Nick Brokhausen calls his squad "an unwashed, profane, ribald, joyously alive fraternity," and that sentence tells you more about this audiobook than any category label will. Fourteen hours and seven minutes of it exist, and the men in them talk constantly. The missions are the frame. The talk is the substance, which is a promising shape for a recording and a difficult one for whoever has to perform it.
Humor I Did Not Expect From Reconnaissance
Officially, the description notes, the unit was known as the Studies and Observations group. In practice Brokhausen served in Recon Team Habu, on his second tour, in 1970, running what the copy calls "some of the most dangerous and suicidal reconnaissance missions ever" into enemy-held ground in Cambodia and Laos. The euphemism and the reality sit one sentence apart in the blurb, and that gap is the book's operating temperature: institutional language on the outside, something considerably less tidy underneath.
Montagnards fight alongside the team throughout, and the copy gives them a proper introduction: "oppressed minorities from the mountain highlands, trained by the US military in guerrilla tactics, armed, accustomed to the wild, and fully engaged in a war against the North Vietnamese." Memoirs of this kind often reduce indigenous allies to scenery. This one puts them in the subtitle position, and the description closes on medals for valor won "at a terrible cost," which is the only line in the whole blurb that lowers its voice.
Humor is what the written responses keep returning to, and I did not expect that from a reconnaissance memoir. N. Blake reports that "the book's humor is absolutely hilarious, I had a hard time stop laughing." Todd calls it "deadly serious, but humorous." Suspense reader singles out the dialogue as "extremely entertaining." That is two people naming the humor outright and a third praising the dialogue, none of them prompted, in a book about suicidal reconnaissance work. That convergence is worth more than the star average, and it squares exactly with the fraternity line in the publisher copy.
A Format That Flatters This Material
Dialogue-driven memoirs are the natural case for audio. A page of overlapping soldier talk asks the eye to do work that an ear does for free, and Brokhausen writes the banter thick. Fourteen hours is a real commitment, but this is not fourteen hours of terrain analysis; it is a long stretch of men speaking to each other in a register that only survives in the mouths of people who were actually there. The format flatters the material.
Dg Crawford Jr. writes as somebody who was in the same country at the same time, an Air Force Forward Air Controller who worked daily with Special Forces and lived alongside the Aussie Special Forces as well. That review does not evaluate the prose. It says the book "brought many memories, some great, and some terrible," and calls it "a primo book, and well worth the effort to get it." Testimony from that direction is a different order of endorsement than a star.
Abibliofob supplies the comparative frame. Having lost count of the Vietnam books read, estimating "several hundreds," that reviewer places We Few among "the better ones" and promises to move straight on to the follow-up. Four stars from someone with several hundred points of comparison carries more information than five stars from someone with none, and it is the only response here that grades the book against a field rather than against a feeling.
Rereading is its own recommendation. Suspense reader claims about four passes through this book and reports no fatigue with it, which is an unusual thing to say about a war memoir and a useful signal ahead of a fourteen-hour purchase. Titles that survive a second pass tend to be the ones carried by voice more than by plot, and every response here points at the voices.
Spelvin's Fourteen Hours Remain Completely Undescribed
Numbers on this page do not survive contact. The badge shows 4.6 above a vote counter set to two, and 4.6 cannot be assembled out of two whole-star votes under any rounding rule anyone uses. Meanwhile five people have written full responses underneath. Whatever population that average is describing, it is not the population the counter admits to and not the one you can read. Treat the score as decoration and the five accounts as the actual evidence.
Nothing anyone has written touches the performance. That matters more here than on most pages, because the entire appeal is voices: a squad's worth of them, profane, overlapping, regional. George Spelvin is credited with all fourteen hours, and the listing offers no second name, no full-cast note, no indication of how the banter is handled. For a book whose readers praise its dialogue three times over, the recording itself remains completely undescribed.
Todd's Warning About a Delicate Constitution
Todd issues the warning the publisher copy avoids: "This book is not for one with a delicate constitution." Take that literally. The word profane appears in the author's own description of his unit, and a memoir that earns laughs from combat is not going to be careful about language, casualty detail, or the ugliness of what reconnaissance work involved. Nobody has flagged an abridgment, and at fourteen hours the runtime does not suggest one.
Tantor Audio issued this on October 30, 2018, which makes the review dates worth a glance: one from 2021 and the rest from 2025 and 2026. A memoir picking up fresh responses seven and eight years after release is usually a sign of word of mouth at work, not of marketing, and the 2021 reviewer promising to start the sequel suggests the shelf around this book has grown since.
Steer Clear If You Need to Research the Narrator
Veterans and readers deep into Vietnam literature are the core audience, and the two most experienced voices on this page both land in favor. Listeners who came to the war through documentaries and want the texture underneath the strategy will get more from these fourteen hours than from another campaign history. Anyone drawn to unit-level memoirs, where the subject is the eight men beside you rather than the map, is in the right place.
Steer clear if barracks language wears you out, because the author announces the register in his own blurb and does not moderate it. Steer clear too if you need a narrator you can research first; that information does not exist on this listing. Fourteen hours on a job almost nobody survived long enough to describe, told by a man who found it funny and never once pretends it was.
A Few Questions About We Few
Should I listen to We Few if I have never read a Vietnam memoir?
Yes, with one adjustment. Brokhausen assumes you can follow military shorthand and unit names without a glossary, so the first hour asks for patience. The reward is unit-level detail in place of strategy, and the reviewer who has read several hundred books on the war still rates this among the better ones.
Is the 4.6 star rating on this audiobook reliable?
No. The counter and the column disagree. Two whole-star votes cannot average 4.6 under any rounding convention, and five written responses sit below a counter claiming two people participated. The number is broken, not dishonest. Read the five accounts, which are detailed and specific, and ignore the badge.
How graphic is the language and violence?
Considerably. The author describes his own squad as profane in the publisher copy, one reviewer warns that the book is not for anyone with a delicate constitution, and the combat passages are praised for feeling immediate. Expect sustained obscenity, casualty detail, and comedy drawn directly from both across fourteen hours.
Is the squad banter easy to follow with one narrator on this audiobook?
Nobody has said. Five people wrote about the book and not one mentions the recording, even though three single out the dialogue as its best feature. A single credited reader covers every voice across fourteen hours, so how cleanly those voices separate stays an open question this listing never touches.
