you’re recommending books about the vietnam war. tell me about the first book on your list, a rumor of war (1977).
philip caputo was a marine who later became a well-known journalist. in my opinion, it is one of the first really well-written books to describe the moral ambiguities and difficulties faced by a young naval officer in this particular war. Before that you had world war 2 when they took iwo jima and, well, there was horrendous fighting, but it was much clearer. Caputo was the first to describe the terrible ambiguities. he got in trouble for something that happened, I don’t remember what, but he talked very honestly about the hard part of trying to be a man leading troops into combat in a tough war.
moral ambiguity sounds like a euphemism for something. Are you talking about atrocities?
You are reading: Best books on vietnam war
not. I think it is that there was not the clear good versus evil that you had in the second world war. it was not clear we were involved in the fight against the North Vietnamese, who were not friendly! they themselves committed terrible atrocities. and we were involved in supporting a government, the South Vietnamese, and they weren’t nice and obviously they got into a situation where it’s like, what’s really going on here?
“I wake up every day and think about death, dying, things I did every day. it doesn’t go away.”
and frankly for my generation, when we were little kids in the ’50s, we were brought up with the idea of the knights in shining armor: we’re going to go and defeat the evil Nazis. Vietnam didn’t have that. that’s what I meant by ambiguity. there were no longer any white knights on either side.
That must have been terribly nerve-wracking.
It was difficult, yes. but what happens, and I think it’s important to understand that when you commit to something like joining the army, these issues are important, but when you’re actually fighting, you’re no different from the soldiers in the second world war. my own father was in normandy and the battle of the bulge and my uncles fought in italy and the pacific and they all said we didn’t once think about whipping fascism or anything like that. it was just: ‘how do we get out of this alive and help our friends get out of this alive and not let them down?’ it quickly boils down to those around you, so there is a point where the question of who is the white knight disappears.
your next book is a classic vietnam war book, the things they carry (1990) by tim o’brien.
I like this book because it is his second book on vietnam. the first, following the cacciato, was very surreal. It was a patrol that was looking for a cacciato who was going to Paris, so they followed him to Paris. I don’t know, but my feeling was that it was an attempt by an author to try to have an artistic expression of what, at that point in our history, seemed quite surreal. apocalypse now is not about vietnam. It’s a surreal movie set in Vietnam, but it could have been the first world war. but when o’brien wrote about the things they wore, he was reduced to absolutely real thumbtacks. It wasn’t surreal anymore, it was like here’s a list of what an infantryman wears…
a growl?
correct. because foot soldiers carry so much weight. that’s where the nickname comes from because these people carry 80 to 120 pounds on their backs. it is the same now in afghanistan and iraq. There have been huge technological changes, but that foot soldier on the ground, who is actually the sharp end of the stick, is carrying everything from girlfriend photos to ammunition. The Things They Were Carrying is a series of short stories involving those things, things that bring you back to reality.
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may be the most moving thing about a soldier’s death: a small object that seems to sum them up.
I think because it places you between the two worlds. when you’re in the world of combat it’s a totally different psychic space. I don’t know what else to call it the first time I lost someone, one of my guys, I had to go through his pockets to get his personal effects, and in his left breast pocket there was a picture of his girlfriend from the high school. he was just out of high school, of course. and the bullet had pierced his face. and I started to shake…it was so…here’s a high school girl in his pocket with the bullet obliterating her face. it was so strange. and then I had to organize an artillery mission because they were landing too close to us and quickly you’re back in the… no time to contemplate or cry. it’s like: ‘oh god, the shells are coming in… aaaaaargh’ and you’re back in the other space. That’s why these touching little snippets are so…
psychic space is interesting. vietnam was obviously a long time ago and now you’ve written a novel, matterhorn. what do you do with space for 30 years?
well, raising five kids? no, I worked on the book for 30 years. not by choice, but because no one would publish it or even read it. so I kept saying, ‘well, I can do better.’ in a way, it was a two-edged sword. a typical way of coping with war and trauma is to go to the bar or do drugs and change jobs every six months. I would go to the basement and work on my novel and I think that was healthy. On the other hand, while working on the novel, I got into certain scenes that were very close to things I had witnessed and triggered memories and the unconscious and my post-traumatic stress disorder, which has a thousand names. but he’s been with us since the odyssey. if you read the odyssey, ulysses has all the symptoms when he has that banquet. fascinating. Homer obviously understood PTSD. the other classic description is robert grave’s farewell to all that.
Next on your list of books about the Vietnam War is one written from the perspective of the Viet Cong. tell me about the pain of war (1987), by bao ninh.
this is a great piece of writing and the guy is obviously a talented writer. What caught my attention is the similarity of feeling between people who, by the grace of God, luckily, were on different sides. he was born in north vietnam, i was born in a logging town in oregon. we end up in the same war on different sides, and yet the experience is very similar for the individual soldier. he, of course, talks about the havoc caused in his country, which did not happen on our side. but he had a sense of the humanity of the ‘enemy’. he we love to pseudo-specify our enemies, in a way that you can’t get the job done if you don’t. but reading this writing about an individual soldier in a war on the other side was very moving for me.
we are now in book number 4 of his books on the vietnam war. This is Fields of Fire (1978) by James Webb.
this is a book i like because webb understands the warrior mentality. I’m not one I’m a citizen soldier who is conscripted and I’ll do my part and then I want to get out. but there are warriors born in the world, and thank god we have them, I’m not a pacifist. and the hero of this book, is what I wanted to do since I was a child. he’s scotch-irish and webb is proud of his heritage and the marine corps is full of these people, disproportionately from the southern states, which is where the scotch-irish settled. so it explores that aspect of the human psyche: a guy who wants to be a warrior. then obviously as a warrior he encounters all the problems a warrior encounters and he’s a thinking warrior. webb is someone who does think, even though he is a politician (I find it hard to swallow that contradiction), and he is a good writer. a lot of people like to think that we all hate war, and warriors hate war too, but there’s something about them that makes them good, that makes them think: ‘I can’t wait for the next one’. as they are and a moral judgment cannot be issued.
Isn’t that addictive too? once you’ve been in that psychic space, as you say, it’s very difficult to get out again.
Well, I’ve been reading recent things about war addiction, particularly from correspondents, and someone wrote a review of my book calling it war porn. I’ve never heard that before, but I guess if that makes Tolstoy and Wilfred Owen pornographers, then I’m in good company. I think war addiction spreads. I think you can get addicted to adrenaline and solve it in many ways. one of the ways you get addicted to adrenaline is being in combat and i myself know a lot of marine friends in civilian life who do extremely dangerous snow and ice climbing, surfing, skydiving. I don’t think any of them want to return to combat. however, I’m sure there are people, some, who like it, but I guess they are damaged. psychotics like to kill people and we’re not talking about normal people anymore.
no, i guess not, but when you’ve experienced the extremes of life, including bonding with and losing people around you, then it can be hard to deal with the mundanity of life for most people. people.
absolutely. I often think of the kids I knew who were 19 years old: they were squad leaders, they made life and death decisions and they had amazing experiences. then they come back and get a job making hamburgers? It’s going to be crazy. That’s probably why we need a lot more help moving combat veterans back into civilian space. we don’t do a good job with that. It’s not just PTSD, it’s also this lack of existential meaning. you’re 19 years old and you realize that if you don’t show up and do your job, the machine gun you’re supposed to pull out will kill a lot of the other guys in the company, people I love. you are extraordinarily important and life has meaning, in the sense that your success and failure is life or death. you don’t show up for work at mcdonald’s, who cares?
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people you love. these extreme situations are so exciting that even the positive feelings are much greater than what you would get in ordinary life.
totally. I strive to give the reader a sense of that in my own book and that is one of the enduring positives of war. when veterans get together, they’re not getting together to talk about their exploits or reminisce about the war, which is the cliché, they’re trying to experience that feeling that they experienced when they were younger and in that situation. to try to retouch that love, that companionship.
the last book on your vietnam war book list is 365 days.
this was a book i read before i went to vietnam and it was written by an army doctor who wasn’t even there. I think he was in japan. but what he did was he interviewed the people that he dealt with and it was one of the great examples of breaking the statistics. an army doctor can say: ‘I treated 33 head wounds, I did 14 amputations… boom, boom, boom, boom.’
But if you talk to one of the 14 amputee cases and realize that he’s a real human being, with a real story about how he got there, it gives you this perspective. the next time you read the paper and say, ‘we suffered minor casualties’, you can take the next step and think, ‘i wonder who they were, i wonder what happened to them, i wonder if they kept their leg or i didn’t’, so I was already on the reservation when I read this, but I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is real.’ it’s just an army doctor showing the human side of the word ‘casualties’.
Have you injured yourself?
yes. I have two purple hearts. one was easy and the other was hard: I ended up on a hospital ship, because of a hand grenade.
So tell me more about your book, matherhorn.
well, where do I start? it was a book I had to keep working on because of this need to be understood. I always used to criticize words like “casualties” and “the enemy” and the ability we have to abstract ourselves from those we are talking about. you hear people talk about the marines and the image is of these 35-year-old gray-haired men, but the reality in vietnam and especially today is also that they are 19 years old. they are not gray, nor close. they’re competent and well-trained, but they’re kids and they’re all about girlfriends and fast cars and drinking, and that’s what they are. they have to grow up and take on huge responsibilities at an age when, frankly, most people aren’t ready for that. so how do they handle that? I wanted to write a novel that meant that when someone who has read it sees in a newspaper that the Marines have landed, they will say, ‘I know who he is. not the ones in the movies. those of the matterhorn. that’s what’s doing the job. the book is about combat. he is very focused. I don’t get involved in the politics of war. I’m not talking about anything these characters wouldn’t think about or talk about: getting the job done, racism, class issues, injustice. people have said about my book: ‘it doesn’t talk about the suffering of the vietnamese’, but my characters wouldn’t have thought of it. they just didn’t.
Have you found it cathartic or are you mourning its loss now that the book is out?
That’s a funny question. she was telling someone the other night: ‘I lived with this book for 35 years’. it’s like living with your wife for so long and you agree that it’s time, she’s over, but then you see her with another guy and it’s like- waaaaaah!
but do you feel like you should have stopped thinking about vietnam?
not. I am happy that it is done. I’m done with that. What I remember from Vietnam has little to do with the novel. I wake up every day and think about death, dying, things I did every day. it doesn’t go away you don’t talk about it. flits through your mind as you go about your daily business. luckily for me i have had a lot of help with PTSD and i have a medication that just goes in one side and out the other side. there it was, there it went. but go on with your life and it will be with me until the day I die.