"The Full Circle for Mick is part historical overview and part personal war story, and it wears both halves very openly. Yep, it is absolutely a doozy of a tome in the sense that it wants to take you from the bigger political and military context straight into the boots of one Australian soldier, and then back out again to the moral aftermath.
The heart of it, for me, is Mick Kramer, a German born young man who ends up serving with Australians in Vietnam and carrying the weight of that experience home with him. The Vietnam sections have that on the ground detail that makes you sit up, especially when Mick is reading the terrain and warning his officer about what they are walking into. And then there is a quieter, genuinely thought provoking moment when he wanders into a pagoda during operations and meets an old Buddhist monk who knows his family history, and starts talking to him about karma. First of all, what a premise. Haha. It is one of those scenes that sounds unlikely until you are in it, and then it becomes the emotional hinge for everything that follows.
What worked best is the book’s willingness to name guilt, confusion, and moral injury without dressing it up. Sigh. There is a point where simply talking about what he did, and being judged for it, becomes part of the beginning of his PTSD symptoms, and that felt painfully believable.
I also appreciated that the author is transparent about the book being historical fiction, while still grounding much of the overall story in record and lived experience.
My small issues are mostly pacing and presentation. The history heavy stretches can feel more like a guided lecture than a novel, and the blunt, profane soldier voice will not be for everyone, you know? Still, by the end, seeing Mick push himself through study and eventually return to Vietnam to help rather than haunt, I was glad I stuck with it. 5 stars.
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"This one surprised me in the best way. I expected straight military memoir with dates and unit numbers and a bit of score keeping. What I got was a long hard look at the whole chain of cause and effect that ran from French adventurism in the nineteenth century, through the broken promises at Geneva, to an Australian infantryman in the late sixties trying to survive Phuoc Tuy and then trying to survive what came after. The title makes sense once you see how the book keeps circling back to the Kramer line, from the German engineer in China to the grandson who lies about his age to get into 1RAR, meets a Buddhist monk with an unexpected family link, and later decides that the only way out is to put his karma straight through work and study. That is a very good narrative idea and the author commits to it.

What worked most for me was the voice. He says it is written in the language of the soldier and he does not apologise. That is true. There is blunt anger at the lies from the United States, Britain, France, Australia, even China during the conference that was meant to stop the fighting. There is annoyance at swagger and at bureaucrats who never had to patrol in the mud. There is also respect for Vietnamese resistance and for the way ordinary people fought a much better equipped enemy by getting close. The long historical sections could have been dry but here they are told like someone leaning forward saying listen this is how we actually got there.

It is not perfect. The detail on French conquest in the 1800s runs long and sometimes repeats names and operations and you can feel the author refusing to cut anything because it mattered to him. I did not mind because his sincerity kept pulling me back.

A solid four stars because it is honest, angry in a clean way, and it earns its ending."