Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam
By: Cynthia Kadohata / Narrated By: Kimberly Farr
Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
Cried like a baby—Pretty gritty considering it’s written for Kids… >Sob<
I went into listening to Cracker! with muuuuuch trepidation. My sister had asked me if it should be tagged for Veteran’s Day or for… Memorial Day… Considering that legislation altered after WWII changed the status of military working dogs to that of “Equipment”? And considering that by the end of the war they were considered “Surplus Equipment”? Well, things did NOT end happily for thousands of good and loyal and loving dogs, neither did it end well for the many awesome handlers who worked with the dogs, cared for them, loved them. Imagine going through an entire hell-hole of a war, some of the most gruesome images getting stuck in your head, imagine perhaps being saved by the dog countless times, only to have to abandon the dog in the end. To leave such a faithful friend to be euthanized, or left to the South Vietnamese Army and uncertain fates. That, my friend, is a total mind-screw to some already traumatized men.
So, I knew all that, but I thought: Feh, this is a Kids story. CERtainly it’s gotta be pretty low-key and happy pappy. And it kinda sorta does start that way with girl-dog Cracker running around with her young boy of a buddy. She’s into birds, and killing, and she’s into playing and zooming around. But, alas, the family can’t keep her as they had to move to an apartment that doesn’t allow dogs, so they hand her over to the military, having seen an ad for dogs of certain breeds being needed for Vietnam. And so the confused Cracker gets taken away and starts training with a young man (Heck! BOY! They were all kids back then!) who will be her handler when they get shipped to Vietnam.
Things don’t go well until Rick finds a way to bond with her, but after that Cracker is about as devoted as it gets. And the story turns waaaaay gritty once they’re sent over. There’s walking point, where it’s up to Rick and Cracker to find booby traps, and to keep snipers clear, all a matter of life and death to the soldiers who trail behind. Snipers are gruesomely taken care of, booby traps blow limbs apart. An extraction of prisoners takes place with Special Forces guys, and Cracker and Rick are sent over into Cambodia. There are ambushes in rice paddies where the kid right next to Rick has his throat blown open by a well-aimed bullet.
And then there’s the separation after Rick is severely wounded, when Cracker herself is disoriented from her own wounds and is left lost and alone, suffering from thirst and dehydration, a target for the VC and for rural folks.
And THEN? There’s the increasing “Vietnamization” by the story’s end, with troops pulling out and Vietnamese villagers swarming abandoned posts to search for anything that might make continued life possible. It’s not a good time for Rick; it’s definitely not a good time for Cracker.
To say I teared up SEVeral times during the listening of the audiobook, would be a gross understatement. Cuz, see, young men are hurt, young men are killed, young men would do ANYthing to protect the man next to him, or to protect the dog who’s depending on them as much as they depend on the dogs. Separations occur, love is betrayed, and there’s not much hope left behind when troops pull out and are shipped home to a country where the words: Baby Killers greet them. It was a horrible war, and it was an unjust time for boys who’d been through so much.
Certainly the narration helped me feel so much emotion as Kimberly Farr turned in a fine performance. Yeh yeh yeh, a woman doing firefights, but she handled them with skill and urgency, and conveyed confusion even as adrenaline was kicking in for the soldiers, as they battled for agency over their own bodies through the terror. And Farr well captured Cracker’s thoughts, her feelings, which were very well-written in the first place by author Cynthia Kadohata. Kadohata, by the way, ends the book with an Afterword that broke my heart, even tho’ I was fully expecting her words to make “official” that what I knew, that what I’d also just listened to: It was a horrible time to be “Surplus Equipment”.
So this is a book for Kids, but do trust me when I say that it’s suPREMEly good for adults too; you’ll be engaged, you’ll feel fear, you’ll feel what it must’ve been like to be part of one of the most important and necessary animal/human bonds.
And you’ll absolutely KNOW by the end: Cracker was one of the BEST dogs in Vietnam, altho’…?
Weren’t they all?
To the 200 who were allowed to live? Huzzah!
To the thousands who perished or were abandoned, and most CERtainly to their handlers? My deepest sympathies—I’m soooo sorry for your loss…
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