A HUMBLE AND BY-NO-MEANS-EXHAUSTIVE REVIEW OF BOOKS WRITTEN ABOUT THE VIETNAM WAR

PART ONE

Should a person that has never set foot on the soil of southeast Asia tackle a topic like this? Should the Kardashians be allowed to have children? Probably not, but that's what reality television and blogs are all about.

Predictably, the first wave of authors to write of the war and its effect on the national psyche were Vietnam vets, who wrote first person accounts, even when labeled as fiction. Tim O'brien wrote an eloquent collection of stories based on his time (1968 to 1971) as an infantryman in A Company. The Things They Carried, a standard of the genre, was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1990.

As a counter-intelligence agent for the Army, Robert Olen Butler saw the war from a different perspective all together. His most lauded work, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, is not based in Vietnam but in Louisiana, and explores the experience of a group of southeast-asia refugees who immigrate to the United States. It did win the Pulitzer in 1993, but in reading the work one does not get the sense that this is the quintessential volume on the war. Indeed, On Distant Ground, one of his earlier novels about an intelligence office stationed in Saigon, is more accessible and gives the reader a better sense of that awful conflict. Is it the 'final word'? The book that once absorbed makes further reading on the subject superfluous? The savagery and the moral dissonance are there, but perhaps on too small a scale.

'The final word': perhaps the moniker shouldn't be used at all. But it was, by another reviewer after reading Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. More need not be written, so it was said. I can imagine more than one reason why one might say that about a novel:
1) the reviewer truly believes the work to be the ultimate expression of whatever passed for truth in Vietnam.
2) the story, which is complex, non-linear, and follows a number of unrelated characters to a final endpoint, may have frustrated the reader to the point of 'enough already!'
3) the reviewer was fed up not just with Tree of Smoke, but with everything about the war, and wanted the bibliography, the hand-wringing, the discussion on Vietnam closed.

I slogged through the novel. It asks a lot of the reader. Whether, in the end, the author adequately rewards those tough enough to the final word, I'll leave to each to decide. I finished the book 3 years ago and at the time I agreed with the aforementioned reviewer, placing myself in categories #2 and #3.

Imagine my surprise when, a few months ago, my finger clicked the download button to purchase yet another Vietnam novel. Why did I do it? Because in so many ways, the war defined my generation. Because, as a member of the class of '73, I was lucky. I signed up for the draft, but never had to serve. Because I didn't want it to end that way, frustrated by a book written about a frustrating war. Because when I ask vets what was it like -- dragging through mud and buffalo shit to their elbows, slashing through rain forest as dense and forgiving as a wire brush, the leeches sucking blood from flesh already dehydrated by heat and humidity -- they are not so strangely silent. Because I wanted a 'final word' of my own.

Enter Matterhorn.