 Books
That Was In Nam
By John Dolan
Dispatches
by Michael Herr
Vintage 1977
Everything We Had
ed. by Al Santoli
Random House 1981
Once A Warrior King
by David Donovan
Ballantine 1986
Chickenhawk
by Robert Mason
Penguin 1983
We Were Soldiers Once...And Young
by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway
Harper Perennial 1992
Mel
Gibson's Vietnam movie We Were Soldiers just hit New Zealand,
so I've had to deal with endless commercials of that sagging
beagle-face of his, carefully smeared with artificial dirt
and smoke, rallying the troops in a laughable attempt at a
Southern accent. Having seen The Patriot, featuring Mel doing
a similarly rotten Carolina accent as he ran around chopping
up Redcoats with a teeny little tomahawk, I think I'll skip
his remake of Vietnam.
But it
did send me back to reread the book Mel bought to use as the
basis of the film: We Were Soldiers Once...and Young.
It seemed like a good occasion to review some of the innumerable
Vietnam memoirs I've bought over the years.
Yes,
chillun, I am old enough to remember that once upon a time,
nice people didn't even want to talk about Vietnam, let alone
read about it. Now how did it git so's they don't hardly wanna
talk 'bout nuthin' else? Gather 'round the fire and I'll tell
you all about it.
Avoiding
Nam was pretty much a fulltime job for sensible Americans
of the 70s. It didn't look like fun yet -- not when it was
actually happening. That took several years and about a thousand
war memoirs. At the time, it looked like a remarkably uninteresting
war, with wretched losers from inland America standing around
the paddies twitching nervously, wondering whether the water
buffalo in the next field was going to whip out a Kalashnikov
and start shooting.
Dispatches
That
changed very slowly. The first book to make Nam seem cool
was Michael Herr's Dispatches. This was the first Nam
book taught at universities (I encountered it in a course
at Berkeley). Herr wrote as one of the college boys who didn't
fight. He was there to watch, write, and make a name for himself.
He wrote guilty erotica, and spoke for the smart guys who
got themselves deferments but always wondered what they would've
done if they'd gone: "You know how it is, you want to look
and you don't want to look. I can remember the strange feelings
I had as a kid looking at the war photographs in Life..."
Since
the deferred guys were the core of the teaching pool at most
American universities, they tended to assign Herr's book,
and it became one of those "instant classics" which make it
more for demographic than artistic insights. Herr's book was
a first draft of Apocalypse Now, with Hendrix soundtrack and
quick cuts between cool gore and Saigon lies. It doesn't read
particularly well now; there's too much caution there, like
someone trying to do Hunter S. Thompson after halfheartedly
inhaling one tiny line of speed. But then that's always the
way to crack the upscale porn market: just a little whiff
of the really hard stuff, enough to grab the safe people.
After all, the safe, guilty males of the Nam era had two advantages
over the ones who went: they had graduated to teaching jobs
and could force large numbers of students to buy the book
-- and they were alive.
Herr's
book came out in '77, two years after the fall of Saigon.
It was a while before anybody wanted to hear from the losers
who'd actually gone and fought in Nam. It took a lot of concerted
lying, in films like Deer Hunter, to erase all those images
and persuade the home folks that the enterprise had been a
noble one.
In strictly
literary terms, this great lie was of some benefit, because
there are few genres as rich as the war memoir. Virtually
anyone who saw combat and has a decent memory can write a
decent book about it -- and Vietnam, a war characterized by
thousands of small skirmishes, was richer in incident and
gore than an inner-city basketball tournament. When next you
hear that rough voice asking, "War -- what is it good for?",
you tell it: "First-person memoirs, that's what!"
Everything
We Had
By 1981,
the memoirs were coming fast. The first and in some ways still
the best was Everything We Had, a collection of oral
reminiscences by 33 vets who'd done everything from nursing
the wounded to slitting throats with Bob Kerrey and his pals.
I'd still recommend this book as a starter-kit for the prospective
Nam fan, because the 33 voices offer something for virtually
everyone. Parts of the book are very funny, as when Gayle,
the cute li'l nurse, recalls her answer when asked if she'd
serve on a ward for Vietnamese casualties: "And I said, 'No,
I would probably kill them.' and she said, 'Well, maybe we
won't transfer you there.'" And they say the Army has no heart!
By the
early 80s, it was not just cool to've served in Nam; it was
glorious. It was, in fact, the only sort of martial glory
available (Grenada didn't quite carry the same "cachet," as
they said in the Reagan era.) Every Vet still alive and compos
mentis -- and some who weren't -- headed for that early-model
KayPro or Northstar keyboard to turn his ranting into cash.
They were a little confused at first, having been shunned
and pitied as they dragged their way from halfway house to
detox to medium-security institution...but slowly a canny
ambition shouted down the voices babbling in their addled
heads with the news that the war stories which had driven
the wife and kids to move out with no forwarding address were
now box-office boffo.
And damned
if many of them, fingers trembling on the keyboard, one hand
on the Jack Daniels or rolled-up twenty, didn't hunt-and-peck
out some quite good books.
This
high literary output was a delayed gift of the utter lack
of strategy which doomed the American enterprise in Vietnam:
a war which consisted largely of sending small contingents
of infantry out into the jungle to find the enemy, usually
by getting ambushed, is bound to be a military disaster --
but equally bound to produce an extraordinary number of fantastic
combat tales. As Walter puts it in Big Lebowski: "Me and Charlie,
eyeball to eyeball." Throw in the treachery of the South Vietnamese,
the social and racial bombs going off non-stop back home,
the feeling of abandonment, the music -- greatest soundtrack
of any war ever -- and you had the elements of better stories
than more intelligently-conducted wars could ever yield. (If
there were any true aesthetes worthy of Oscar Wilde's mantle,
they'd've agitated for the continuation of the war at all
costs. Alas, dreary Utilitarian ethics have conquered us so
thoroughly that not a single voice urged the continuation
of the war as the greatest performance art of the century.)
I've
read a dozen of these memoirs, and enjoyed almost all of them.
They come in all flavors. There's the raunchy defeatism of
F. N. G., which describes a "fuckin' new guy" entering an
infantry squad after Tet, when the Americans had pretty much
given up trying to win and were fighting a strange, highly
mobile but essentially defensive war. Then there's Once A
Warrior King, describing one very conservative Virginian's
relatively straightforward war, working with a fiercely anti-VC
village in the Delta. This is Greene's Quiet American told
by the quiet A. himself, as it were -- and he tells a good
story. It's the food I remember best, in that one: the long
descriptions of roasted rat with fish-sauce. That's one of
the delights of war and prison memoirs: you can count, in
these solidly grounded stories, on some excellent descriptions
of meals good and bad. (The POW memoir, combining the genres,
often yields the most mouth-watering descriptions of all;
if you want a book full of the delight of eating, read Brendan
Behan's one good book, Borstal Boy.)
Chickenhawk
The best
of all these might be Chickenhawk, the story of a helicopter
pilot who was, as Martin Sheen says of "Chef" in Apocalypse
Now, "...wound up a little too tight for Vietnam." Robert
Mason, the pilot-narrator, takes the reader in and out of
so many LZs, hot, cold and medium, that you develop a veteran's
wince everytime his slick starts descending toward the purple
smoke.
One of
the many delights of Mason's book is that it describes the
battles for the Ia Drang -- the same campaign glamorized in
We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, the book Gibson
filmed. The campaign, which is depicted as a noble, though
doomed, strike for freedom in We Were Soldiers.... doesn't
come off so well in Mason's memoir. In fact, he and his fellow
pilots seem to have done something the generals in charge
of the operation didn't do: read the books about earlier French
campaigns against the Viet Minh in that same valley. Mason
and his drunken buddies end up predicting the failure of the
campaign while their superiors are still sending home the
sort of communiques which did so much to cement the American
Army's reputation for...er, "emphasizing the positive," let's
say.
We
Were Soldiers Once... And Young
But Mason's
topper, his most brilliant passage, comes at the very end,
in the epilogue summarizing his messed-up return to civilian
life. Here's the superb two-paragraph conclusion, describing
his next move after the early drafts of his Nam memoir had
been rejected and he'd failed in everything he tried since
getting back to The World:
"What
did the desperate man do? I can tell you that I was arrested
in January, 1981, charged with smuggling marijuana into the
country. In August 1981, I was found guilty of possession
and sentence to five years at a minimum-security prison. I
am currently free as of February 1983, appealing the conviction.
No one is more shocked than I."
Just
roll that last sentence over on your tongue. "No one is more
shocked than I." Now there is a meal. Even the fussily correct
grammar, that annoying "...than I" rather than the colloquial
"than me" or "...than I am"; so perfectly droll, such a change
from the Nam dialogue in which every other word is "fuckin'
". And the grand historical irony, that the junked helicopter
jock should become desperate enough to sell his one skill
to the only people who wanted it, the drug dealers, designated
New Enemy of the Reaganites. And the timing! Mason's manuscript
got four rejections in the years leading up to 1981, when
the memoirs started appearing. A little later, and he'd've
been cool. But that would have been disastrous. To go to prison
for piloting a helicopter full of drugs, albeit unworthy boring
drugs like marijuana, even as that great war-dodging hypocrite
Reagan shoved his leathery grin in front of the flag -- ah,
It's a fate better than death.
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