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Kent Anderson

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Sympathy for the Devil Mass Market Paperback – August 1, 2000

by Kent Anderson (Author)

4.6 166 ratings

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Censured by some critics for its brutality but heralded by others as a modern-day classic, Sympathy for the Devil is a terrifying, intoxicating journey through the violence, madness, and insane beauty of battle. It traces the story of a hardened Green Beret named Hanson, a college student who goes to war with a book of Yeats's poetry in his pocket and discovers the savagery within himself.

In this extraordinary novel, we follow Hanson through two tours of duty and a bitter attempt to live as a civilian in between. At one with the lush and dangerous world around him in Vietnam, Hanson is doomed to survive the landscape of devastation he encounters. Sympathy for the Devil contains some of the most vivid, finely etched prose ever written about the actual process of war--from firing a weapon for the first time in battle to the moment a young man knows that he has entered a living hell and found a home....

Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Bantam
Publication date

August 1, 2000
Dimensions

4.2 x 0.82 x 6.88 inches
ISBN-10

0553580876
ISBN-13

978-0553580877
See all details

Kent Anderson
331
Paperback
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Anderson has a profundity found with novelists of the human experience who have observed, can interpret and then carry us back to smell, hear and bleed."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Tear[s] like a burst of tracers through the field of Vietnam War literature...riveting."
-- Dale A. Dye, Captain, U.S.M.C. (Ret.), author of the novel Platoon

"ANDERSON'S WORK IS CHILLING AND AUTHENTIC."
-- Oliver Stone

Novels by Kent Anderson
Night Dogs
Sympathy for the Devil

Available from Bantam Dell Books

From the Inside Flap

some critics for its brutality but heralded by others as a modern-day classic, Sympathy for the Devil is a terrifying, intoxicating journey through the violence, madness, and insane beauty of battle. It traces the story of a hardened Green Beret named Hanson, a college student who goes to war with a book of Yeats's poetry in his pocket and discovers the savagery within himself.

In this extraordinary novel, we follow Hanson through two tours of duty and a bitter attempt to live as a civilian in between. At one with the lush and dangerous world around him in Vietnam, Hanson is doomed to survive the landscape of devastation he encounters. Sympathy for the Devil contains some of the most vivid, finely etched prose ever written about the actual process of war--from firing a weapon for the first time in battle to the moment a young man knows that he has entered a living hell and found a home....

From the Back Cover

"Anderson has a profundity found with novelists of the human experience who have observed, can interpret and then carry us back to smell, hear and bleed."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Tear[s] like a burst of tracers through the field of Vietnam War literature...riveting."
-- Dale A. Dye, Captain, U.S.M.C. (Ret.), author of the novel Platoon

"ANDERSON'S WORK IS CHILLING AND AUTHENTIC."
-- Oliver Stone

Novels by Kent Anderson
Night Dogs
Sympathy for the Devil

Available from Bantam Dell Books

About the Author

Kent Anderson is a former police officer, a former Special Forces sergeant in Vietnam, and the author of Night Dogs. He lives in Idaho.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE LAUNCH SITE

A sheet of paper was tacked to the wall over  Hanson's bunk:

Every day in the world a hundred thousand people die. A human life means nothing.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, Commander-in-Chief, North Vietnamese Army

"In order to despise suffering, to be always content and never astonished at anything, one  must reach such a state as this"--and Ivan Dmitrich indicated the obese peasant, bloated with fat--"or else one must harden one's self through sufferings to such a degree as to lose all sensitivity to them: that is, in other words, cease to live."

Anton Chekhov

Hanson stood just inside the heavy-timbered  door of his concrete bunker, looking out.  There was no moon yet. The only sound was  the steady sobbing of the big diesel generators,  but Hanson heard nothing. Had the generators  ever stopped he would have heard the silence,  a silence that would have bolted him wide-awake, armed, and out of his bunk if he were asleep.

He stepped from the doorway and began  walking across the inner perimeter toward  the teamhouse, a squat shadow ahead of him  in the dark. His web gear, heavy with ammunition  and grenades, swung from one shoulder like  easy, thoughtful breathing. The folding-stock  AK-47 in his right hand was loaded with a  gracefully curving thirty-round magazine.

As he got closer to the teamhouse,  he could feel the drums and steel-stringed  guitar on the back of his sunburned forearms  and against the tender broken hump on his  nose. Then he could hear it.

Hanson smiled. "Stones," he said  softly. He didn't have enough to pick out  the song, but the bass and drums  were pure Stones.

He slid the heavy, light-proof door  open and stepped into the bright teamhouse.  The song, "Under My Thumb," was pumping  out of Silver's big Japanese speakers.

Quinn was pouting and strutting to  the music, one hand hooked in his pistol  belt, the other hand thrust out, thumbs down,  like Caesar at the Roman games sending the  pike into another crippled loser. His small blue eyes were  close-set, cold and flat as the weekly casualty  announcement, as he mouthed the words.

Hanson shrugged his web gear to the  floor, shouted, "Let me guess," and pressed  his hand to his freckled forehead. He pointed  at Quinn and shouted into the music, "Mick  Jagger, right? Your new Jagger impersonation."  His snub-nosed combat magnum glinted from  its shoulder holster.

Quinn ignored him, pounding the floor  like a clog dancer.

The battered white refrigerator was  turned up to high in the damp heat, and gouts  of frost dropped to the floor when Hanson  opened it to get a Black Label beer. The  seams and lip of the black&red cans were  rusty from the years they had been stockpiled  on the Da Nang docks. Years of raw monsoon  and swelling summer heat had turned the American  beer bitter. But it was cold; it made his  fillings ache when he drank it.

Hanson took a flesh-colored quart jar  from the top of the refrigerator, screwed  off the top, and took out two of the green&white  amphetamine capsules. He knocked them back  with the icy beer.

Beats coffee for starting the day,  he thought, smiling, recalling the double-time  marching chant back at Fort Bragg: "Airborne  Ranger Green Beret, this is the way we start  our day," running the sandhills before  dawn, the rumor that one team had run over  a PFC from a supply unit who had been drunkenly  crossing the road in front of them. The team  had trampled him and left him behind, never  getting out of step, chanting each time their  left jump boot hit the ground, "Pray  for war. Pray for war. Pray for war."

He sat down on one of the wooden footlockers  and began thumbing through the Time  magazine that had come in on the last mail  chopper.

The Stones finished "Under My  Thumb," paused, and began "Mother's  Little Helper." Quinn turned the volume  down and walked over to Hanson. He moved  with ominous deliberation, like a man carrying  nitroglycerin. People got uncomfortable if  Quinn moved too close or too quickly.

"Keepin' up with current events, my  man?" he asked Hanson. "How's the war going  these days?"

"This magazine says we're kicking  shit out of 'em. But now," Hanson said,  tapping the open magazine, "what about the  home front? They've got problems too. Take  this young guy, a "Cornell Senior' it says  here, "I'm nervous as hell. I finally decide  on a field--economics--and then I find out  I'm number fifty-nine in the draft lottery.'  Rough, huh? Just when he decided on economics."

Hanson thumbed through the magazine,  singing softly, ". . . My candy man, he's come an' gone. Mah candy man, he's come an' gone. An' I love ever'thing in this godomighty world, God knows I do . . ."

To the west a heavy machine gun was  firing, the distant pounding as monotonous  as an assembly-line machine. Artillery was  going in up north. Three guns working out.  They were good, the rounds going in one on  top of the other, each explosion like a quick  violent wind, the sound your firestarter  makes when you touch off the backyard charcoal  grill. Normal night sounds.

Hanson read the ads out loud. ""There's  a Ford in your future.' "Tired  of diet plans that don't work? . . .'"

"Then come to Vietnam, fat boy,"  Quinn shouted, "and get twenty pounds blown  off your ass."

A short, wiry man came into the teamhouse.  He wore round wire-rim glasses and had a  thin white scar running from his lip up to  the side of his nose like a harelip.

"Silver," Hanson yelled to him, then  almost said, how much weight did you  lose on the Vietnam high-explosive diet plan,  but changed his mind. Silver had lost half  his team, and his partner was in Japan with  no legs.

"How's that hole in your ass?" Hanson  asked him.

Silver couldn't talk without moving,  gesturing, ducking, and jabbing like a boxer.  He talked fast, and when he laughed it was  a grunt, like he'd just taken a punch in  the chest. "I like it a lot," he said.  "Thinking about getting one on the other  side. For symmetry, you know? Dimples. A  more coordinated limp," he said, walking  quickly forward then backward like a broken  mechanical man. Then he stopped and stared  at the reel-to-reel tape deck.

"Listen to that," he said, cocking  his head slightly. "Background hiss. And  that tape's almost new."

"How much longer you gonna be on stand-down,  you skinny little gimp?" Quinn asked him.

"Couple weeks. I'll fake it a little  longer if I have to. Captain says he's gonna  try and get Hanadon up here from the C team  for my partner. I don't want to go out with  some new guy."

". . . Candy man," Hanson sang to himself as he leafed through the magazine, "he been and gone, oh my candy man, he been and gone. Well I wish I was down in New Or-leens . . ."

"And look here," he said, holding  up the magazine. "President visiting the  troops over at the Third Mech fire base."

Silver had a slight limp as he walked  over. He looked at the two-page color spread.  "Shit," he said, then laughed. "I was  there. After they fixed me up, but before  they said I could come back here. The troops  down there? They spent three weeks building  wooden catwalks around the guns so the Prez  wouldn't get his feet muddy. Of course, huh,  they weren't able to use the guns for fire  missions for three weeks, but they looked  good. Issued all the troops brand-new starched  fatigues an hour before The Man was supposed  to get there, and made 'em stand around at  parade rest so they wouldn't get wrinkled.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam; Reprint edition (August 1, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553580876
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553580877
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.2 x 0.82 x 6.88 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,013,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #22,741 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #23,708 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)
- #69,287 in Suspense Thrillers

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4.6 166 ratings

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Gary Griffiths

"We Kill for Peace"

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2006

Verified Purchase

If you were only to read one book of the Viet Nam War, watch one movie, or read one historical text of the 60s, make it "Sympathy for the Devil", Kent Anderson's deeply disturbing, darkly moving epic of war and American culture of the late 60's. This is the story of "Hanson", a young Army Sergeant of the Special Forces, an authoritative treatise of Viet Nam brutally told from Napalm-level. Anderson rips away any illusions of the patriotism or romanticism of war generally accompanying modern fiction, leaving naked the insanity of war as expertly delivered from the bare hands of its most accomplished practitioners. Yet Anderson has no anti-war axe to grind. Far from it - Hanson and his brothers-in-arms wallow in the mayhem and carnage of combat unapologetically, finding themselves clinically unprepared to function in "the real world."

Anderson's accomplishment is virtually without comparison, but Cormac McCarthy's classic "Blood Meridian" is a good benchmark in plumbing the depths of depravity while shattering the niceties and civility of life as seen from the sofa. "Sympathy" is much more than a chronicle of war - it is a deeply moving and arresting indictment of a generation that turned its back on our soldiers. But it is also a cautionary tale of the crooked paths that violence, when unchecked, can take, as the enemy is seen in the eye of the beholder and allegiances warp to fit the circumstances.

Despite the subject matter, the beauty of Anderson's prose casts an intoxicating spell akin to the macabre fascination of an auto wreck, leaving the reader reluctant to turn the page but nonetheless powerless. While not for the squeamish, "Sympathy for the Devil" is an uncommon classic in American fiction; a graphic charnel house tale is at the same time perversely uplifting.

14 people found this helpful

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C. Vale-Allen

Exquisite and wrenching

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2002

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This is a truly remarkable book, one that could only have been written by someone who'd experienced the madness of the Vietnam conflict and lived to tell about it. It is the most powerfully authentic of all the books I've read on the subject and succeeds because it takes us along on the transformation process. We are witnesses to how a young man discovers the seeds of primal savagery within himself and, thanks to military training, is set "free" in a fashion, to go to war. Within the context of Hanson's mindset, through his eyes, we see all that is evil and ugly simultaneously externalized and internalized. In Hanson's war there is a scalding justice that is meted out on those who are arrogant, or stupid, or in the wrong place at the wrong time, or who are too young to comprehend the training they've received (or victims of its inadequacy.) Death is everywhere, pointless yet necessary to satisfy a general's need for another star for his epaulettes; to vanquish an enemy it's too often impossible to recognize. The sights, the smells, the reek and feel of torn earth, torn bodies, the melting death of an Agent Orange landscape, invade the reader's senses; with lyrical force we are taken with Hanson through the madness that is his soldier's life and, ultimately, becomes ours.
A powerful tour-de-force, this book is peerless, an absolute must-read for anyone with the least curiosity of what too many young men faced eight thousand miles from everything familiar, and what those who survived brought home to relive in their day- and nightmares forever.

27 people found this helpful

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E. Wade

Fantastic. Stop reading reviews and buy it, right now.

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2021

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I purchased this book when it was first published and I was a soldier and it's one of the few books I reread on a regular basis.
I don't read literature and I'm not smart enough to suss out the various literary elements of the story, but what I can't get over is how Anderson both glorifies war and all its attractions to the young and naive, while demonstrating the awfulness and futility of it. This is the first book in a three part series written over a number of years. I would highly recommend all three.

2 people found this helpful

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michael k.

pretty damn good.

Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2020

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i love vietnam war reality/fiction. i have read many memoirs, many fictionalizations and many historical non-fictional works about this conflict. as a former (peacetime) soldier, i will never tire of learning the everyday toils of american soldiers in hostile, foreign theaters of operation. this is a good one. the viewpoint of the lost soul that found a dysfunctional home in the midst of chaotic horror is a rare and relatively unplumbed aspect of the genre. read it. think for a bit, for your own edification.

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2022

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I am a Vietnam vet, draftee, and the parts of the book related to basic training brought back memories about how much I hated the army. I really enjoyed this book, particularly some of the humor. I am going to read more books by Mr. Anderson.

3 people found this helpful

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michael bishop

My favorite book about war.

Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2021

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Out of 100 men, ten shouldn't even be there, 80 are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back. -Heraclitus

Mr. Anderson, like no other author I've encountered, let's you see inside that warrior's mind. It is by turns frightening, repulsive, dark, humorous, and deeply compassionate. With gritty honesty, Mr. Anderson describes what it is like for someone to submit their being to the gods of war without apology.

2 people found this helpful

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Jared Thompson

The quintessential Vietnam War read. Do NOT miss.

Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2018

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I’ve worn out three copies of this in paperback version. Now that it’s available on Kindle, of course I bought it. Mr. Anderson is an unbelievably talented author, and this prose takes you to the Vietnam War in all of its sordid glory. It’s reflections on the United States civilian population and political climate of the time are nothing short of staggering, yet somehow he manages to capture the individual Teams man mentality in a way that makes you believe you were every bit as there and as invested as Hanson himself. There needs to be an option for more than five stars. I can only hope in the future they write about my Iraq War with half as much of the gift Mr. Anderson has.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Apemantus

A love song to the god of war

Reviewed in Italy on September 7, 2022

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Though I have read a LOT of books over the past 4 decades or so on military matters of all varieties, 99% of them have been non-fiction. I have never really been able to take “war fiction” seriously, as I never thought it was really possible to write about combat in the right way. However I took a chance on this book, and devoured it in a few days – it is outstandingly good.

In a concise but not at all bad introduction (I normally hate “introductions”) written by the author of ‘Rambo’, David Morrell notes that “[b]y conventional standards, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ can be faulted as a novel on the basis of its minimal plot and characterization”; well this is maybe one of the reasons I think the book IS so good: I’m not interested in absurd contrived plots with “twists in the tale”, "character development" and “linear progression” etc etc. I can also heavily relate to the author’s attitude – and let’s face it, your liking or disliking anything is based on your own instincts, and whether you go along with the other’s way of looking at the world – in passages such as this (p. 260):

“A Cobra gun-ship looks like what it is, as simple as a wedge. It is a machine designed to kill people from the air, and every rivet and toggle switch in it is part of that purpose. It makes the kind of blunt, unapologetic statement that Hanson had learned to admire, cold simplicity, as unadorned as physics, without apology or qualification, requiring no “point of view” or situational perspective. It was like the inevitability of death or the existence of evil in human life, like part of a language that required no modifiers or metaphors, a language in which, when you said something, everyone knew exactly what you meant.” (p. 260)

I can DEFINITELY relate to that.

Throughout the book the writing is very visceral, emotive, graphic, and in my opinion truly captures what combat is like, and especially the sense of actually (dare I say it?) enjoying it. As a character says to the newly-posted protagonist Hanson, “You’re gonna learn to love it, I can see that already. You APPRECIATE the insanity.” On leave back in the US, Hanson is confronted by a shrieking protestor asking him why he was a soldier in Vietnam; he admits frankly that he actually enjoyed it there.

I was particularly impressed with the passage narrating Hanson’s first engagement, beginning:
“The wooden pop of a few rifles surged to a furious lashing fire, gusting and rattling like hail in the wind. The air around Hanson was alive, boiling with tiny sonic booms and brass-jacketed slugs, little cones of lead rabid with energy that, if they only touched him, would tear away gouts of muscle and splinter his bones.
It was as if he had taken hold of a high-voltage cable and become part of the circuit. His old life burned out of him, replaced by this new power. His eyes dilated and he could taste the adrenaline as it stung up into his nose and pushed through his skin as sweat.”
(pp.227-8)

This is supremely good writing, very evocative.

My only albeit minor complaint is that sometimes there are just too many similes – no doubt an attempt to translate lived brutal experience into images expressed in words which others can try to understand (not everyone can innately relate to the “cold simplicity” outlined in the passage quoted above) – and although some of them are very striking (“Red clay showed through the asphalt like raw meat in a third-degree burn”, p.223) sometimes I got the feeling that they are used simply because this is a “work of literature” and it’s necessary to use “literary devices” (the author did go on to teach literature at university). However this is a very minor quibble and I didn’t notice it through most of the book. The edition however has not been proofread very well (no doubt – as always these days – it was simply done by a machine): there are innumerable errors of punctuation (i.e. in the printing and clearly not in the writing).
All in all I cannot recommend this book highly enough if you are an aficionado of war, and honest enough to realise and admit this.

“The game was war, and if you get too close to war, if you look in its eyes it will take you, muscle, brain, and blood, into its heart, and you will never find joy anywhere else. Outside it, love and work and friendship are disappointments.” (p. 132)

One person found this helpful

Nicholas K.

Change your life read this

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

One of the best books I’ve ever read

3 people found this helpful

Client d'Amazon

Simply awesome

Reviewed in France on September 28, 2016

Verified Purchase

So intense, this is a must read. Experience the madness of war, better than any war movie, so thrilling and so sad at the same time, what a story !

Inemac

Not great

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 13, 2019

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Having seen the star rating for this book, and having read a few other books on the Vietnam war I thought I couldn’t miss! Reviewer Joseph’s excellent synopsis had me going back to it at an earlier attempt of giving up, but it proved a struggle and I Gave up. I then realized I’d missed the most obvious point : the majority of reviewers are male. 😌 No offense!
It however made me realize the book obviously ‘speaks’ more to them; it has not done well with female readers (cp reviews)....
I in no way want to denigrate the experiences, brutal and otherwise, of the Vietnam war and those that fought it; nor attempt any comments about the reasons for, nor the essence or futility of war - this is not the platform for that.
The author’s writing style is choppy and perhaps therein lies the crux that I was not able to finish the book. Did writing it prove cathartic to him? If in reading it it proved so to others then I wholeheartedly applaud his efforts as I cannot imagine the effects on the psyche of soldiers having to go to war....
Enough said.

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Sympathy for the Devil Mass Market Paperback – August 1, 2000

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