His Second Act Was to Denounce His War
Could a fifteen-year-old runaway who lied his way into the peacetime Army in 1946 really become one of its most decorated soldiers and, decades later, one of its most public critics? About Face spends over forty hours answering that question, and the audiobook's sheer length turns out to be the point rather than a drawback. Colonel David Hackworth's memoir tracks a full twenty-five year military career, Korea, occupied Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, and finally Vietnam, and John Pruden's narration has to carry a life this dense without losing the thread across four decades of institutional history.
What makes the book more than a standard war memoir is its second act, the part reviewers keep returning to: in 1971, at the height of his career, Hackworth went on national television to denounce the Vietnam War effort he had spent his adult life fighting. The New York Times called it everything a twentieth-century war memoir could possibly be, and that assessment holds up specifically because Hackworth is not writing hagiography, his own or the Army's. He is building an indictment of Pentagon strategic failure from inside the institution he loved, which gives the later chapters real teeth that a purely celebratory soldier's memoir would lack.
About Face's designation as a Military Book Club Main Selection and a number-one Amazon bestseller in Korean War Personal Narratives signals a specific kind of institutional endorsement, not just commercial success but recognition from within military-reading communities that value accuracy over sentiment. That combination, decorated-soldier credibility plus explicit critique of the institution that decorated him, is relatively rare in the genre, where memoirs tend to sort cleanly into either celebration or condemnation rather than holding both at once across a single career-spanning account.
Pruden Holds Steady for Forty Hours
Reviewers describe this as the best military careerist book they have encountered, and the specificity of the praise is notable: one listener traces Hackworth's path essentially year by year, starting with his 1946 enlistment, through Korea, and into his rise as one of the era's most heavily decorated soldiers. That granular structure, an actual career unfolding in close to real time rather than compressed into a highlight reel, is exactly what a forty-hour runtime allows that a shorter treatment could not, and it is the audiobook's clearest argument for committing to the full length rather than seeking out an abridged summary.
Multiple reviewers frame Hackworth's rise as a story about overcoming a broken childhood as much as a war narrative, describing him climbing from family instability to the top echelon of American military leadership across three wars. That throughline gives the book emotional stakes beyond battlefield tactics, and Pruden's narration reportedly holds steady across both registers, the institutional history and the personal formation story, without letting either one flatten the other, which matters over a runtime this long since a narrator who tired or lost calibration midway would be difficult to ignore for the remaining twenty hours.
Placed alongside other landmark Vietnam War memoirs, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War or Michael Herr's Dispatches, About Face occupies a distinct niche: it is written from inside the professional officer class rather than from a drafted infantryman's or embedded journalist's perspective, giving Hackworth's institutional critique a specific authority those other accounts, however powerful, could not claim. He is not simply describing what Vietnam looked like from the ground; he is diagnosing why the strategy directing that ground war failed, from someone who had spent twenty-five years inside the system responsible for it.
A Living Legend Who Lost Real Standing
Forty hours and thirty-eight minutes is a genuine commitment, longer than most single-subject biographies and closer to a multi-volume history in scope. Listeners should plan this as a multi-week project rather than something to finish over a weekend, and the density of institutional and tactical detail across three wars means it rewards sustained attention more than casual background listening, especially through the Korea and Cold War-era Berlin chapters, where names and unit designations accumulate quickly. One reviewer's description of returning to it night after night suggests the pacing sustains interest despite the length, but that same density is worth flagging honestly before committing to the full runtime.
Hackworth's public break with the Pentagon in 1971 means the book carries a genuinely critical, sometimes combative stance toward military leadership, not a neutral institutional history. Listeners expecting an uncomplicated tribute to Army leadership should recalibrate, since About Face positions itself explicitly as an indictment in its later chapters. The rating, a strong 4.8, is built from only two reviews, a small sample worth knowing even though both are highly enthusiastic and consistent with the book's decades-long reputation among Vietnam veterans specifically.
The personal cost of Hackworth's 1971 television appearance is worth flagging as its own thread within the book: reviewers describe him as a living legend at the moment he chose to speak out, meaning the decision cost him real standing and relationships within a military culture that does not easily forgive public dissent. That tension, between institutional loyalty and moral obligation, runs underneath the book's later chapters and gives the memoir emotional stakes beyond the historical record it is also carefully building.
Veterans Call It Their Generation's Most Important
Military history listeners wanting a single account that spans Korea, the Cold War, and Vietnam through one continuous career are the clearest audience, especially anyone specifically interested in the Vietnam War's internal institutional failures rather than only its battlefield history. Vietnam veterans and their families, a group reviewers repeatedly identify as the book's most invested readership, will likely find the account resonates on a personal level beyond its historical value, which is consistent with veterans reportedly calling it the most important book of their generation.
Listeners wanting a brief single-sitting overview of Hackworth's career, or a purely celebratory account of American military heroism without institutional criticism, should look for a shorter alternative. For anyone genuinely willing to invest in a forty-hour account that treats both battlefield courage and Pentagon dysfunction with equal seriousness, About Face remains one of the genre's most complete entries, and the length ultimately serves the story rather than padding it.
Readers of broader Cold War military history, not just Vietnam specifically, will also find real value in the Korea and Berlin chapters, which document a period of American military institution-building that gets comparatively little standalone attention next to the two World Wars or Vietnam itself.
