A tough read about a haunted Vietnam veteran

Larry Heinemann served two tours in Vietnam as an infantryman in the 25th Division. His first novel Close Quarters (1977) is generally regarded as one of the best tales from the muddy ground of Vietnam. His second novel, Paco's Story won the National Book Award as the best novel of 1986 (I'll get to the controversy about that). Last year, he published Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam , , which is partially a memoir of his infantryman days in Vietnam, partially an indictment of his then-commanders (civilian and military), and partially an account of a trip Heinemann and American Vietnam-veteran writers made, as guests of the Vietnam Writers Association, in 1992. ("Black Virgin" was what many US soldiers called Nui Ba Den, a mountain in Tay Ninh Province.) In 1992 Heinemann's non-Vietnam-oriented novel Cooler by the Lake also appeared.

Like Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (which also won the National Book Award and was adapted into the riveting movie "Who'll Stop the Rain?"), Paco's Story begins with combat in Vietnam and carries a heavy weight of trauma home. A major difference between the two books is that Paco Sullivan is not trying to "make a killing" in the sense of profit. His aspirations after being the sole survivor of Alpha Company from a firestorm that rained down on a fire base called Harriette are low. I think (but am not entirely certain) that the devastation came from so-called "friendly fire."

What the narrator (one of the ghosts from Alpha Company, telling James, who I think is a ghost of another US casualty from Vietnam who was not in Alpha company) recalls is, I think, "friendly fire":

"Lt. Stennett crouched over his radio hoarsely screaming map coordinates to every piece of artillery, every air strike and gunship within radio range, like it was going out of style, when all of a sudden—zoom—the air came alive and crawled and yammered and whizzed and hummed with the roar and buzz of a thousand incoming rounds. It was hard to see for all the smoke and dust kicked up by muzzle flashes, but everyone looked up—GIs and zips—and knew it was every incoming round left in Creation, a wild and bloody shitstorm, a ball-busting cataclysm."

I quote this both because I am not entirely certain about whether the cataclysm was "friendly fire," but also to provide a sample of the piling-on rhetoric of the narrator, who died in the bombardment.

Paco was the company's premier booby-trap layer and conscious of committing and witnessing war crimes. There is some extremely grisly material in the book, and language that the term "vernacular" seems inadequate to characterize. It also frequently is lyrical even while evoking horrendous memories. I can't imagine anyone reading through the book without wincing—if not for the language or a very detailed atrocity, then for the "pricktease" Cathy's diary.

After the barrage that killed everyone else on both sides, Paco laid with maggots growing in his many wounds through two nights before being found and roughly removed to a field hospital. He survived. Scarred and needing a cane, he took a bus as far as his money would take him. After multiple insensitive rejections, Paco is hired to wash dishes and clean up at the Texas Lunch by a WWII veteran, Ernest with stories of his own about heavy fighting in the Pacific. Paco rents a room across the street and is observed (and teased) by a student teacher. With loads of pain-killers and anti-depressants, he gets by. As I already noted, his aspirations are low. There are no traces of survivor guilt (but then his ghosts leave little need for that kind of guilt!)

I think that the middle of the book has way too much description of the Texas town in which Paco finds a hard-scrabble refuge for a while. The device of the ghost narrator gets old fast, and the return of some repressed memories seems more than a little contrived. They are, nonetheless, powerful, traumatic memories. And finding out what Cathy thinks and feels (and thought and felt) is saddening, whether it is what those around obviously physically and wounded Vietnam veterans thought and felt or what Vietnam veterans thought and felt that those who had no idea what they had been through thought and felt.

The book seems to me to sag in the middle and it has a rawness that surely puts off others (or would put off those trying to read the book). When it won the National Book Award, a number of African American writers and activist expressed outrage that Toni Morrison's Beloved (also a tough read about past horrors) had not won, which undoubtedly played a part in Beloved being the Pulitzer Prize Committee's choice. Arguments could easily be made that both books are over-written and more than a little contrived to rub readers' noses in horrors and extreme reactions by their characters. (I don't recall what other choices were available.)