The American War

I’m on a tour of Southeast Asia this month, and before leaving I composed a month’s worth of blog posts for my newsletter. The original post for this week was paired with an excerpt from Forced Air, the story of my Vietnam War experience, and suddenly, because of an activity this morning, the post seemed completely inadequate. I’ve substituted this one.  

Today our group went to Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, the area where Ho Chi Minh lived during and after the war. The square is now dominated by a big, Russian-style mausoleum where Ho’s body lies in state.

Our guide, Tuyen, gave a brief, moving, personal commentary on the war and its aftermath, the gist of which was that the Vietnam War (here called the American War) had no winner. Both sides suffered, tragically and needlessly. The Americans were intent on preventing Vietnam from allying with China, somehow failing to notice that for two thousand years the Vietnamese had resented and even hated the Chinese, a feeling that, according to Tuyen, persists to this day.  

Someone asked Tuyen how much of the country today is communist and how much is capitalist. To our surprise, he said Vietnam is one hundred percent capitalist. In other words, he feels that the country is communist in name only.

What a thought—that the passage of time has accomplished what the Americans killed three million Vietnamese to do, and failed. This morning, standing in Ba Dinh Square, it all seemed unutterably sad.  

Stories from My Life

Several weeks ago, I announced the publication of Stories from My Life, a series of eight short memoirs I’ve written between novels. If you missed that announcement, you can read it here. 

Here's another excerpt from Forced Air: A Crazed and Troubling Tour of Duty with the 562nd Air National Guard Band, the fourth short memoir.

How can I explain what it was like to be a member of the Guard Band? It was hilarious and awful and wasteful and fascinating, and somehow, no matter how much sleep I’d gotten the night before, I always needed to take a nap. The Guard Band assaulted you the way a third-grade bully does, holding you down and tickling you until it hurts. Never in the years since have I experienced such levels of outrageous laughter and stultifying boredom, often within minutes of each other.

If you listened closely, you would have noticed an odd quality to the laughter. It was loud, but there was something else about it, too—something sad and brittle and almost desperate. Underlying it all, like the hum of a blown amplifier, was a deep feeling of guilt. There we were, attending weekend rehearsals in California, while other young men thousands of miles away were carrying M-16s and picking their way among land mines. And what had we done to earn our special status? We had passed an audition and joined a band. It wasn’t right, and we knew it. So we clowned and joked and laughed a little too often and a little too loud.

Learn more about Forced Air.