Page 1 of 2 BOOK REVIEW US rattled by Vietnam War skeletons Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl
Marlantes Girl by the Road at Night: A Novel of Vietnam by David Rabe Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam
by Wayne Karlin
Reviewed by Nick Turse
The streets of Ho Chi Minh City, which most still call Saigon, were abuzz on
the eve of last year's "Liberation Day" - the 35th anniversary of the date when
Vietnam was reunited after decades of war between Vietnamese revolutionaries
and the French, the Americans and their indigenous allies.
Thrown into broad relief were competing visions of the country that are only
slightly less obvious throughout the rest of the year. The city was bedecked
with all the trappings you might expect to celebrate a victory under communist
leadership - red banners
bearing the hammer and sickle, others with the visage of father of the nation,
Ho Chi Minh, and reproductions of period propaganda posters stressing national
unity, shared sacrifice and selflessness.
All around, however, unrestrained capitalism and conspicuous consumption were
unquestionably king, as ubiquitous motorbikes, now competing ever more with
shiny, late model cars, raced past Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs and the glass and
steel Vincom Center on Dong Khoi Street, with its towering ads touting Versace,
Emporio Armani and shoe-magnate Jimmy Choo.
Modern Saigon would probably have been unfathomable to young Wayne Karlin, Karl
Marlantes and David Rabe, three men who, decades ago, traveled thousands of
miles to bring war to Vietnam in the name of anti-communism. Today, each is a
celebrated author and each has returned to the war as the subject of his latest
work.
Marlantes'
mammoth Matterhorn - the name of a fictional combat outpost - has been
almost universally praised. And there's good reason for it. Marlantes
reportedly spent more than three decades writing his novel and the long-term
care shows. Not only is the dialogue between combat US Marines pitch perfect,
but the interwoven prose sparkles.
Polished and riveting, as a piece of literature Matterhorn will take a
spot on the shelf next to other writerly triumphs, both fiction and
non-fiction, by fellow American veterans, including: Tim O'Brien's Going After
Cacciato, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, Ron Kovic's Born on the
Fourth of July, Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story, Lewis Puller
Jr's Fortunate Son and David Rabe's play The Basic Training of Pavlo
Hummel, to mention just a few.
If you're an aficionado of Vietnam War literature and devour everything from
the aforementioned works to the worst of the throw-away paperbacks about
snipers, you'll find that Matterhorn seemingly offers every trope out
there. Naturally, there's the brutal environment. And the full menagerie:
mosquitoes and tigers and elephants, oh my! (All that are missing are the
(in)famous "fuck you lizards".) Then there's the morass of military bullshit.
Hurry up and wait. Faulty resupply that left field Marines collapsing of thirst
while REMFs (rear-echelon mother fuckers) lived a cushy life back at base. And,
of course, the shitting and puking. The cramps and diarrhea. The blood loss and
bloodshed.
As one gets deeper into the book, familiar scenes come on fast and furious. We
have Marlantes' main protagonist, Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, and a list of
the things he carries: "three canteens, two filled with Rootin' Tootin'
Raspberry and one with Lefty Lemon; five hand grenades ... M-16 magazines; and
food cans stuffed into extra socks".
("The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the
necessities or near-necessities were ... mosquito repellent, chewing gum,
candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches ... C
rations, and two or three canteens of water," wrote Tim O'Brien in 1990's The
Things They Carried.)
There's also the constant worry that accompanied each patrol. "He tried to
force the nagging fear from his mind and concentrate on moving silently ...
Heel down, feel for anything that could make noise," he writes of Mellas.
("Don't walk there, too soft. Not there, dangerous, mines ... watch for the
fuckin' snipers, watch for ambushes and punji pits," writes O'Brien in his 1973
book, If I Die in a Combat Zone.)
Later he comes to the realization, "We're nothing but fucking bait. Bait."
(Just as now-Senator Jim Webb's narrator from his 1978 novel Fields of Fire
recognized "Somebody said it was an operation with a name, but it had its own
name: Dangling the Bait.")
A page later, a camo-clad sage mouths a variation of the age-old adage used by
soldiers to shut civilians up: "You think someone's going to understand how you
feel about being in the bush ... you really think they're going to understand
what it's like out here?"
("There is no way you can ever understand. So just forget it. Unless you've
been humping the boonies, you don't know," says a veteran in Bobbie Ann Mason's
1985 novel In Country.) Not long after, we have Mellas' colonel fixated
on a favorite military bugaboo for the American loss in Vietnam - the press,
which he disparages for chasing Pulitzers, not the right stories and the real
war.
The real war, however, is exactly what's missing from Matterhorn.
Almost 40 years after US combat in Vietnam ceased, most Americans still view
the war through a Matterhorn-type filter as an American tragedy typified
by American suffering. But while tens of thousands of Americans died in the
conflict, Vietnamese suffered millions of losses.
America experienced strife at home. Vietnam was literally torn apart. But you'd
never know it from Matterhorn. Marlantes has taken the war out of the
villages where it was really won and lost, where the real misery occurred
day-in and day-out, and moved the action to the outer fringes of Quang Tri
province where his handful of Marines face off against uniformed regulars
instead of guerrillas and civilians.
Only rarely does Marlantes offer the real war the slightest nod. One line,
almost 540 pages in, is perhaps best. Mellas, he writes, "hitched a ride on an
Army truck ... across a dreary wasteland of abandoned rice farms to Quang Tri,
the location of the division's administrative rear". Marlantes offers no
explanations about what left Quang Tri fallow.
Readers never learn that Quang Tri was the most heavily bombed province in
South Vietnam, nor that that particular area - Quang Tri District - was
saturated with 3,000 bombs per square kilometer. Instead, Quang Tri is cast as
a wilderness fit for army-on-army combat, while in reality there were 3,500
villages in the province - only 11 of which were not bombed during the war.
As a result, after almost 600 pages of elegant prose, we know next to nothing
about the majority of people who experienced the war.
One American who long ago discovered that the war was not just an American
story is Wayne Karlin who, like Marlantes, served in the Marine Corps in
Vietnam. For many years, Karlin has not only been writing his own books, but
also shepherding long-absent Vietnamese voices into American literature.
His
latest work, Wandering Souls, focuses on two men brought together by
war, chance and maybe even, as many Vietnamese would have it, fate, on a
nameless trail in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.
On March 19, 1969, Hoang Ngoc Dam (referred to by his first name, Dam, in the
book), a North Vietnamese medic at war since 1964, rounded a bend on a dirt
path and came face to face with First Lieutenant Homer Steedly, Jr, an American
on his second tour in Vietnam.
In an instant, both men were raising their rifles, but only one managed to fire
off any rounds in the fatal encounter. Steedly hastily searched his body and
found two notebooks and some loose documents. "I took his identification papers
and will send them home," he wrote in a letter to his mother that night.
"Please put them up somewhere for me."
The war trophies sat in the Steedly attic for the next 35 years, during which
time Hoang's family learned of the medic's death, but little more. His body,
like so many others, was not recovered during the war.
As of June 2, 2011, the US Department of Defense counted 1,274 American
military personnel still missing in action in Vietnam - with more removed from
the list each year as joint US-Vietnamese teams conduct searches to bring
American bodies home. The common number offered for the Revolutionary forces
who opposed the US is 300,000 missing, but this may be an undercount.
While most American families who lost relatives in Southeast Asia have a desire
to see their loved ones repatriated, for the millions of Vietnamese whose
family members lie in some unknown grave, the psychological and spiritual pain
involved is almost unimaginable to Americans.
In telling the personal stories of Hoang Ngoc Dam and Homer Steedly, who
eventually returns to Vietnam to meet Hoang's family, Karlin offers a rare and
moving portrait of the complex relationships between the living and the dead,
between families and their missing relatives, the shadowland between both
worlds where souls wander, and the many ways - official and non-official,
personal and political - that Vietnam is still grappling with its astounding
losses from what is there called the "American War."
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Marlantes'
mammoth Matterhorn - the name of a fictional combat outpost - has been
almost universally praised. And there's good reason for it. Marlantes
reportedly spent more than three decades writing his novel and the long-term
care shows. Not only is the dialogue between combat US Marines pitch perfect,
but the interwoven prose sparkles.
His
latest work, Wandering Souls, focuses on two men brought together by
war, chance and maybe even, as many Vietnamese would have it, fate, on a
nameless trail in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.
