Both friends also wrote about the war. In Gene’s case, I have an unpublished manuscript that I find brilliant. Broader in scope than the Vietnam War, through a series of thematically related short stories, he connects the diversity of the lives in his pieces to the broader consequences of war. Interspersed with biographical details of his own life, a broad number of voices, diverse on the surface, flow together as a woven tapestry.
When Leadership Fails
Many codes were broken in the war, lies spoken, cover-ups pursued. The degree to which that occurred set a bad precedent for governance in the United States. So many lives were lost because of a failure of leadership at so many levels. In my view, the United States has not healed from the divisions created during the war, domestically and internationally.
Civilian war casualties
The five-year-old boy in the photograph is Tran Van Hay. I did not know his name until a friend still in Vietnam sent me the newspaper clipping after I’d returned from the war. When I first saw Tran, his abdomen was ripped open and his intestines were exposed and dangling outside of his abdominal cavity. I didn’t think he would live.
Reflections on a Poisoned Jungle
In my view, the war was unwinnable. The Vietnamese had been there before with foreign invaders. That’s what we were to many Vietnamese. To this day I hear talk of tactics among the revisionists. If only the war had been fought better strategically, we could have won. In reality, we made many of the same mistakes as the French. We failed to learn from their miscues or our own. The Vietnamese were steadfast and patient in their resistance.
Update: Poisoned Jungle ARC
Writers become attached to some of their characters more than others. A favorite in Poisoned Jungle was Yardly, third platoon’s Montagnard Tiger Scout. Through his depiction in the novel, I hoped to convey part of the complexity of the situation for the Montagnard people in Vietnam. Portrayed as a boy soldier of sixteen who had seen his first combat at fifteen, I witnessed Montagnard soldiers as young as thirteen after a battle near the Seven Mountains. After treating many wounded in a mass casualty situation, I began asking an interpreter the ages of the youngest soldiers.