The Vietnam Reader (81 page)

Authors: Stewart O'Nan

BOOK: The Vietnam Reader

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The writing went quickly and easily. I drafted the piece in a week or two, fiddled with it for another week, then published it as a separate short story.

Almost immediately, though, there was a sense of failure. The details of Norman Bowker’s story were missing. In this original version, which I still conceived as part of the novel, I had been forced to omit the shit field and the rain and the death of Kiowa, replacing this material with events that better fit the book’s narrative. As a consequence I’d lost the natural counterpoint between the lake and the field. A metaphoric unity was broken. What the place needed, and did not have, was the terrible killing power of that shit field.

As the novel developed over the next year, and as my own ideas clarified, it became apparent that the chapter had no proper home in the larger narrative.
Going After Cacciato
was a war story; “Speaking of Courage” was a postwar story. Two different time periods, two different sets of issues. There was no choice but to remove the chapter entirely. The mistake, in part, had been in trying to wedge the piece into a novel. Beyond that, though, something about the story had frightened me—I was afraid to speak directly, afraid to remember—and in the end the piece had been ruined by a failure to tell the full and exact truth about our night in the shit field.

Over the next several months, as it often happens, I managed to erase the story’s flaws from my memory, taking pride in a shadowy, idealized recollection of its virtues. When the piece appeared in an anthology of short fiction, I sent a copy off to Norman Bowker with the thought that it might please him. His reaction was short and somewhat bitter.

“It’s not terrible,” he wrote me, “but you left out Vietnam. Where’s Kiowa? Where’s the shit?”

Eight months later he hanged himself.

In August of 1978 his mother sent me a brief note explaining what had happened. He’d been playing pickup basketball at the Y; after two hours he went off for a drink of water; he used a jump rope; his friends found him hanging from a water pipe. There was no suicide note, no message of any kind. “Norman was a quiet boy,” his mother wrote, “and I don’t suppose he wanted to bother anybody.”

Now, a decade after his death, I’m hoping that “Speaking of Courage” makes good on Norman Bowker’s silence. And I hope it’s a better story. Although the old structure remains, the piece has been substantially revised, in some places by severe cutting, in other places by the addition of new material. Norman is back in the story, where he belongs, and I don’t think he would mind that his real name appears. The central incident—our long night in the shit field along the Song Tra Bong—has been restored to the piece. It was hard stuff to write. Kiowa, after all, had been a close friend, and for years I’ve avoided thinking about his death and my own complicity in it. Even here it’s not easy. In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.

12
Memory

March 1968. At My Lai, U.S. forces under Lt. William Galley slaughter hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians. The massacre is unsuccessfully covered up by the military.

The returned vet’s flashback to combat experience is a common device in Vietnam writing, from the highest literary art to the basest genre thriller. Backed by veterans’ testimonies as well as ample medical research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), authors conjure up memories to overwhelm and torture their heroes. This can be done subtly or clumsily depending on the author, but it’s the most notable—and inescapable—use of memory in the literature.

The pieces in this chapter employ memory in other ways, although, in the end, many of the vets we see are not much different from those the popular media gives us. The gap between veterans and civilians seems even more present now, so many years after the war, and the relationships of the veterans are that much shakier. There’s a loneliness, an unwillingness to speak or unearth the past. It’s not merely that America won’t listen, it’s that for his own sake the vet hesitates to make the private public, and instead keeps it inside.

Unlike most other veterans, Yusef Komunyakaa didn’t write about the war until he’d established himself as a major poet. He’d already published a number of critically acclaimed collections before bringing out
Dien Cai Dau
in 1988. The title is Vietnamese for “crazy” or “no good,” and Komunyakaa or his poetic persona recalls those strange days by quietly contemplating remembered images, trying to make sense of his experience without the melodrama of the flashback. His memories are no less insistent though; as he says in “The Dead at
Quang Tri,” “the
grass
we walk on / won’t stay down.” His work also probes the relationship between African American soldiers and the United States, as well as those same soldiers and the local Vietnamese prostitutes.

Nonvet and literary short-story writer Bobbie Ann Mason’s first novel
In Country
(1985) explores the lack of memories its teenage hero Sam has of her father, who was killed in Vietnam. Sam attempts to reconnect with him by trying to reexperience the war, obsessively watching
M*A*S*H
and reading Vietnam books—in essence, trying to bridge the gap (not only of the war, but of gender and generation). Her uncle, Emmett, is a quirky, messed-up vet, and in the section excerpted here, he grudgingly lets Sam in on some of his own well-guarded memories of the war. What’s interesting is that Sam has already collected these memories from popular sources; the individual memory of the vet is being absorbed or subsumed by the culture at large. Like Mason’s stories,
In Country
is written in a style that eighties critics labeled trailer-park minimalism, a blue-collar, lightly ironic realism with an emphasis on the everyday details of domestic American life, especially the use of familiar brand-name products.

First Air Cav vet Kevin Bowen’s “Incoming” from his 1994 collection
Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong
seems to be conveying the reality of what it feels like to be mortared, and then, halfway through, the poem takes us across the ocean and into the lives of those affected by the loss of loved ones, and shows us how that loss remains far beyond the physical end of the war.

In the Lake of the Woods
(1994) is Tim O’Brien’s fourth Vietnam book. The novel investigates the disappearance and possible murder of Kathy Wade and the life of the prime suspect, her husband, Vietnam vet and recently failed politician John Wade. In the closing days of an election, newspapers report that John took part in the My Lai massacre, and he loses badly. He and Kathy retreat to their lake house, from which Kathy disappears. O’Brien looks into three distinct mysteries in the book, all of which have already taken place—John’s formative years, his participation in the massacre, and the disappearance of Kathy—by using memories and chapters the author calls “Evidence,” made up of a combination of nonfiction (some of it from William
Calley’s court-martial) and fictional testimony of characters who had some connection to John Wade. The novel is an examination of John’s possible guilt or innocence, and by extension the conduct of the war. As in
The Things They Carried,
a first-person author figure is present, and facts and stories often blend and clash, revealing no final concrete answers. In the end, O’Brien gives us several possibilities for what could have happened to Kathy, but none excuse John Wade’s (or America’s) denial of his terrible past. The
New York Times Book Review
judged
In the Lake of the Woods
the best book of fiction for 1994.

In John Balaban’s “Mr. Giai’s Poem,” Mr. Giai, a former Viet Minh soldier, shares a quiet memory he himself tried to immortalize in his own poetry. His intimate audience of three American veterans (in actuality the poets W. D. Ehrhart, Bruce Weigl, and the author himself) toasts this moment of connection, creating a new, redeeming memory.

In each piece, memory serves some other purpose than conjuring mere terror or heartrending sorrow. It seems that as the years pass and the war recedes, more Vietnam authors are questioning memory, examining how it can be at once devastating and salvific, perhaps because with the dwindling of any worthwhile popular discussion concerning the war, veterans and their families are left with little but their own intimate recollections.

Dien Cai Dau
Y
USEF
K
OMUNYAKAA
1988

Somewhere Near Phu Bai

The moon cuts through
night trees like a circular saw
white hot. In the guard shack
I lean on the sandbags,
taking aim at whatever.
Hundreds of blue-steel stars
cut a path, fanning out
silver for a second. If anyone’s
there, don’t blame me.

I count the shapes ten meters
out front, over & over, making sure
they’re always there.
I don’t dare blink an eye
The white-painted backs
of the Claymore mines
like quarter-moons.
They say Victor Charlie will
paint the other sides & turn
the blast toward you.

If I hear a noise
will I push the button
& blow myself away?
The moon grazes treetops.
I count the Claymores again.
Thinking about buckshot
kneaded in the plastic C-4
of the brain, counting
sheep before I know it.

Starlight Scope Myopia