Them's Fightin' Words

Illustrations by Brad Yeo

I spent 14 months in I Corps, Vietnam, as a conscientious objector combat medic; like every grunt I vowed never to forget after seeing too many guys eat the Big One. When I came home I began searching out, collecting and obsessively reading every piece of American war literature I could beg, buy or borrow. Unlike Gustav Hasford, though, I didn’t steal any.

Hasford—that wacky ex-Marine Gus, who authored a couple of hot-rod, hellacious, hallucinogenic Vietnam novels (one of which, The Short-Timers, became that gentle, affectionate date movie, Full Metal Jacket)—subsequently did three months in the slam for checking out 748 war books from various libraries and forgetting to check them back in. The Hasford website (gustavhasford.com)—the only place you can still read his remarkable novels (except libraries, ironically)—calls him “the guy who paid the greatest fine ever levied in the written history of library science.”

I swear I bought all my war novels, your honor. Then again, I only have about 500 of ’em—a piker compared to Hasford, God rest his soul. Gus told me once that he braced a wavering New York publishing executive by telling him, “I ain’t one of your wimp-ass Algonquin Round Table intellectuals, pus-face. I’m a Marine. I’ll permanently nail a piece of the world to your head.”

With that warm sentiment in mind, here goes: a few thousand fightin’ words about American wars and the writers they spawn, with some completely subjective recommendations of the books I’d suggest you avoid and the ones I’d recommend you track down, read and permanently add to an honored place on your shelves, together with a critical theory of why.

The critical theory first. Ready? Write this down: You cannot write a great war novel if your fatigues still fit.

War writing, by its very nature, emerges gradually out of the fog of the fight. It takes slow maturation, reflection, the ability to look back in honor and in horror and truly see and contextualize the whole incomprehensible experience. Pain and terror and agony only resolve themselves into meaningful narratives over the span of a decade or two or three.

During and immediately after our wars, we get journalistic battle reportage like Michael Herr’s Dispatches or Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead—terri?c works, writerly high-water marks, grunt tours-de-force, but literature they ain’t. They’re accounts. Sorry. Herr’s work and, to a lesser degree, Swofford’s have been mightily praised, and these books are riveting, up-close, death-from-above canons of their genre. I’ve read and re-read Dispatches and its glaring mercury-vapor prose, often just for the IV injection of adrenal and stylistic horsepower it always delivers, but ultimately it and others like it fail to find and hold a metaphor.

Those sorts of books comprise the first, fastest and most elementary category of three separate and mightily unequal types of war lit. Battle reportage has a lengthy and honorable history, from the prototypical grunt who came home from the Peloponnesian Wars and wrote the whole bloody screwed-up epic story down with a quill pen, to the gyrenes in armored Humvees in Baghdad speaking into their digital recorders. Essentially travel writing with bullets, this category gives us shake-and-bake first impressions and eyewitness reports from the front. Read these books if you want to know about bang-bang. They may not tell you The Great Truths, but they’re a start.

For the second category, I like Tim O’Brien’s term—war stories. War stories all follow a conventional pattern, pretty much the standard tripartite Joseph Campbell hero myth structure:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes home from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man....” —The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Of course, all of us know this story by heart—innocence to experience, the bildungsroman, boyhood to manhood, the heroic struggle to discover the inner self. So many war narratives—probably 90 percent of my collection anyway—fit into this rubric: Naive Johnny goes to war, gets his assumptions shot off, comes home jaded and wiser, and usually not so warlike. Or, in a less popular anti-hero variant, the war makes Johnny discover his dark side and turns him into a homicidal monster, and he brings back his monstrous boon, violently chastising the corrupt society that stole his innocence.

The best books in this category generally appear many years after the shooting stops. Stephen Crane’s Civil War classic The Red Badge of Courage; James Jones’ WWII tale From Here to Eternity; Dalton Trumbo’s achingly horri?c Johnny Got His Gun; and a whole raft of Vietnam-soldier memoirs like Philip Caputo’s machete-sharp Rumor of War; Ronald Glasser’s wonderfully detached 365 Days; Tim O’Brien’s incantatory If I Die in a Combat Zone (Box Me Up and Ship Me Home); Larry Heinemann’s deadly realistic Close Quarters; James Crumley’s harshly tender One to Count Cadence; Robert Roth’s lyrical Sand in the Wind—all appeared at some distance from the cessation of hostilities. A few of these books, but only a few, become well-read and well-loved classic accounts of war. Oddly, that usually isn’t due to their evocation of war itself, it’s usually because they create a single, memorable and deeply felt character. We relate to people, not events.

These classic grunt-as-hero/antihero memoirs are exactly what you’d expect (and hope for) from soldiers several years out from their war. The authors use their own lives to illuminate the entire experience, and sift it down into the quintessential, archetypal hero myth—I went, I saw and was changed, I returned. And just as each person functions as their own autobiographical hero, these writers recount their own war stories and tell us the gruesome truths they saw, both inside and out. They make the personal and the specific into a wider, more general story about what violence and death does to us.

In an important war-story variant, the walking-wounded veteran as protagonist now pervades the American novel. Everyone—non-veterans, genre writers, literary authors—uses this handy-dandy device. Because our most recent and current wars have fractured public opinion throughout the country and the world, you can say a great deal about a character’s inner reality just by defining what he or she did during the war, daddy. Prime examples: James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux mystery series, which takes the twin questions of violence and honor seriously and hauntingly; Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, which overlays the sensorium and sensibility of Vietnam across the hard, cold landscape of the Civil War; and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch cop novels, which follow a damaged vet across a murderous postwar Los Angeles to harrowing effect. Connelly told me once that he used the protagonist-as-veteran trope in his novels with great trepidation, since he wasn’t a veteran himself and couldn’t be sure he was getting it right. But as a war story it works.

One caveat: By definition, only survivors write war stories. I never once found a finished manuscript in the rucksack of a dead guy. When you read a war story, take it with a salt tablet. It was written by someone who lived, who didn’t pay the full freight, who made it out somehow. Many incredible war stories are just that—in-credible, as in not that believable. Several years ago Tim O’Brien told me what he considered the ultimate one-sentence war story, before he decided to put it in The Things They Carried: “Guy goes up a mountain, doesn’t come back down.” End of narrative—no moral, no instructive principle, no symbolism. That’s a true war story, no question about it. All others ought to come with warning labels.

In fact, some war stories have dubious credentials. They try to impose a political or personal motive over the narrative, and therefore become penny dreadfuls full of gore-as-entertainment or melodramatic adventure. James Webb’s Fields of Fire and Barry Sadler’s Green Berets and many more like them take the war story and turn it into preachy, self-righteous agitprop, or worse, into violence porn. Vietnam inspired more penny dreadfuls than any other war, mostly penned by rear-echelon pogues, subsequent political appointees or preening War College officers, each justifying what they had to do in their own terrible but toweringly noble struggle. In these lurid, execrable books, killing is glorious and for the greater good; everyone who comes home in a coffin is a hero; and war is a noble and sacrificial undertaking. This is history writ, Sarge, by the victors, or in the case of Vietnam, the wishful thinkers. Just keep in mind, as a general rule of thumb, that anyone who calls war noble and heroic generally wasn’t there.

Past the war story, we ascend to the third and most rarified category of war fiction—the true war novel. This masterpiece of literature takes the real, chaotic, god-awful experience of human death and destruction, the very worst that human beings can do to one another, and slowly, very slowly, turns it into a tale terrible and beautiful, a boiler stoked with the scream of life—funny and perilously moving, filled with grace and meaning. This is the Everest of fiction—to create and propel the true war novel demands more from a writer, in my view, than any other form. And the true war novel differs from the war story in one significant and powerful way—it employs war and its warriors as metaphor for the entire human condition. It tells the truth amid a forest of lies, and tries to answer the oldest human question: Why do we kill each other?

“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.” —Tim O’Brien, “How to Tell A True War Story,” from The Things They Carried

Only a few American writers have reached this summit: Hemingway’s ruthless and groundbreaking A Farewell to Arms; Joseph Heller’s iconic Catch-22; Kurt Vonnegut’s gruesome and fanciful Slaughterhouse-Five; Tim O’Brien’s two spectacular, loosely linked works Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried; Robert Stone’s hallucinatory Dog Soldiers; Larry Heinemann’s fine, quiet and powerful Paco’s Story; Gus Hasford’s brilliant, psychotic war-epic-in-two-installments The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper; and the sadly almost forgotten, beautifully intense Peter Tauber novel The Last Best Hope.

In that rarified stratosphere I’d nominate a few new war novels and a memoir, each worth your perusal. Interestingly, none of them take place during combat. Each, though, has the slow-cooked stamp of the true war novelist working to grasp at the big Why.

Dave King’s The Ha-Ha springs entirely from the inner landscape of a brain-damaged veteran who can’t communicate except through gesture and action. King, although he’s not a veteran himself, creates a touching, screwed-up, entirely believable character who functions as an emotional simile for every wounded veteran, which, of course, means all veterans. In The Ha-Ha, only new life, in the form of the profane, nine-year-old son of a cocaine-addict mother, can even begin to redeem the war’s ugly, wordless damage.

Cormac McCarthy’s blast furnace of a new novel, No Country for Old Men, upends, overruns and co-opts the standard, blood-drenched conventions of the thriller to take the brutal violence America exported to Vietnam and Iraq and bring it back home. Many critics have not appreciated McCarthy’s new work, comparing it unfavorably to his Border trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, et al) and missing the point. McCarthy—along with Thomas McGuane among our greatest living literary voices—uses the mechanics of the thriller to say much in few words about America’s violent predilections. That’s because No Country is a war novel, and can only be understood in the context of America’s defeat in Southeast Asia and the subsequent violence and drug addiction that war boomeranged right back into our culture. When McCarthy kills one of his main characters midway through the book, most war-novel readers will grasp what the veteran and the death of his values means.

One more: Larry Heinemann’s new memoir (I know, it’s not fiction, but…) Black Virgin Mountain, A Return to Vietnam uses his own travel in-country as a device that allows him to riff on the war and its vicious impact on him, his family and the world. This book is terrifyingly astute, the wonderful virtues of survivor hindsight on full display. With this expressive, elegiac work Heinemann completes his own war trilogy, and proves that maybe it takes a few successive books to really get at what war means.

Tragically, we’ve lost a few of our finest war writers within the past decade—Heller, Hasford, Tauber. But they left us their codas, and you can read them, and weep. With Iraq in full hue and cry, with all those un-photographed, red, white and blue-draped coffins carried down the ramp every day, maybe it’s time for the citizens of our bloody country to read and re-read America’s great war novelists, who suffered and bled and struggled so we could understand.