The Boy who Picked the Bullets Up (ii)

From novelist Charles Nelson and the United States Navy

It is a novel in letters out to Paul, Arch, cousin Chloe and Mom from Kurt Strom. I have spotted one letter to a sister Karen. Mom is Kurt’s granny, bà ngoại. He discusses her daughter in his letters as Mother.

Charles Nelson presents the letters in date order starting 2 August 66 through 21 July 67. Those are the years when the novelist served as Kurt the Navy corpsman does with our Marines.

Kurt’s letters reveal that he moved to Florida as a child. So did the author. But his epistolary novel is a work of artifice and invention.

Other authors, for instance the Army engineer Joe Haldeman, have edited into a first novel the letters home from Viet Nam to mom and dad which he wrote for just that purpose. Kurt’s letters are not for mom and dad.

He mentions no father in those I have read so far. Mother is an antagonist who has stolen Kurt’s savings, and who schemes to rob Mom.

This presents a half measure of the theory of Charles’ day about homosexuality developing in a boy close to his mother while absent a connection to his father. Indeed Kurt is in terms of our day half a gay man, living publicly as straight in order to have sex with men who prefer to fuck women.

Kurt is out to his correspondents Arch, Chloe and Paul. I don’t know why I take it that Paul, who Kurt writes about sex to most of all, is his straight friend while Arch also fucks men. Kurt tells him and Chloe mostly about the Marines, and the Navy, and war.

Paul shares a personal name and an interest in languages and literature, but not a family name, with the translator of Rimbaud whose poems give the title to the novel and decorate the page beginning each of the four parts: The Hanged Men Dance, Democracy, Evil, and The Boy who Picked the Bullets Up. Charles dedicated the novel to him.

The letters are down-home such as friends and family exchanged before we yapped at each other on the telephone. They concern a snake pit of family life, and many acts illegal at that time.

Any of them, it occurs to me, would have disqualified the author and his correspondent from military service. Whatever else these letters may reveal, they are the sea stories of an enthusiastic volunteer to our war.

This was the the second of 3 Viet Nam letters so far to present The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up by Charles Nelson. The first posted on October 31, 2022 then the third on February 19, 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.