Just before I learned this part of his past, we'd been talking about writing—how his wife enjoys journaling and how she encouraged him to bring a journal and write things down. Whether she meant memories from back then or just his experiences now, birding and seeing the country as it is today, I don't know. I wonder if he's doing that. As an essayist myself, I think a braided piece about being in the thick of war as a young man, searching for elusive guerrilla fighters, then walking quietly through jungles in search of elusive birds as an older man, with a life as a priest sandwiched in between, could be killer good.
In any case, the talks I've been having with him on the trail have been interesting, and I look forward to more over the next couple of weeks. They also make it clear to me how very little I know about the Vietnam War. I didn't even know, really, what the Ho Chi Minh Trail was, though of course I'd heard of it. This morning he described how they'd fly over and bomb it, and the next day the women—it was mostly the women—would be out immediately repairing it. And he described all the people, both civilians and Viet Cong, who traveled the trail on bicycles, carrying supplies into the south, masking themselves from view by tying branches to their backs or their loads. After seeing the immense loads that people carry today on their mopeds, and occasionally on bicycles, I have no doubt what a formidable force these people were.
But back to how little I know. I thought I'd compile a list of books about Vietnam and the war, but of course that's already been done, with aplomb, by the New York Times, in concert with Ken Burns's recent 10-part, 18-hour PBS series about the Vietnam War. So I'll just list a few of the titles that are covered in that article, focusing on works of fiction, that I think I might like to read. It seems I'm going to have my reading cut out for me when I get home! (The links below are to New York Times or Kirkus book reviews, from which the quotes also come.)
"Karl Marlantes’s first novel, 'Matterhorn,' is about a company of Marines who build, abandon and retake an outpost on a remote hilltop in Vietnam. According to the publisher, Marlantes—a highly decorated Vietnam vet—spent 30 years writing this book. It was originally 1,600 pages long; now it is 600. Reading his account of the bloody folly surrounding the Matterhorn outpost, you get the feeling Marlantes is not overly worried about the attention span of his readers; you get the feeling he was not desperate or impatient to be published. Rather, he seems like a man whose life was radically altered by war, and who now wants to pass along the favor. And with a desperate fury, he does. Chapter after chapter, battle after battle, Marlantes pushes you through what may be one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam—or any war. It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered."
"Nguyen, born in Vietnam but raised in the United States, brings a distinct perspective to the war and its aftermath. His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light."
"Mr. O'Brien strives to get beyond literal descriptions of what these men went through and what they felt. He makes sense of the unreality of the war—makes sense of why he has distorted that unreality even further in his fiction—by turning back to explore the workings of the imagination, by probing his memory of the terror and fearlessly confronting the way he has dealt with it as both soldier and fiction writer. In doing all this, he not only crystallizes the Vietnam experience for us, he exposes the nature of all war stories."
Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers
"A terse spitball of a book, fine and real and terrifying."
Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War
Caputo neither screams of horrors and outrages nor recoils from them. "Anyone who fought in Vietnam, if he is honest about himself, will have to admit he enjoyed the compelling attractiveness of combat"; he experienced exhilaration as well as revulsion. And anyone who still harbors the illusion that Lt. Calley was a monstrous aberration will find out from Caputo that it's not so. Caputo can testify that the "collective emotional detonation of men who had been pushed to the extremities of endurance" is as inevitable as the wordless tenderness that binds the soldiers in a platoon.
A 1958 book about "the so-called educated elite of the [U.S.] diplomatic corps" and their "insensitivity to local language and customs. . . . " Writing in the Book Review, the veteran correspondent Robert Trumbull called it a 'devastating indictment of American policy' and a 'source of insight into the actual, day-by-day byplay of present titanic political struggle for Asia.' " President John F. Kennedy was deeply impressed by the book, which may have been an influence in his creation of the Peace Corps.
If you're more interested in works of nonfiction, I encourage you to visit the New York Times list—it's long and varied. Me, I've just put in an order for David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, which covers how the U.S. got involved in Vietnam, showing how “bureaucratic considerations triumphed over ideological or even common-sense ones.” I also have Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and American in Vietnam and Michael Herr's Dispatches in a box in the garage somewhere. (Have I mentioned elsewhere that it's high time I dealt with those boxes in the garage? It remains true.)
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