One of the things I learned from reading Larry Heinemann's nonfiction book about Vietnam, Black Virgin Mountain, is that "grunt" was not a term in use when he was an infantryman in Vietnam (1967-68). I was looking for the word he said was used then, "trooper," in his 1977 first novel, Close Quarters, but if he used it, I missed it.

After reading his second Vietnam novel, the 1986 National Book Award-winner, Paco's Story, I could have gone either back to read his first novel or forward to read his memoir. Being more than a little curious about how autobiographical Paco's Story was, I advanced and only then went back to Close Quarters, which I think is much more autobiographical than Paco's Story—although both have firestorms from during the Tet Offensive (which Heinemann says began for the 25th Infantry Division in which he served from around Thanksgiving 1967 into the next summer (by which time he was home, driving a bus in Chicago).

Paco's Story follows the sole survivor of a firestorm, who was badly wounded, through hospitalization and discharge to trying to function (as a dishwasher in a small-town Texas diner) with physical pain (including many shrapnel fragments still in his body) and traumas (not just his near-death experience along with those of everyone else in his company). After finding out what a woman who had toyed with him thought of him, Paco leaves.

Close Quarters follows the "natural" cycle of stateside training, transport overseas, tour of duty in the combat zone (with an R&R interlude in Tokyo), transport back to the USA, mutual incomprehension between those who had not been through hell and those who had. Philip Dosier is haunted by memories of his mates whose names will be going on the monument on the D.C. mall some years later, whereas Paco's Story is narrated by one ghost to another of those from Charley Company who died around Paco.

Memories of horrors (including a rape/murder by one soldier in Charley Company that everyone else witnessed) return to Paco as he is trying to get by and get beyond the traumas, whereas Dosier's experiences (including killing an old man and a 14-year-old at close range) are related more or less chronologically. Dosier is not the "last man standing" when he leaves Cu Chi. In his last days there, he and his buddy Quinn refuse to go out in the M-113 armored personnel carriers (called ('green dragons' by the Vietnamese, "13-ton death-traps, obsolete the day they were built" by Heinemann) that they have named "Cow Catcher." Without them, it is badly damaged, one man killed and three others badly wounded, and the vehicle is hauled back for scrap. Dosier feels that if he and Quinn had not ducked the patrol, they would have avoided the destruction. Quinn will not accept any survivor guilt.

Dosier and Quinn smoke a lot of Cambodian marijuana, pop barbiturates (Darvon) in great quantities, and drink a lot of warm beer over the course of the book (and are frequently high when in combat). They also pound away at a Vietnamese prostitute with regularity, kill at least two water buffalo, get a black soldier imprisoned for defending himself from a nearly lethal attack by Quinn, fire countless rounds into the woods ("jungle"), Dosier strangles an old Vietnamese and shoots a prisoner (after which his mates, including even the lieutenant, corroborate his lie that the boy tried to grab Dosier's gun... on which the safety just happened to be off).

"Winning hearts and minds" was not on the list of priorities of the soldiers in the book. The Vietnamese are invariably referred to with derogatory terms, and the n-word also recurs for those in the same uniforms as Quinn and Dosier. "Barracks language" is the language of the book, the f-word the most frequent adjective. The book is not for those offended by realistic representation of how soldiers spoke... or of how they coped with copious pharmacological aid and total contempt for those who sent young Americans to kill and die in Vietnam. "It seemed clear to us that the war was not simply a pointless waste, but egregious and iniquitous. Though these were not the words we used. "—the f@ck outa here Bub, F@ck this." No one I knew wanted any part of it," Heinemann recalled in Black Virgin Mountain. It describes the attitude of Dosier & co. in Close Quarters.

Close Quarters also shows in excruciating detail what Heinemann told in Black Virgin Mountain). "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 with the Vietnamese." The treatment of the Vietnamese prostitute does not fall within "ordinary human contact" (unlike the higher-priced Japanese one with whom Dosier spent his R&R leave).

Dosier and Quinn knew that they could not "go home" again, though they wanted to see it again, and perhaps stimulate some memory of who they had been before they went to Vietnam.

Heinemann's two Vietnam novels are gripping and very uncomfortable reads. They have a gritty authority lacking in the "gung ho" warmongering fantasies of Tom Clancy and John Wayne (the latter's name is used for pointless risk-taking)... Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. Unlike them, he was there, on the ground while the fire was flying (plenty of it outgoing along with more carefully aimed lethal inbound fire). (I have not read other Vietnam war writing by those who were on the firing line (Robert Stone, Philip Caputo, Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien) in decades, so can't compare their structurings of their experiences or prose to Heinemann's. Close Quarters does not go back to boot camp, as "Full-Metal Jacket" and "Jarhead" (the movies at least) do.)

I have to say that I find Heinemann's prose a bit overwritten. I think that Close Quarters would be better if around 50 (of its 336) pages were excised. Although less so than in Paco's Story, Heinemann sometimes build sentences that some might find evocative or rhapsodic, but which seem run-on to me, whether in long lists or multiple clauses. The prose is never as involuted as Henry James or William Faulkner, and is sometimes as laconic and stripped-down as Hemingway. And "to say the least" is not over-used as it is in Paco's Story.

The book includes a useful glossary of technical and soldier vernacular terms used in the book. (The entry for "John Wayne" notes "always derogatory," as are all the words for Vietnamese.)




Recommended: Yes