My friend, Beth, recently learned that one could lend a Kindle book for two weeks to a friend. She wanted to figure out how to do it, so, having several books she thought I’d like, she kindly selected me as her guinea pig. After a couple of false starts, we managed to get her copy of the book, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (by Karl Marlantes), onto my Kindle. Although I’m sure she told me what she was lending me, I guess its significance didn’t quite get through. I’d never read a war story in my entire life, nor would I have read this one under different circumstances. But my friend’s efforts on my behalf encouraged me to give it a try. It has been a moving and educational experience.
I was a young woman during the Vietnam War (called ‘the American War’ in SE Asia), and as everyone knows, its conduct was the subject of much dissension, even violence, on the home front. My friends and colleagues demonstrated, some students elsewhere were killed, and the society was torn apart by controversy over it. My pains related to that war were all sympathetic, however. I had no direct experience of deaths and disfigurements among those I loved. I would say that though I was against the war, I was several steps removed from it, and truth be known, was fairly ignorant of its deeper meanings.
This book, which is extraordinarily well written, brings it all painfully home. It introduces a group of men, some educated, some not; some black, some white; some ‘lifers’, some members of the reserves. It slowly, methodically, and beautifully describes the characters, through their thoughts and actions. It portrays the social and psychological forces at work, as a group of men, young men, copes with the horrendous conditions of war. The horrors are described in appalling clarity and realism. As one reads, one feels the pain of tropical sores (something I’ve endured in very small measure), the misery of hunger and thirst, of alternately excessive cold, damp and heat on long marches, or waiting, bored and frightened, in trenches. The author (himself a Marine who served in Vietnam) conveys the feelings of esprit de corps, drilled into Marines, and the genuine selflessness displayed at times, with contrary feelings of skepticism, cowardice, and self-aggrandizement, in convincing counterpoint.
Much of the book takes place in the countryside, where the soldiers’ effort is divided between staying/keeping each other alive and ‘killing gooks’; but there is another thread that characterizes those above the soldiers, those who make decisions elsewhere for them. One comes to understand the bad decisions made by distant officers (exacerbating the near-unbearable suffering and death in the field), as the interplay of the officers’ past experiences, social pressures and personal ambitions unfolds. The actions and reactions at field level and at headquarters are reminiscent of the complexity of motivations, mistakes, and good intentions one sees at these two levels in international development contexts. But in the book, which must surely reflect what goes on in war, the effects are truly matters of life and death.
In 2007, I made my first trips to Laos and Vietnam, places that were routinely in the news, in my youth. I’d heard about Vietnam’s recent economic successes; and about the beauty of the landscape in Laos. I was anxious to see for myself. I did not expect the intensity of my own reactions to the visits. In Hanoi, the feelings of the 1960s came back to me immediately on arrival, as I drove by Hồ Chí Minh’s well-lit tomb, and worked the next day in a building draped with a gigantic flag of his face. I remembered the uproar caused when Jane Fonda went to Hanoi in 1972. I wondered, as I walked the streets, if people knew I was American and if they were feeling hatred in their hearts. In Laos, my feelings were even more intense. I went to small villages in the northeast, where we planned a conservation and development project. In Muangmuay, there was a poster on the wall with UXO written on it—‘unexploded ordinance’—and pictures of all the different kinds of dangerous mines and other killing devices. The village head wore a T-shirt he’d won by memorizing all these UXOs. Not far from there was the Plain of Jars, which was said to have more unexploded mines than any other place on earth. It was all I could do to refrain from crying.
I spoke with another Laotian man, who saw me walking one evening as dusk approached, and invited me to join him on a bench along the roadside in the small town of Viengkham; he wanted to chat, perhaps practice his English. I was overwhelmed with sorrow, and expressed my feelings of regret and guilt about what had happened to these people. He reassured me, telling me that it was not really America’s fault, that it was a fight among brothers, among the Laotians themselves, and that the bigger powers had simply been drawn in. I suppose there’s a grain of truth there as well, but I feared he was mainly being kind. Such kindness from someone who has seen the violence of war, certainly exacerbated by my own country, touched me. It still touches me—that people can be so forgiving.
But to return to the book, which takes place in Vietnam near the Laotian border, it does not address the pain and suffering of the people of Vietnam or Laos. It only describes the experiences of the American soldiers. For myself, I have found it exceedingly painful to read; but I have learned from it, more realistically, more basically, what war really means. Each night I read some more (I’m 3/4 of the way through), and I wake in the night feeling sadness that we, the human race, are still willing to sacrifice the lives of young people—no matter what nationality—-in such ways. The waste and suffering on all sides surely never goes away, despite the kindness I’ve witnessed as a former enemy in these two countrie.
The waste is truly unconscionable.