I, Dynamo

A Review

In Your Wildest Dreams

by

Kimi Foos

Review by R.E. Prindle

Foos, Kimi, In Your Wildest Dreams, iUniverse, Inc. 2008  14.95

     This lovely memoir by Kim Foos is characterized by rare charm and grace.  A virtual love letter to her husband of 35 years Rick.  From beginning to end one feels how lucky Rick is to be cherished so.

     Kim Foos as a young girl of twelve fixed her sights on a much older (in teenage years) Rick determining then and there to make him hers.  Kim lovingly chronicles Rick’s doings as a child and young man as though from a watchful distance.  The anectdotes are wondrously told.  Rick and Kim grew up near Wheaton, Illinois in what seems like a heavenly less populated time spent fishing, weirding out and investigating old subterranean missile sites.  Sort of like my old childhood but strikingly different.  I didn’t have that much fun.  We didn’t have any fantastic abandoned missile sites near us.  More detail could have been lavished there by the historically minded Kimi.

     The innocence and  sprigtliness of Rick’s springtime was rudely blasted apart as he heard a knock on the door and the low chuckle of Uncle Sam saying:  Here I am.  Yes.  And the viet Nam war was raging in far off Asia.  Like any good lad who knows his duty Rick chose the Army over Canada.  Might not have been the wisest choice in retrospect.  Turned his life inside out in one devastating moment when the hell he was standing on in Viet Nam moved skyward.  Yes.  It was thoroughly mined, a trap, an ambush.  Dazed and blonkered Rick came back down to survive and stagger back to help his fellows, ears ringing and staggering nearly aimlessly.  He needed as much help as anyone else.

     Strangely he was not sent home but remained to serve out his term.  And now Kim Foos’ story take a dark turn.

     If there were enemies on the Eastern Front they had allies on the Home Front.  Inept in Viet Nam our Commanders were cowardly at home.   They allowed the traitorous domestic Red allies of the Communist Viet Namese to taunt and revile those who had courageously fought the battle of Justice and right.  The returning soldiers who had faced a dogged and vicious enemy were told to keep their heads low on their home turf.  This to appease a bunch of criminal, traitorous Red agitators who might just as easily have been shot.  I don’t know who to revile more the Command or the scurvy Reds.

     The shame of America that Rick experienced was to go much deeper.  Returned home, reunited and united with a supportive wife in Kim now old enough to marry Rick, just barely, he took a job as auto repairman.  According to Kim he was a born mechanic.  When a customer learned that Rick was a returned Vietnamese vet he said he would take his custom elsewhere unless Rick was fired.  Didn’t want him working on his car.  to the shame of America, to the shame I share on behalf of American ingrates the garage owner fired Rick.

     What does it mean to be an American?  Don’t ask.  It’s only an idea anyway.

     Shortly thereafter Kim and Rick removed to the wastes of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The story continues there, the review ends here.

     I close as I opened:  this is a memoir of rare grace and charm.  A testament to the love in a young girl’s heart.  You won’t be wasting your 14.95.