I explain this new class to my students:
Early one November morning over a year ago I awoke with a reverie in which I saw my favorite writers of Vietnam gathered in a room with me, there to help me out, tell me how I could write my book about the boys I had lost to Vietnam. My book was a new kind of writing for me. I had written as a journalist -- about live people, and as a scholar -- about texts. But I had never tried to bring alive dead people whom I had once loved. How to make Butch come alive in that meadow in Vietnam just before that sniper's bullet hit him below the left ear? How to show Tony's mix of emotions as he finally found a family who would take him in as he fled to exile in Canada? How to describe Bob after the arrest on the White House Lawn, as he faced a group of threatening men in a prison cell in D.C., knowing he was about to be passed around and gang raped? And how to work with 100s of pages of journals from my cousin Rick as he fell in love with the country of Vietnam, and as he bumped along in a plane in a monsoon after taking kids to get repaired in Saigon, only an hour away from the plane crashing against a mountain? And my brother Geoff as he faced a Boy Scout leader ridiculing him for not marching to support the Boys in Vietnam because Geoff was a pacifist?
These writers in my reverie -- their books had become my friends. Laura Palmer, Phil Caputo, Tim O'Brien, Marilyn McMahon all showed me ways I might see my boys as they faced their varied moments . And they showed my how to tell the story---Phil with his images of being in the jungle, and then out into the hot baked meadow; Tim with his philosophical visions of how the memory and the spirit might live somewhere else than in that field or in that suffering. Marilyn with her 3 voices in one moment of July, 1969: in Seattle, in DaNang, on the moon -- all at once. Just like my Nov 16, 1965: Geoff hangs himself, the ravaged soldiers crawl away from IaDrang, Norman Morrison burning to death still in our minds, the New York Blackout about to come: the headline: "Black Tuesday: Will it ever happen again?" They were all Black Tuesdays that November of 1965....
My writers gave me precise visual portraits of complicated people struggling with particular paradoxes of love and hate, mourning and pride, wistfulness and fury -- in each soldier and nurse and activist, in each family left behind. Like me, so many are moving through these writers toward healing, and toward telling the stories that need to be finally told.
I had mentioned my reverie to colleagues at Brown and the beauty of Brown is to manifest my reverie -- say yes, let's do this: Bring these wonderful writers. So the conference: Tim, Phil, Yusef, Bruce, Marilyn, Laura, Jade, Frank -- voices of soldiers, nurse, South Vietnamese, RI Vets.
And my course, created around the same questions -- how does genre change what one can do with the same experience? Reading these searing memoirs and poems and biographies, what do we understand about the war now, and about how to write about war?
I wondered, who would come to this course?
The students came quietly -- not with the usual excitement or anxiety I usually sense in my writing courses the first day. Today they were quiet, as if out of respect, or awe, maybe a mute wondering of how will we deal with this big emotional VIETNAM. No class at Brown had done this in such intimacy before; the history lecture on Vietnam is hundreds in a room digesting statistics and anecdotes of policy debates and some testimonies from Vets.
I explained my book, the conference, and told them they would be charting new waters here. I wanted to know why did they choose to come? They spoke -- carefully. Some wanted to write in different genres, and wanted to know about the war they knew was central to their parents' lives, but they had no personal connection to the war and its aftermath. The students we all slowed even further to listen to were Dan: my mother is Vietnamese, my dad was in the navy and brought her home; Eirene -- My mom is Vietnamese and my dad was a Marine and brought her home; and Kerri -- My dad was a fighter pilot, he flew Phantom F-4s out of Saigon and doesn't talk much about it. Another said his dad was in it but as his son he had grown up seeing the military not as a right t or wrong choice, but as a way to be upwardly mobile -- that's what it had been for his dad. Finally a student said, "You may not like to hear this, but my mom was here at Brown '67-'71 and she was a draft counselor; I want to know more of that time for her." I say, "Why apologize? I was a draft counselor; it was what a lot of us did." I am struck by her worry. Here at Brown where most current profs were antiwar, a student might presume support for pacifism. But here suddenly in this room the pacifist's child feels defensive in the face of children of soldiers. I want each student to learn as I have -- that each decision was made according to family and religion and economics and personality and neighborhood culture. Each boy chose as he had to. Then and now it was not a simple thing, for anyone.
The feeling in this room right now is intense, almost spiritual and I know that I am about to have an experience with students that I have never had before. Much like that war that changed all of us forever.
2/18/99. My student whose mother fled Vietnam with her American soldier says she cannot yet read this literature carefully. It's too close. She can't think of her dad like that in Tim O'Brien. Or of her mom as the Vietnamese are. For now she must skim the writing. Hear it the way she first heard her mother's stories from the backseat of the car, in bits and pieces that jarred.
2/27: Ben's fiction was so good -- precise, clearly located in era references, and about Vietnam, that I thought it wasn't his; his memoir had been good, but not so vivid or confident. He may be case in point that for some writers fiction liberates the visualizing in their prose so there they can be much more true and engaging than in their nonfiction.
My sister calls and says friend whose Dad is dying of cancer says she's so angry, but it helps that she's reading Vietnam fiction right now. Something about this war, its literature, somehow acts as metaphor that we return to again and again to walk through the process of wounding and healing that defines our generation. Marilyn McMahon knows this in her poem, "Wounds": Wounds must be opened and probed, must see the light, must heal from the bottom up, and from the outside in. It's the story of our generation, but also a universal truth -- maybe that's why people (my students for instance) find Vietnam's stories so riveting; emotionally somehow it speaks to the deepest imaginable hurts.
We talk about Tim O'Brien's NYTimes Sunday Magazine article about when he went back to My Lai in 1994. His movement from personal narrative to historical narrative to personal narrative again. He circles around this difficult information -- My Lai -- and when he's finally there, looking at it, he switches from journal mode to tight, shaped, direct historical explanation. He's done his homework now; he knows the story; he quotes the Calley court-martial, and he editorializes more strongly that usual: this is the horror: that we explained it away.
Students like how his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Kate's presence works in the piece. She was only 3 when Tim was in Vietnam! She is the spur to his going back, but as he says, if she had not been there he would have gone only as a vet. Her presence makes him see it fresh -- the horror and the beauty; she pulls him into the future, makes him see the beauty of Vietnam now.
They like too how Kate's presence underscores his feeling that the war was about love not just war. She is love and loss in different ways, the war was love and loss in different ways.
I say she is coincidentally a vehicle to draw in a readership that might not have read the piece if it was just about a vet going back. The love story draws in readers who want a good love story anywhere. Also because she is young, she represents the care and fascination of many who are too young to remember, or who were not touched directly by the war.
One student is struck by Tim's vulnerability in this piece: he says maybe this is not fit for public discussion -- the breakup of his love. He is risking here, getting closer to truth in that factual way than he often has before. He shows us here that it was Chip being blown into the bamboo hedge that became Curt Lemon being blown into the trees, that it was McIlhaney who drowned in the rice paddy. When does he choose to fictionalize, and why? What makes Curt lemon in "How to Tell a True War Story" more powerful than seeing Chip here in factual memory now??
A student thinks Caputo is much more honest in Rumor of War about what exactly all this means; how to judge it. Tim is poetical, personal. I talk about how Caputo is a different kind of writer-- a journalist, essayist, interested in exposition and historical narrative even as he writes memoir. O'Brien is the poetical fiction writer; he wants to evoke, suggest, take the reader into their own experience of an event and time and place, not tell them how he thinks about it. As writers you need to choose this too: what does your mind and sensibility lead you to write? Are you more truthful in essay or fiction or poetry or drama or journalism? What form will your voice find its greatest clarity and ease?
We are moved by 2 students' readings of their own memoirs (draft #3).
Eirene tells the story of her Vietnamese mother becoming consummate soccer mom in Barrington RI where her 6 Amer-Asian kids clearly stood out. So they just went with it and stood out more, as star athletes, prom queen, scholars. Mom would talk to others in the car on the way to soccer practice, tell stories of her grandparents and uncles and aunts being killed in a rice paddy; Eirene didn't want to hear it, at least not that way. Then there was the memory of the older brother who showed up, a stranger, and her mother making him leave because he beat up on the six younger siblings. Finally mom confesses, as she's about to return to Vietnam for the first time in 24 years: the older brother was born to her when she was 14 in an arranged marriage to a brutal man in Vietnam. The man left her and the child for dead in a ditch and she fled to Saigon, where eventually she met her American soldier who brought her to America. But the boy she had had to leave behind with her mother; the bully father had taken the boy away again, and then the bully father had been murdered. Years later Eirene's mother did trace the boy and bring him to America, but when he tortured her new children, she made him leave. "I abandoned him twice. can you ever forgive me for abandoning my own child?" she asks her children now.
We sit there stunned, heartbroken.
Alana's story is funny -- about growing up as the servants' family caring for the Mayor of Ellenville, NY with his dolled-up belly-dancer wife, the dogs they love more than each other, the golf carts they zoom around in, the nasty family members, one who calls his nephew a little shit.
We talk about how Eirene's piece avoids sentimentality by just reporting the facts, and Alana's piece creates humor by just reporting the facts. How to...: always the goal of our writing class.
Speak from the writing, always, learn how to do from the writing, always.
Phil Caputo said he is a writer first, a writer of Vietnam once upon a time. He analyzes what he sees -- in war correspondence, historical novels, magazine features. "I'm not in the school of writing as therapy," he said. He writes to tell the story, to find out what hasn't been seen or told yet. He's kind of a wiseguy -- funny in a wry, dismissive kind of way.
Tim O'Brien -- always the balancing diplomat, suggested the act of writing could be therapeutic. But for him, now, writing is all about the right word, the perfect sentence.
In his speech he had said of his truth in fictionalizing: If it wasn't true in a literal way it was true to what was in my head. I may have been literally on the golf course, but in my head I was cleaning pig guts and feeling nauseous and drowning in blood. There was a rainy river I never went to; but I did in my head.
Marilyn McMahon, our nurse poet, was the warm hug with a sense of humor who spoke with most passion about how we're doing it all over again in Kosovo. If there's a draft, she says, "EVERYONE should go." She means, even if you're handicapped you can push a button. Writing for her finally came by surprise almost, when one day a journal looked like a poem. Then it became a place to put all that STUFF she had been drinking away for years; finally she stopped drinking and just wrote.
Yusef Komunyakaa bowled us over with the force of his readings. His poems about the war came after years of not letting himself remember; it was being up on a ladder and renovating a house that somehow let the first memory come. When he speaks, it's like listening to hard, dark, intense jazz. There are still many stories that need to be told, he says -- particularly of some racial moments and statistics that no one seems to have answers for yet.
Laura Palmer fell into journalism by falling for a guy who picked her up hitchhiking in California and following him when he got a civilian job in Vietnam. Like each of these writers, she didn't plan or ask for this career trajectory; it came at her and she faced it with pragmatism, intelligence and ingenuity. She held on to Vietnam in writing, and she became good at knowing when a story was THERE, and it had to be written.
Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh -- who suffered in ways beyond any of our comprehension -- made us laugh the most. He got out of his seat and showed how his captors tied him up -- thumbs to toes: "See?," he said as if describing how to do a fitness exercise. "You get down like this, they tie this to this, see?" He lampooned his skill in speaking English: "I'm in this Iowa hamburger joint, see. I need fork. But, I say to waiter, "Excuse me, I need to fark! Fark! Please!" Jade said he has not been allowed to return to Vietnam because he wrote this memoir. "I have not seen my mother or my father in 20 years." And we were silenced.
In the SEAsian workshop, Jade said: Write down 20 memories.
Write everyday.
Tell story.
Of movies: Tim and Phil chose not to recognize any movies about Vietnam. Yusef said one sitting through "Apocalypse Now" and he didn't watch another Vietnam movie again. Marilyn said when her nephew wanted to join the Army she said, "Ok, just promise me you'll watch 'Platoon' first, then decide." He saw the movie; he didn't join the Army.