Parthian Shot (i)

From novelist Loyd Little at Viking Press

How is it that I had never heard of Loyd Little? I must have read before the passage of this 1976 novel that Wayne Karlin published in the very first collection of veteran authors 50 years ago, in 1973.

Loyd was my neighbor in small-town Hillsborough until his death in 2020, a fellow Tar Heel from the University of North Carolina. He had to have been at least known to the many literary authors of that town who I have worked with.

Yesterday it occurred to me that it is the same reason no one has heard of most of my guys despite me running my mouth all these years. The working class is invisible to the publicity machine when it shows the values of work:

competence, intellect, perseverance. What the pukes in suits want is someone to feel sorry for.

This novel from a medic who hates the Army as only a United States Special Forces non-commissioned officer can do remains avant-garde Vietnamese studies and very funny 60 years after his fieldwork in the delta, 1964-5. No idea how it got published.

The language is as various and the attitude as antinomian as the French fascists I struggle to read. I conjecture that Viking Press had in-house Central Intelligence Agency assets and officers as most of the New York publishers had done since founding (Wilford, 2009.)

Loyd Little had worked for the Civilian Irregular Defense Group the year after the Army took it over from the CIA, alongside veterans of Laos who had worked for the idiots directly. Even if they aren’t actually on the payroll, NY literary editors have a similar approach to the world as CIA: bullshit.

Happy horseshit, because they don’t work for a living. They are all officers, in both cases often my fellow graduates of the department of English at Yale University (Winks, 1987.) In this instance, an ill wind blowing some good, attention to an artist and his work of art.

Or maybe not. A finished passage of Parthian Shot had appeared already 3 years beforehand in Friendly Fire, Wayne’s 1973 anthology from First Casualty Press, propagandists for truth.

So maybe a movement sympathizer at Viking acquired the book after a government agent had stalled it. All you really need to know about 1976 in the United States of America is that Saigon had fallen.

For the rest of the decade there were no rules about right and left, right and wrong. There were many funny books no one has known what to make of since or how to remember.

This was the third Viet Nam letter of 4 so far presenting the author Loyd Little. The first posted on April 20, 2022, the second on June 25, 2022, then 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.