William Turner Huggett, R.I.P.

Holy Agent Orange! No sooner do I namecheck W.T. Huggett's great Vietnam novel Body Count, a book I haven't thought about in twenty years, than I see Huggett died two weeks ago. You can pick up a used copy of his only book for $1.32 at Amazon, and though I can't be confident in recommending anything I liked such a long time ago, I can say Body Count had everything I wanted in a book as a pre-pubescent: Marine Corps bildungsroman, war melodrama, visits to whorehouses, Brian's Song-style interracial male bonding, hilarious hillbillies with heavy weapons, voluminous detail about tactics, weapons, and equipment, menacing black nationalists with heavy weapons, and a whole lot more. I'm happy to read that Huggett seems to have had a good life as a Miami lawyer, and hope his former publisher or somebody else will take this opportunity to bring Body Count back out of print.