[Sabramerican]

"If such things actually happened in Nam, and the incident were handled with more skillful literary craft, that would be one thing. Neither is true."

He defended his fiction as "illuminative."

"It's not a sexual act," Webb told Plotkin regarding the "Lost Soldiers" excerpt. "I actually saw this happen in a slum in Bangkok when I was there as a journalist."

"The duty of a writer is to illuminate the surroundings," he added.

Coincidentally, a Cambodian woman in Las Vegas is facing sexual assault charges for performing a similar act on her young son, according to an Oct. 14 report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The article quotes an office manager for the Cambodian Association of America, who described the act as a sign of respect or love.

[Torie]

Bangkok is not Saigon, much less the rice paddies, and has nothing to do with the verisimilitude of fiction describing what happens under the stress of battle in Nam. I will submit Webb got his idea from Bangkok, the king of anything goes sex, and ran with it, to sell his books. We all have to make a living after all.

[jwalsh07]

I know of no culture that has Dads greeting their 4 year old sons by turning them upside down and putting juniors unit in Dads mouth. Kissing a babies penis and swallowing a 4 year olds are not analagous acts. More to the point there is no contextual reason for it in Webbs book. It is gratuitous crap used to sell books and evidently Webb is into gratuitous crap to sell books.

He wrote it, he owns it.