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REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON
It has been written by your book editor, among others, that
the literary novel about the Vietnam War would be by a
21st century Stephen Crane. It would be published decades
after the conflict ended (Crane’s seminal Civil War
novel Red Badge of Courage came out in 1895) by someone
who hadn’t taken part in it (Crane was born in 1871).
There
has been one strong nominee for this honor: Stewart O’Nan’s
masterful The Names of the Dead, which was published in
1996 and evokes the grunt’s life.
As good as O’Nan’s book is, though, it pales
in comparison with the astonishing new novel, Tree
of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 624 pp., $27) by Denis Johnson,
who was born in 1949 and until now has been best known for
his 1992 short story collection, Jesus’ Son. The tightly
written Tree of Smoke spans the period from 1964 to the early
1980s. In it, Johnson deftly intertwines the war (and non-war)
stories of a coterie of CIA types, a group of American grunts,
and several Vietnamese. The novel came with a boatload of
pre-publication publicity, all positive; it won the National
Book Award for fiction; and it dented The New York Times
bestseller list.
The book takes its title more or less from
the mad plan drawn up by the central player, a man we know
as “the Colonel,” a
Captain-Kurtz-like character who has spent too many years
undercover in Southeast Asia. The main story line follows
the careening adventures of the heavy-drinking, philosophy-spouting
Colonel, who appears to be losing his grip on reality as
he runs his own psyops operation with
the unwilling help of a unit of American infantrymen. Added
to the mix is the Colonel’s nephew, Skip Sands. He
is a young, sort-of idealistic undercover op, who is sort
of the Alden Pyle (the well-intentioned but fatally naïve
anti-hero
of Graham Greene’s classic The Quiet American) of the
piece. Sands spends several years in country more or less
working under the Colonel.
In the shadowy world that Johnson
creates, nothing is clear. That goes for the other main story,
which follows the ne’er-do-well
Houston brothers, one of whom, James, winds up in the thick
of it in Vietnam. These boys were screwed up before they
went into the military, proceed to mess up big time while
in the military, and then become psychic and physical accidents
waiting to happen after they come home.
In James Houston, Johnson flirts with creating yet another
clichéd, combat-crazed Vietnam veteran, but instead
makes this difficult person into a fully realized individual,
as he does with all the other characters in the book, including
the other Houston boy, whose life is believable, if sad and
often revolting.
Johnson does not shy away from the brutal
reality of life in the war zone. Here’s one passage
that drew my attention, a meditation on “American soldiers” through
the eyes of a world-weary Canadian woman doing humanitarian
work in Vietnam: “They threw hand grenades through
doorways and blew the arms and legs off ignorant farmers,
they rescued puppies from starvation and smuggled them home
to Mississippi in their shirts, they burned down whole villages
and raped young girls, they stole medicines by the jeep-load
to save the lives of orphans.” Yes, this is partly
bombast and hyperbole, but you have to admit that this passage
bores in on the yin and the yang of the life of a young American
fighting in the Vietnam War.
In short (this book is not—it’s
a long book, but a very readable one), Denis Johnson has
created the real deal here: A Vietnam War novel that brings
alive the war at its cauldron-bubbling worst, a novel filled
with memorable characters and well-wrought set pieces in
Vietnam and at home. This is a novel that will stay with
you and remind you of the consequences of war for those who
take part in it and for those who happen to be living where
war is.
FICTION IN BRIEF
John Burdett introduced Sonchai Jitpleecheep, his half-American
Royal Thai police detective, in the entertaining and enlightening
Bangkok Tattoo in 2003, brought him back in 2005’s
meaty Bangkok 8, and gives him life again, amid a cast of
over-the-top characters and a wild plot, in another excellent
detective/thriller, Bangkok Haunts (Knopf, 305 pp., $24.95).
Like its predecessors, the new book hones in on our hero,
a Buddhist Bangkok cop whose father was an American GI on
R&R during the Vietnam War and whose mother was a prostitute
who becomes the madam of a bawdy house that he helps run.
Once again, Sonchai solves a convoluted murder while doling
out lessons in Thai Buddhist culture and social mores, along
with a strong infusion of religious and other spiritual beliefs.
The
3 CD-set recording, Selected Shorts:
Wartime Lives (SymphonySpace,
$28), contains oral presentations of six works, two of which
are top-drawer pieces dealing with the Vietnam War: an excerpt
from Tim O’Brien’s masterful The
Things They Carried (read by Dylan Baker) and War Wounds, a portion of
Tom Bissell’s memoir, The Father
of All Things (read
by Oskar Eustis), along with “Mother
in the Trenches” (read
by Kathleen Chalfant), a new Robert Olen Butler short story
set in the trenches in World War I. The stories first were
aired on the NPR series Selected Shorts: A Celebration of
the Short Story.
The pseudonymous Dean O’Shea’s
Yard Bull (On the Mark, 350 pp., $24.95) is a well-done autobiographical
novel told in the first person by a railroad detective just
back from the Vietnam War. For more info, go to www.theyardbull.com
Bill
Pezza’s fast-paced Anna’s Boys (Author House,
457 pp., $24.95, paper) follows the fortunes over the years
of a group of working class Baby Boomer guys in Bristol,
Pa., who get enmeshed in the Vietnam War.
VVA member James
Isaiah Gabbe’s ambitious and cleverly
plotted LaRue’s Maneuvers (BookSurge, 398 pp., $17.99,
paper) centers on a memoir-within-a-novel written by a Vietnam
veteran who is haunted by his past, especially what happened
to him in the war.
The tenth anniversary edition of Ken Kirkeby’s
engagingly written The Tournament (Black River Books, 192
pp., $11.95, paper) has just been published. The story is
set in 1978 in the Bahamas and involves a Vietnam veteran
and his adventures in the world of sport fishing and much
more.
Former Marine Elliott Storm’s These
Scars Are Sacred (BookSurge, 207 pp., $24.95 paper) tells the war and
postwar stories of a Marine who has a rough time on both
fronts.
Charles Sheehan-Miles’s second novel, Republic (Cincinnatus Press, 332 pp., $16.95, paper), is a dialogue-rich
tale centered on an Iraq War veteran fighting on three fronts
in the near future. Sheehan-Miles served in the first Persian
Gulf War.
NONFICTION IN BRIEF
Ronald Spector, the long-time George Washington University
history professor and Marine Corps Vietnam veteran, has written
three excellent books of history, including the acclaimed
After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam. His latest, In
the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle
for Postwar Asia (Random House, 358 pp., $27.95), is an incisive,
informing look at what happened in Asia following World War
II. It contains two meaty chapters on the mess the French
and Japanese left in Indochina.
And what a mess it was, a
roiling stew that included French nationalists, Vichy French,
the defeated Japanese, British troops in the South, Nationalist
Chinese troops in the North, Vietnamese nationalists north
and south, Vietminh revolutionaries in the north, a Vietnamese
criminal syndicate, Vietnamese religious cults, and the
American OSS in the background. It was a scene of “mutual
suspicions, geopolitical imaginings, personality clashes,
prejudices, and ignorance among the victorious Allies,” as
Spector perceptively puts it. And he shows how it led to
France reclaiming its Indochinese colony and the Vietminh,
under Ho Chi Minh, starting what would be a nine-year war
for independence.
Allen Clark’s Wounded Soldier,
Healing Warrior (Zenith,
320 pp., $24.95) is a moving memoir that focuses on what
happened to Clark, a West Point grad and Army Special Forces
Captain, after he lost both legs in a mortar attack near
Dak To on June 17, 1967. Clark went though a long process
of physical recovery and emotional torment that he overcame
in large part through strong religious faith. His well-written
memoir has all the details of this uplifting story, including
Clark’s high-level work at the VA in the 1980s and ’90s.
For more info, go to www.woundedsoldierhealingwarrior.com
Don
W. Griffs served a 1968-69 tour of duty in Vietnam as a Marine
lawyer with the legal office of Force Logistics Command near
Danang. At the same time, he commanded a Provisional Rifle
Company whose duties included patrolling, setting up ambushes,
and conducting offensive operations. Griffs, who was 25 when
he went to Vietnam, kept a journal. He has put that long-ago
work to good use as the basis of his readable, insightful
war memoir, Eagle Days: A Marine Legal/Infantry
Officer in Vietnam (University of Alabama Press, 174
pp., $29.95).
The current edition of The U.S. Air Force Academy’s
excellent literary journal, WLA: War,
Literature & the
Arts, is a 2006 special double issue that contains several
Vietnam War-related pieces. That includes illuminating tributes
to the late Gloria Emerson by three of the top writers whose
work has been strongly influenced by the Vietnam War: John
Balaban, Wayne Karlin, and W.D. Ehrhart.
The prolific Gordon
Rottman, who served with the 5th Special Forces Group in
Vietnam in 1969-70, today specializes in writing nuts-and-bolts
military history. He is the author of three recently published
high-quality, heavily illustrated paperbacks put out by Osprey,
the British military history specialty publisher: Mobile
Strike Forces in Vietnam, 1966-70 (96 pp., $23.95); Vietnam
Airmobile Warfare Tactics (64 pp., $17.95), with illustrations
by Adam Hook; and Viet Cong Fighter (64 pp., $17.95), illustrated
by Howard Gerrard.
Also in the well-illustrated, military
hardware-heavy vein: Retired U.S. Navy officer Peter Mersky’s
U.S. and Marine Corps A-4 Skyhawk Units
of the Vietnam War, 1963-1973 (Osprey, 112 pp., paper, $21.95); the revised and
updated The New Weapons of the World
Encyclopedia: An International Encyclopedia from 5000 B.C.
to the 21st Century (St. Martin’s,
368 pp., $24.95, paper), which contains a brief section on
the Vietnam War, put together by The Diagram Group; and Chris
McNab and Martin J. Dougherty’s Combat
Techniques: An Elite Forces Guide to Modern Infantry Tactics (St. Martin’s,
191 pp., $24.95), which makes repeated references to the
American War in Vietnam.
The heart of William Schroder and
Ronald Dawe’s Soldier’s
Heart: Close-up Today with PTSD in Vietnam Veterans (Praeger
Security International, 187 pp., $49.95) consists of five
long chapters, each of which is devoted to the first-person
story of a Vietnam veteran with PTSD. Schroder and Dawe served
as helicopter pilots in the Vietnam War.
Kim Long’s
sprightly written, encyclopedic The
Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals & Dirty Politics (Delacorte,
240 pp., $24) contains one prime entry dealing with the Vietnam
War—the unauthorized publication of The Pentagon Papers,
the secret history of the war, and how that led to what Long
calls “the mother of all political corruption events,” the
Watergate scandal.
New in paper: Tiger
Force: A True Story of Men and War (Back Bay/Little, Brown, 393 pp., $14.99),
Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss’s book-length version
of their Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper series on the out-of-control
actions of a group of 101st Airborne soldiers in Vietnam,
and Douglass H. Hubbard, Jr.’s Special
Agent, Vietnam: A Naval Intelligence Memoir (Potomac Books, 268 pp., $17.95).
Also
new in paper are three worthy titles from the Naval Institute
Press: The Battle of Ap Bac, Vietnam:
They Did Everything But Learn From It (224 pp., $19.95), David M. Toczek’s
examination of the pivotal January 1963 ARVN-VC conflict;
The War Managers: Thirtieth Anniversary
Edition (232 pp.,
$19.95), Douglas Kinnard’s incisive analysis
of what went wrong in Vietnam told primarily from his fellow
generals’ point of view; and Honor
Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973 (736 pp., $34.95),
Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley’s comprehensive
look at the experiences of American Vietnam War POWs.
VVA
member Hank Miller, a photographer and teacher who served
as a Navy Attack Aviator aboard the Oriskany in 1966-68,
has just produced a 26-page pamphlet, Digital
Photography for Travelers. For ordering info, go to www.lulu.com/hank-miller
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2008, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8605 Cameron
Street, Silver Spring, MD 20910