The Extras (i of 1 so far)

from novelist Wayne Karlin

1 cousin was there before 1965, the only citizen in an infantry company of cadre doing a tour to practice tactics they would teach soldiers like him. His job was to draw fire.

The other thing I know is that after separation he left the country again and stayed out a long time. Many who had come back could not stand to remain in the United States of America.

Same goes for many in the movement that had begun for civil rights and ended against the war. The novelist Wayne Karlin, a veteran of both our military occupation of the Republic of Viet Nam and also our civilian movement to withdraw, went to the State of Israel.

Funny thing, that movement and that war kept me out of Israel. The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior had liberated me at age 4 from legal segregation.

Ho Chi Minh, as a ghost, had spared me at 12 from constabulary duty in a civil war. I wasn’t going to volunteer for either in Israel.

Wayne didn’t. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Jerusalem in 1972, watched the 1973 war, met his wife from yet another country, and came home.

The Extras appeared in 1989, his third published novel after Lost Armies the year before and Crossover in 1984. Now it’s hard to count his books.

This novel concerns Ezra, the priest sent to Jerusalem from Babylon to restore the study of our law. Well no this Ezra is a sabra, a Jew born in Israel, who fought through the whole city in the 1967 war.

Maryam, sister of Moses, the mother of Jesus, is an Israeli of distinguished Arab family sent by insurgents to contact a peace movement Ezra has joined under pressure from his spook uncle to inform on them. Ezra and Maryam were childhood friends.

I am going to read you this one step by step. But you should know the Parnassus we walk.

I have written before about Wayne as the author of an oeuvre. That essay was incomplete when I wrote it 13 years ago and now is 15 years out of date.

The author’s works are an unusual accomplishment, from a man you don’t meet every day. Wayne was one of the first helicopter Marines.

That war was all about helicopters for the United States Marine Corps. David Marr, historian of Vietnamese revolution, has remarked that all his own Marine commander cared about was the new ride.

Wayne became a skilled tradesman, of war’s working class. The Corps asked him to stay on and teach.

Instead he rallied to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He didn’t just show up drunk at a demo, as he had not walked the paddies as a target among the minimally trained Army leg infantry.

He became an organic intellectual of the VVAW. He forged with Basil T. Paquet and Larry Rottman the testimony of these witnesses.

Wayne is a Jew. My long-ago essay on his oeuvre draws the obvious connection from his career to our prescribed relation with fellow men and women.

Wayne among Jews is one from those families who escaped the extermination of our kind in the collapse of Europe. Many of us recognize no specific connection to any of those dead.

Wayne among the Jews of America has sojourned in Israel. Few of us here in the States have developed a view of that nation grounded in daily life.

Wayne is a teacher. It’s not just something he has done for money.

The poet Lucille Clifton lifted him up in his teaching. Black Americans don’t do that for every Jew, and not many United States of American authors among boomer white men have looked up to a black woman poet.

Le Minh Khue, sapper then journalist of the People’s Army of Viet Nam, author of the Viet Nam Writers Union and editor of its publishing house, guided Wayne’s publications of novels from the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam here in English. There has been no other such authoritative collaboration by our 2 nations.

The diplomat Ho Anh Thai, my age, a bestselling novelist since his Army days, leader of the Writers Union in Ha Noi and across the SRVN, prepared many of the first drafts then Wayne set to work as a book editor does at our literary houses, although not in France or Viet Nam. Wayne is an accomplished mid-list author.

A mid-list author is one whom the publisher signs in the serious hope of hitting it out of the ball park. Wayne stands out among mid-list authors in coming to bat again and again with one publisher after another.

Along the way he has built a monument. We all would like to see him hit one out of the ball park so I never have to play tour guide again.

Whatever. I am reading the books through very slowly.

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.