In
my experience, related people and topics tend to show up which at first seem random,
but after a time, the connections and meanings emerge. A couple of years ago, a
student appeared in the nonfiction continuing education class I teach at
Rutgers University -- a retired physician writing about his experience as an
Army medic in the 1950s Korean Conflict. Having never before worked with a
writer on this kind of memoir material, I think it is safe to say we learned
from one another – and continue to, as he develops more meaningful narratives
and I get the pleasure of seeing his work bloom.
Last
year, I was asked to help edit a memoir by a severely injured Iraq war veteran,
a project that is ongoing; with each new chapter, I learn more about parsing
the multi-layered nuances of trauma. Thus my education in first person writing
about war and its aftermath continues. Along the way, I've added key books to
my memoir reading list.
Which brings us to how quickly I headed
straight for John Merson's spot, when I saw his book, published
by an imprint of Random House, propped up on the Local Authors table a
couple of weeks ago at the Nantucket Book Festival.
“No,” I answered, “because my memory is
better than my imagination.”
But her question wouldn’t go away. I began to think maybe I might have more
freedom with a novelistic treatment of my subject, the Vietnam war.
One classmate, recalling our freshman-year
study of the Crusades, asked, “Why is it that the West is once again at war
with Islam?”
The year was 2006, US forces had invaded
and occupied both Iraq and Afghanistan, and I had just returned from my tenth trip
to Vietnam. The first was in 1966, when I began a tour of duty as a marine
infantry “grunt.” For the next thirteen months, I had a worm’s-eye view of the
ground war in Vietnam, living with villagers whose lives were not so different
from the farmers and ranchers for whom I had worked while growing up in
Pennsylvania and Wyoming. We brought the war into their homes, schools, and
rice paddies, gradually forcing them to side with our enemy.
Forty years later, I confronted the
damage I had done. My classmate’s question became, for me, a question about the
results of war. Having personally endured the years-long process of recovery
from war, beginning when I was still in Vietnam, and following my return from
duty, I could see that war hadn’t solved any problems, but only made them
worse.
Motivated by wanting to explain this to
my reunion classmates, I wrote a short story about an actual 1967 incident in
which my platoon killed nearly twenty unarmed villagers during a night ambush
in Dai Loc. The aftermath of the massacre reverberated throughout my life:
during the end of my tour, while returning home, and over the years and decades
spent finishing college and graduate school, getting married, going to work,
becoming a parent, divorcing and re-marrying, and finally coming back to
Vietnam.
On my first return trip to Vietnam in 1995, Dai Loc was the only place
where I had once fought, that I visited.
The site had been made into a war memorial, listing all the names of Dai
Loc villagers killed between 1945 and 1975, the years of the struggle for
independence.
This
experience of revisiting the scene of the original incident became the fulcrum
on which I constructed my memoir. I had first tried a thematic approach in
which each chapter of the book was devoted to a lesson I had learned, but
comments from readers of a draft indicated that this structure was confusing.
As a result, I switched to a more chronological story line in the next draft,
starting with my arrival in Vietnam in 1966 as a very green and scared infantry
scout, moving through my tour in Vietnam, my return to the US, and finally my
trips back in Vietnam between 1995 and 2006. The chronological approach worked
much better for readers of later drafts, since they understood how and why I
had learned the lessons I was describing. The entire writing process took less
than a year.
Still,
the climax of the story was the massacre, where I was forced to confront the
central truth of my experience as a foot soldier: that I was the instrument of
destruction for the villagers of Dai Loc. What had led me to that night? Why
had I volunteered to fight in Vietnam? I had gone to war with dreams of
becoming the hero I thought my father and uncle had been, so why had fighting
in Vietnam not made me any stronger or more able to confront the challenges in
my life? Understanding the mistakes I had made, how could I make amends?
On subsequent trips to Vietnam between 1995
to 2006, I worked with government officials, tech industry leaders, young
Vietnamese who had grown up after the fighting had ended, and with American
veterans who had returned to Vietnam to remedy the damage done by the massive
American bombing of civilian targets. On one trip, I learned about a project in
Quang Tri that clears unexploded bombs, providing new land for farmers. I had
spent my boyhood working on farms not endangered by bombs, and so I had found
the right project to support with my modest book royalties and speaking fees.
The memoir I wrote weaves two distinct
threads -- learning to be a soldier, and finding a way to recover from war. The
second graders in my writing class taught me that writing a memoir might be a
first step but not the last word.
