Book Review : Successful Trip Down a Well-Trod Path of War

Let a Soldier Die by William E. Holland (Delacorte Press: $15.95) Holland’s first novel, born out of experience, suggests deja vu. The sensitive hero, the brief tragic love affair with a nurse, the death of a close friend, the soulless superiors, the Army bureaucracy and the randomness of death are all stock-characters and situations that Holland somehow manages to successfully resurrect.

What makes his version effective is a portrayal of tactical and moral complications particular to Vietnam. So while the protagonist, Troll, moves through well-trod territory, Holland has captured much new ground as well. If there are no genuinely new war stories, there are new wars with sad variations and extrapolations on familiar themes of pain and death.

Troll is the nom de guerre of a young American helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Although we never learn his real name or his past or even how he came to be in the Army, we are deeply affected by the cold hard truth in Troll’s present.

The premise for his story is like a good news/bad news joke. The good news is he’s the best pilot in his company, a man whose life begins in the Army, “after a lifetime of being nothing in particular, it was a revelation to him to be the best at something.” The bad news is he’s in Vietnam and by the time the book begins Troll has hit the wall on the killing business, “His failing was that he liked people. . . .”

What further distinguishes Troll from almost everyone else in the book proves to be his biggest problem: He has a conscience. Conscience bothers him when his fellow pilots empty their rockets into civilian villages practically at random, shooting at what might be there.

Through no fault of his own, Troll is early on involved in an accident that seems typical of the horror stories out of Vietnam. Flying a routine reconnaissance mission in a free-fire zone, the company unloads weapons to save fuel on the way home, unwittingly demolishing a unit of fellow Americans lost in the jungle. This scene depicts wartime futility and waste as vividly and painfully as any description in literature or film.

During the ensuing rescue mission, Troll is badly shaken by firsthand observation of the death and destruction he has wrought. The focus of the rest of the book is Troll’s agonizing attempt to deal with guilt. Even though the order to fire wasn’t his decision, he acknowledges, “Something in me agreed to it.” That realization expands to include the war in general and the conflict between duty and conscience. He decides to request a transfer from his gunship to a medevac unit.

Army red tape prevents the transfer. Then Troll rationalizes, “If I don’t fly, somebody flies in my place. Somebody dies doing my work.” On his next mission he dies heroically, yet unnecessarily, a victim of poor judgment by his superior officers.

Holland’s machines of war, the helicopters, may rescue men as a kind of mechanical realization of deus ex machina , but Holland, the author, exercises no such power over his characters. If at first the plot seems slightly contrived, it is because we wonder how likely it is that one soldier and every person he loves or respects would be killed in separate random incidents. Would any writer create such a grim story solely for artistic effect, particularly when it risks believability? But the reader is then chilled to realize that Holland is simply being true to his material; if art imitates life it must imitate death as well.

When Troll suffers his inevitable fate, the hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach isn’t just for the loss of one fictional hero but for all the hypocrisy, bleakness and futile heroism of Vietnam.