Out with the Lions (i) in Free Fire Zone (ii)
from author Loyd Little and editors Wayne Karlin, Basil T. Paquet, and Larry Rottmann at 1st Casualty Press
"'Bac si' a voice interrupted.
'Yes, An?' I said. It was a Nung gunner who spoke some Vietnamese.
He complained at length about a stomach ache which had troubled him off and on for some time. Evidently, it wasn't anything serious; most likely patrol jitters, so I asked, 'Have you had any children before?'"
Wayne Karlin, Basil T. Paquet, and Larry Rottmann list their names as editors in that alphabetical order on the title page of Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans.
They list the authors of the stories at the back of the book, in the Index of Authors, also alphabetically. The table of contents at the front lists the index but not the authors.
Egalitarian, substantive, very 1970s. It's a 1973 book. Saigon hasn't fallen yet.
I consulted the index and there was Loyd Little, of Hillsborough, North Carolina, the next town north of here. I lived years there in the hayloft of a horse farm off the road where the Klan rode south to shut down our university at Chapel Hill when we integrated after the war.
I didn't know Loyd. He died out there in Orange County no more than ten miles from here in Durham the year before last but he was from Hickory, at the western border with Tennessee, in the hills. Loyd is a frontier spelling of the Welsh name Lloyd, from the people who moved ahead of the colonies.
He came east to study journalism at the university, class of 1962. He served with the non-commissioned officers of the United States Special Forces, who train here in the state at Fort Bragg.
They each practice two specialties. One of Loyd's was medicine. The other was what? Languages?
His narrator here is serving with Nung in the Mekong delta, communicating in Vietnamese, a second language for both. Loyd left the Republic of Viet Nam the year the Marines landed at Da Nang, 1965.
Here he publishes in 1973 what looks like a polished excerpt from his novel Parthian Shot, winner of the first PEN/Hemingway award in 1976. Another secret war story, In the Village of Man, followed in 1978.
Here he is cracking a joke, my kind of joke, in a book I have owned nearly 50 years, edited by my good friend Wayne, beginning a career made in Chapel Hill and Hillsborough where I am friendly with many Southern writers.
And I never heard of the guy. Off to read his novels and get them in this rota.
I don't know who is in the photo at left. The index credits only the shooter Martin Ray, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, working with Army spies just a year before publication, in 1971 or 2.
Looks like a woman of business, soon to be an enemy of the new state if she wasn't already conspiring against her old one. Maybe both. I wouldn't have identified her either.
This was the first Viet Nam letter of 4 so far presenting the author Loyd Little. The second posted on June 25, 2022, the third on October 24, 2022, and the fourth on April 17, 2023.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.
Promotional copy:
Wayne Karlin, Larry Rottman, and Basil T. Paquet edited and published their collection of fiction from veterans of the United States' invasion of the Republic of Viet Nam 2 years before Saigon fell.
If there is an author in English or Vietnamese from that war with an oeuvre that has developed his subject both as a topic and as a perspective on the polyglot world that narrative fiction conjures,
that is Wayne. Had one of those books made a pile of money you would have heard about them all. How it works. The press takes heed of money. Since the author's books instead paid their way because people buy and read them,
you are hearing about this one from me. Never heard of Wayne, right? Here is where our great original as internationalist editor, Ezra Pound, followed his conscience into error,
inveighing against money making money sucking all substance out of human relations, making it impossible to make a living by useful work.
Taking in each other's washing is a dismissive phrase among economists for an economy that cannot pay. Why is that? What in the world is there more fundamental to life but to clean up?
Say, after a war. Sadly, Ezra called it usury, once a sin in Christendom, and a basis ever since for hating Jews. The poet went to work for Mussolini who found his enthusiasm unsettling.
Of course both the law of the Jews and the cause of Zionism are rather daily and grand acts of resistance to the destruction of the human and the holy. So is Wayne's life work.
Here is my second Viet Nam letter of 3 written so far in a slow crawl through this first book from a great man of letters from around Viet Nam. It concerns a Special Forces sergeant,
of whom I have known many all my adult life, who was my neighbor in Hillsborough just north of here, who wrote humor from the secret war and its minority troops,
all in all just my kind of thing yet I never had heard of him until I sat down to go carefully through this book I have owned since it came out. Loyd Little is dead now and Wayne says he had not been in touch since working on the book.
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