Larry Heinemann wrote one of the first novels based on first-hand ground-level experience in Vietnam (Close Quarters, 1977), followed by a novel about a GI survivor haunted by his comrade as he tries to adjust to civilian life carrying mortar fragments and horrible memories (Paco's Story which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1986). He served in the 25th Infantry Division on M-113 armored personnel carriers (called 'green dragons' by the Vietnamese, "13-ton death-traps, obsolete the day they were built" by Heinemann) at Cu Chi and Dau Tien, towards Cambodia, northwest of Saigon) from March 1967 until March 1969, which is to say through the Tet Offensive. He used his experience of a major battle from that (the same one that Oliver Stone survived) in Close Quarters). The protagonists of both novels are based at Cu Chi, directly above the famous tunnels (of which there were two hundred kilometers dug by guerrillas with ordinary garden tools).

No one who has read the two novels would doubt that the contempt of the soldiers for their officers in general, and General William ("Light at the end of the tunnel")Westmoreland in particular was Heinemann's own, and this is amply confirmed in Heinemann's 2005 book Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam, which is half memoir of his experiences as a soldier and half a memoir about revisiting Vietnam beginning in 1990. His scorn for Westmoreland is undimmed. For second place on his contempt list, it is a tossup between Robert MacNamara (the robotic Secretary of Defense during the buildup of US troops in Vietnam), John Wayne (whose name became a verb for US soldiers in Vietnam) and James Webb (a former Secretary of the Navy), followed closely by Henry Kissinger, Jesse Helmes, and Richard Nixon. (He has some rancor for LBJ, too, but it is less colorfully, viscerally expressed.)

Readers of the two novels (or other memoirs and fiction of enlisted men who fought in Vietnam) already know that they knew or cared nothing about the Vietnamese they were ostensibly protecting. "I did not want to know about Vietnamese," Heinemann recalls, "much less understand, still less appreciate.... We did not have what anyone could remotely regard as ordinary human contact wit the Vietnamese, just as 'Vietnam' was distinctly not a country, but, rather, an event; a war of the death's breath nightmare kind. We were severely and earnestly warned not to 'fraternize' with the Vietnamese; not to learn their language; not to eat their good; not to listen to their music, or in any way come to appreciate them as a people or culture." When he left, he writes, "I didn't know anything more about Vietnamese language, military or social history, literature or music, religion or customs or 'sociology' than when I arrived."... except that they made great beer, Ba Muoi Ba (33).

Heinemann writes about his return, getting a job as a bus driver in Chicago in time to see the buildup for the 1968 police riot in Chicago, his distrust of Vietnam Veterans Against the War as being an organization of former officers, the suicide of his brother, makes clear that writing about his experience as an infantryman has not been cathartic, and noting that for a long time he had not the slightest desire ever to see any part of Vietnam again. But, eventually he felt a need to "see the country at peace, to see ordinary folks leading ordinary lives."

In 1990, Heinemann joined a group of American writers (the best known of whom is Philip Caputo) for a conference of American and Vietnamese writers who were veterans of the war. The second half of the book describes his impressions of that conference and various travels since then in Vietnam—mostly by rail, with poet and fellow train-buff Larry Rottmann. He is better able to notice the beauty of the country (and particularly Black Virgin Mountain, which loomed over his war), appreciate pho (the national dish of noodles in chicken broth with fish sauce), recognize that many of the 300,000 Vietnamese MIAs were obliterated, as were the less than two thousand US ones. He elicits a first-hand memory of a soldier who accepted the surrender by Van ("Big") Min in Saigon's Presidential Palace (ending a presidency of less than 48 hours). He finds General Vo Nguyen Giap, "one of the great, ruthless military minds of the twentieth century" (main strategist of the defeat of the French and Dienbenphu and the US neocolonial expedition that followed in less than a decade). He was "the first man of flag rank I had ever met or been in the same room with." Heinemann was awed by a general being a solicitous host for soldiers from an army he defeated, but has no great insights into that military mind.

The rest of the book is Vietnam travelogue by bicycle (within Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City) and train. As such, it is less gripping and insightful than Catfish and Mandala: A 2-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, describing a return by Andre X. Pham, a younger survivor (whose family were boat people) fluent in Vietnamese, who traveled around Vietnam by bicycle. The memories of the war and its aftermath are both vivid, and that (which is not all in the first half) is the most compelling part of Black Virgin Mountain, though the final climb of the titular mountain, 996 meters in height, called "Nui Ba Den" in Vietnamese (with many stories about a wife named Ba Den waiting for the young soldier she loved to return) and "La Montagne de la dame noire" by the French is a moving finale (if suspect epiphany)—or as "finis" as Heinemann can be of what he saw and did in Vietnam as a young soldier in 1967-68. From his two earlier novels, the impossibility of ever going home (as opposed to being back in the USA) or finding closure for what he did and saw in 1967-68 is impossible.




Recommended: Yes