Back In The 'Nam

During the question period at the end of Tuesday night’s “Three Views of Vietnam” event at the Waterfront Theatre a gentleman in the audience asked the three authors on stage when they thought interest in Vietnam would die down or end.  It was an odd question to which there really was no answer and the audience seemed as perplexed by it as the people sitting on the stage.

One thing the strange question did seem to emphasize is that interest in Vietnam is indeed strong, a fact one could also gather by the size of the audience that showed up here when there was serious competition coming from three other events happening at the same time, including the star-studded Grand Openings.

Tourism to Vietnam, particularly by people from western countries, has grown exponentially in recent years.  People are interested in Vietnam.  I am interested in Vietnam.  Adam Lewis Schroeder, author of In The Fabled East, Camilla Gibb, author of The Beauty of Humanity Movement and Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn, are all obviously interested in Vietnam because each of these recently published novels is set in Vietnam.  Interest in Vietnam is a done deal and is likely to be around for some time.

The evening began with the authors reading from their works.  Adam Lewis Schroeder gave an animated and entertaining sampling of his Vietnam, a fictionalized French colonial Indo-China, Saigon circa 1937.  Camilla Gibb’s Vietnam is modern day Hanoi.  Her protagonist, “Hung”,  a street vendor of pho, the Vietnamese national dish, has survived a great deal of history in his 80 years.  Karl Marlantes’s Vietnam is the Marine Corps circa 1969, a few clicks south of the DMZ.  It would be hard to come up with three more divergent milieus from a common thread–-Vietnam.

Why Vietnam?  For Adam Lewis Schroeder it’s a crossroads of power, of empires, and a byword for horror.  Curiously, what got him interested in the country initially was seeing the movie “Platoon” when it first came out.  He was fourteen.  In his twenties he traveled to southeast Asia, which also figures prominently in his two other published books.

Camilla Gibb, a trained anthropologist as well as novelist, visited Vietnam in 2002 out of a “chronic curiosity” about the country.  She noted that 60% of Vietnamese were born after the “American” war, as the Vietnamese call it.  The Americans were in Vietnam supposedly to defeat Communism.  They failed.  But modern Vietnam wants the modern world.  The country has embraced many tenets of capitalism.  There’s a great deal of Vietnamese “Art” created exclusively for the tourist market.  It sells.  Real Vietnamese culture lies elsewhere, including a long and rich literary history.

Karl Marlantes’s Vietnam was not a graphic war movie but the real thing.  A decorated veteran of the “American” war,  it’s been thirty years since his desire to write a novel derived from his experience resulted in an 1800 page unpublishable “psychodrama”, as he called it, to Matterhorn,  a 600 page book published this spring.  A long journey. 

I must confess, as a student of the war, I was keenly interested in Karl’s reading, and in what he had to say.  In a way it was “my” war too, a conceit I’ve played with for a long time.  I was the same age at the time as a lot of the human beings fighting it, “kids” is the word the author uses.  I vividly remember the nightly news on the American TV stations in living black and white while I was in high school and what seemed to me even then the strangely blasé iteration of body-counts, VC, NVA and American, like some insane sporting contest.  The place-names and the murderous things going on there were compelling too and still are: Hué, Khe Sanh, Con Thien, Kontum, the Central Highlands,  the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  I have a desire to visit Vietnam and go to some of these places, to see the landscapes in real time and soak up some of Vietnam’s terrible history and its beauty.

Karl Marlantes was a willing participant in the war.  He was an enlistee and an officer who gradually came to see the war for what it was, “a self-inflicted wound and a mistake”.  He cited the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq and especially now Afghanistan.  In Afghanistan just as in Vietnam the western forces in reality are in the middle of a civil war.  They fight under rules of engagement but the enemy plays by no rules.  They are propping up a corrupt government.  They don’t speak the language and they stick out like aliens.  He thinks that’s why people want to read Matterhorn.  It’s relevant to what’s happening today.

Jerry Wasserman did a great job as host.  Always urbane, relaxed and witty he managed to navigate through some hostile fire in the early stages from a seriously malfunctioning PA system.  BLEET!  SCRINGE!  BLAP!  The mike went nuts rather too many times until a techie, moving around in the background while the show was in progress, finally got things settled down.