National Veterans Art Museum to host reading of Short, Crazy Vietnam War memoir

Julie Titone will read from the book, which she co-authored with the late Grady Myers, at the museum at 4041 N. Milwaukee Avenue. The free event will include the display of Myers’s drawings from the museum’s permanent collection. Guest reader Bill Crist, also a Vietnam veteran, will join Titone in reading excerpts from the book.

The book takes its title from soldiers’ slang pronunciation of “beaucoup dien cai dau,” meaning “very crazy.” A reviewer for the Vietnam Veterans of America called the memoir “Lucid … well-told … beautifully illustrated … infused with humor.” Washington State Magazine praised it as “Part ‘M*A*S*H’ and part ‘Full Metal Jacket.’ ”
Myers was an aimless Idaho teenager, when, desperate for troops, the U.S. Army overlooked his extreme nearsightedness and transformed him into Hoss, an M-60 machine gunner. In “Boocoo Dinky Dow”, he recounts his military initiation at Fort Lewis, Wash. He describes the intensity of Vietnam, where an old man carrying a bundle of sticks posed a moral dilemma and where his explosives-happy comrades in Charlie Company sometimes posed the greatest danger.
Myers returned from three months in Vietnam with a Purple Heart and spent the rest of his Army career recovering from his war wounds. He went on to a professional art career in Idaho and Washington State. He died in Boise in 2011. Myers’ work has been in the NVAM’s permanent collection since 1997 and includes such pieces as “Mascot,” “Still Life with CIB” and “The Toymaker.”

Myers and Titone were newspaper colleagues when they produced the first manuscript of his memoir in the late 1970s. They eventually married, had a son, divorced yet remained friends. When he became bedridden several years ago, they revived the manuscript to give him a project to work on.