been publicized, places like Inwood were feeling those protests as insults against their sons, brothers, cousins, and friends.

And so one night, the bartender at Doc Fiddler's tells everyone that he's going to Vietnam, by God, to tell their local boys that they're all beloved by the folks they've left behind. But bartender George "the Colonel" Lynch is in his 30s, and who would run the bar while he was away, so Chickie ends up accepting the mission: "You get me a list of the guys and what units they're with, and next time I'm over there, I'll bring them all a beer," a comment he admits was "kind of a flippant thing to say, but that's how it all started" (p10).

Literally 24 hours later, Chickie's on board a ship, working his way from New York via Panama to Vietnam, with a mixed case of local New York beer varieties, in search of a half-dozen close friends.

He makes it to Vietnam. He finds some of the Inwood boys. They drink their local beer. He learns about atrocities, and bravery, and governmental stupidity, and the iniquity of some military brass. He goes home a wiser man, with some different thoughts about the war and American exceptionalism, still full of love for his friends.

While he's there, though? The Tet offensive begins; he's literally across the street watching the fight for the US Embassy in Saigon, because he was supposed to be there when it opened that morning to get his passport in order to go home. One of his friends is working at the Long Binh ammunition depot when it blows up, and Chickie manages to hitch a ride out there the morning after its explosion to see whether his friend survived. You wouldn't be wrong to think of it as a bit like one episode within the Forrest Gump universe.

The story's told in completely unvarnished prose, perfectly straightforward narration, and gripping. The Greatest Beer Run Ever isn't the least bit literary, but not everything should be, so who cares, and there's always room for ripping yarns and thrilling tales.

(Among other things, this the kind of book that makes you wish BC author Joe Garner had had an editor or co-writer, and that he cared even the tiniest bit about making his many, many memoirish books into things worth reading by people whose families don't appear in them. Another project I'll never, ever have time for.)