Still too weak to read other authors. Here is what I had to say in 2008 about those a cousin selected for his brother:
That is all another story. I was telling you what I know about narratives by Americans who fought in Viet Nam, so you can interpret what I say about my cousin Peter's stack of books his brother David selected to represent his time there with the Marines.
It's a short stack. There is Michael W. Rodriquez' s collection Humidity Moon: Short Stories from the Vietnam War, not something you would look to anti-immigrant Rush Limbaugh to recommend. At Viet Nam Generation we published the first book from a Chicano veteran, so far as we knew, Leroy Quintana's poems.
Since then I haven't been paying attention. I did trip over a memoir, An Accidental Soldier: Memoirs of Mestizo in Vietnam, by Manny Garcia. Manny was a Ranger, a super-infantryman, and partakes in the general American Indian way of looking at overseas military service, as a walkabout.
Leroy is instead Aurelian, taciturn about the ambiguities of republic and empire. Michael is more like Gus, demotic and ironic, and his prose seems mannered to me in comparison to the Short Timers. But that's a matter of taste, relative social position. Manny's stories have a lot more details about soldiering.
David my cousin's second book, Hell Looks Different Now: One Corpsman's Journey Back to Viet Nam, by J. "Doc" McNiff is like a manuscript by John Creech I tried to publish at Viet Nam Generation. Kali wouldn't do it, thought it was sub-literary, though she wouldn't use that word, we used to make fun of a man we knew who said it a lot who is now chair of Yale's English department.
Viet Nam Generation was all about publishing anything good but Kali wanted me to work my rewrite magic on John's stories. John would have liked that too. I make changes that snap a manuscript into the shining professional quality the author was aiming at. But I wouldn't do it for John because I won't do that Maxwell Perkins/Gordon Lish rewrite work unless there is real money in it for everyone.
John recently published his manuscript himself here in Chapel Hill, which is what Doc seems to have done. Both books are best off as they are. John worried over his stories for a decade, to their improvement. Doc's book is gloriously unedited. He thanks someone for going over the manuscript or galleys but I don't think the changes got sent to the printer.
Doc is from the small town in Massachusetts where he returned to work for the police. He got a serious education after the war and much of the memoir is by a reflective grownup. But the core voice of his book, and John's, and only a few others I have found that slipped through editors somehow, is that of an uneducated teenage private soldier, not the ventriloquist's dummy of the writer he became.
If you're interested in what it feels like to walk around in the woods with couple hundred other American teenagers blowing foreigners apart with rifles and grenades as they try to do the same to you, Doc is about as good as it gets.
The rest of my cousin’s selection are by two authors who, in contrast to Doc and John, have built a career as professional authors, and have escaped Gus' fate. W.D. Ehrhart and Robert A. Anderson moreover have a quality of reflection and deliberate action that contrasts with Michael Rodriquez' tone.
Ehrhart, known as Bill, is an author in the sense of a man who has built an oeuvre, a series of books in verse and prose, fiction and non-fiction, as writer and editor, that show growth in thought around central concerns over a lifetime.
In that sense he is the American author from the Viet Nam war. It would take another essay of this length to review his career. You may instead consult Kali's book, which takes Bill as the case study of the veteran author trying to return to society with the truth of his past.
The book by Bill which cousin David chose is the one often selected by teachers to represent the Viet Nam war. That is why Bill wrote it.
Vietnam-Perkasie: a Combat Marine Memoir appeals to the teenage boy who wants to be a soldier. Then it walks him through the war in Viet Nam, from the wide-ranging experience of Bill's tour. A bright enlisted volunteer from high school, Bill was both protected by older men who kept him doing REMF office jobs and indulged by them in going out to fight.
We see him selecting the harassment and interdiction artillery fire missions that took so many lives among the citizens of our ally, the Republic of Viet Nam, we sit with him in a bunker at Con Thien by the the DMZ, where the artillery of the People's Army reached every day, and we fight through Hue city after Tet 1968, until a rocket-propelled grenade wounds him.
Another memoir, Passing Time: A Memoir of a Vietnam Veteran Against the War, and the novel Busted: A Vietnam Veteran in Nixon's America carry on the story, but Vietnam-Perkasie is the one that can slug a young man in the head and give him some clue that fighting for America may become a betrayal of his country.
The story starts with the RPG round, then backs up to high school to unreel the narrative up past the blow that sent Bill home. Except for that narrative trick, Bill sticks strictly to what he knew, when he knew it. It can really get to a kid. Bill is a killer high school teacher.
In the new edition from the University of Massachusetts Press, a preface by R. Bruce Franklin explains Bill's great theme, the individual fantasy that obscures the limits of US government power. Bruce, with Kali, is the critic of US literature from the Viet Nam war who uses literary skill to address the psychic issues and social predicament that motivate Bill.
A library search on criticism of American belles-lettres from the Viet Nam war might miss Bruce and Kali, and the articles and monographs cited would only glance on Bill. The literary critics, of course, stay within the realm of the literary, in the sense of the fantastic and the aesthetic.
But I am writing this narrative for my friends who know Vietnamese language and history, who are disposed to take US veteran authors as people making serious assertions about the world as we live in it. Viet Nam is not a fantasy for us.
I am often surprised to find these colleagues teaching a novel by Tim O'Brien or Dispatches as the one American book in a course on Viet Nam. Those two are explicitly anti-intellectual and specifically anti-historical.
I am telling you this story so you may read and consider teaching Gus, Kali, Joe, Bruce, David Willson, Alan, Michael, Leroy, Manny, Doc, or Bill instead. You should also consider reading Robert A. Anderson, and reading with him.
I don’t argue like that for books and authors any more. Anymore I don’t advise as if that is called for. As if is good, the launch of the imagination, but uncalled-for is the marching order of folly.
There never has been a field of teachers for my cousin’s authors or for mine any more than the United States of America ever acted on a reason to occupy the Republic of Viet Nam. The only purpose is here, on this page, my reading and yours.
Portrait at All People Soul Food Grill, Hillsborough, North Carolina, © 2007 by Tim Duffy. Link to the essay “I am getting over a virus” here. The first and second and third and fourth Viet Nam letter on “I am getting over a virus” appeared on February 7 and February 10 and February 13 and February 16, 2024.