The activities of the American Indian Movement (AIM), while often grouped with the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s New Left, has received relatively little attention compared to the white movements of the period and the civil rights movement. Moreover, what scholarship does exist largely focuses either on the leaders of the movement or the United States' government's efforts to repress native movements for self-determination.

Within this context, Woody Kipp's Viet-Cong at Wounded Knee would seem to provide a welcome addition to the literature on the movement. Kipp is what one could describe as a "rank-and-file" member of AIM, he was not leadership at either the national or local level but was simply one of the thousands of native people that were attracted to AIM's efforts. Nor was Kipp a life-long radical, he joined the movement after returning from Vietnam and encountering AIM members at his college. For Kipp, the realization that the United States government did not have his interests at stake was a gradual process. It began with his realization in Vietnam that the Viet-Cong looked similar to him and that there was little reason for people of color to be fighting other people of color in order to secure rights for them not afford to native people within the United States and concluded, in a rather startling manner, when, while sneaking into the AIM-occupied village of Wounded Knee, the United States government used the same machine guns that he was trained to use in Vietnam against him.

However, rather than describe at length his conclusion that he was, as far as the United States government was concerned, a Viet-Cong, Kipp's book is filled primarily of his tales of "womanizing and drinking" of which there are many. In between these tales, the reader occasionally gets some interesting insight into the attitudes of the AIM rank-and-file but these insights are rare and are almost buried amidst page after page of explaining how Kipp and his friends were able to secure alcohol or how poorly they were faring do to the lack of alcohol. By the time of the epilogue, most readers will have wondered why they spent the time reading the book, as little of consequence can be gleaned from its pages. Such a conclusion is unfortunate, because the epilogue points to Kipp's potential for great insight into AIM, contemporary issues facing Native Americans, and native spirituality. Had Kipp pursued these topics rather than writing a narrative encompassing his chaotic younger years, he would have made a valuable contribution to the literature available on the American Indian Movement.