On April 9, 1975, I left Saigon for the last time, yanked straight up into the sky by a helicopter from a city I had come to love. Tanks rolled into town the next day and the government of South Vietnam surrendered. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, but I have never been able to call it that.
Vietnam became my teacher once again in 1986. I traveled thousands of miles, knocking on strangers' doors to ask them about the biggest loss of their lives. It was not always easy.
Yet I will always think of Shrapnel in the Heart as a blessing. At times, it seemed to extract a terrible emotional toll from me and from the people I interviewed; we were caught in a riptide of sadness. But I know now that this book gave back more than it took. It gave me the steadying reminder that the legacies of our lives are written in the hearts of those we love.
When I began this book, I thought I was writing about dead soldiers. I finish with the knowledge that they are, spiritually, very much alive. I don't know if their deaths were a waste, but I know most assuredly that their lives were not. They mattered passionately to the people who loved them, and that has never changed. Their deaths caused wrenching, unending pain and despair. But the magnitude of the pain leads to an understanding of just how much these men were loved. It is by peering through the wretched gloom of their deaths that we see the magnificence of the love that still binds them to the living. Sadly, it is not a love that can stop war, but it is one, that defeats death.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial enabled a nation to say, "They were ours." This book offers the simple rejoinder "Yes, and he was mine."
[read from LAURA PALMER, Shrapnel in the Heart, New York 1987, p. XX] |