His ‘Fair Weather Foul’ May Lead to Brighter Days

When I first met Sean Freeman, he was about to become a teen-ager. We were shagging flies in center field during the very loose-jointed softball game that was part of an annual multifamily picnic in Rustic Canyon Park.

You could write a novel or a series of novels or a long-running soap opera about the vicissitudes in the lives and marriages and careers of all of those friends who used to gather, noisily and pleasurably, in the park. We were usually marshalled by Sean’s parents, who lived just up the canyon.

Maybe Sean will write the novel or novels himself. He has just published a very good first novel (although it is the third he has written) called “Fair Weather Foul” (Morrow, $16.95). The writing of it has been with all else a therapeutic act helping Sean to cope with his Vietnam experience.

New jobs, relocations and a divorce or two broke up the picnics although the friends have stayed friends. But I hadn’t seen Sean since our center-fielding days until he came by for breakfast during a visit to Los Angeles a few days ago. It dates us both to note that he is turning 40 this year.

He had drifted through Palisades High, not sure what to do with his life. “Spinning my wheels,” he said. His father Mickey, a Hollywood publicist, urged him to enlist in the Army; he might have more control over what he did than a draftee would, and the experience might help him find himself. It turned out to be more of an experience than father or son had expected.

Sean finished high school in June, 1966, and by August was taking basic training to be a combat medic. A year later he was in ‘Nam, serving as medic with an infantry company. He saw a lot of action. His company and battalion took part in the battle near the Cambodian border, which Oliver Stone used as the model for the climactic scenes in “Platoon.”

The war was a double horror for him. He was opposed to it politically (“It was an obscenity”), and he was not a killer but a healer who had opted for medical duty in the first place because he didn’t want to be a rifleman. (The medic’s life is at least as much at risk as the infantryman’s, minus the chance to shoot back; he is unarmed.)

It was in Vietnam that Sean discovered reading and writing. He read Hemingway, Mailer and Knut Hamsun, and he wrote a piece about the combat medics for a grammar school friend who was editing a counterculture weekly here.

“After Vietnam, I spent another year in the Army in Germany, and I began writing short stories. I still wasn’t sure I was a writer or whether I wanted to write. When I got out, I didn’t write again for three years.”

Sean was for those years and in fact for a decade the model of the Vietnam veteran, rootless and resentful, haunted by his experiences, unable to get a focus on his life.

His uncle, Bud Freeman, a playwright and teacher, urged him to keep at the writing. “I’ve been close to him all my life. He’s been a terrific influence. Plays tennis in his 70s, has a new musical coming out.”

Thanks to his medical training, Sean was able to be licensed as a registered nurse in California. In 1975 he enrolled at the College of Marin in Northern California and ultimately edited the literary magazine. He supported himself by working in an intensive care unit.

“But I found out eventually that I was burned out as a nurse. I didn’t like the ICU. The patients were irresponsible, a lot of them. They’d had put themselves there by their indulgences.

“I liquidated my assets and took off for a long visit to Hawaii. While I was there I decided I wanted to write a Vietnam novel. Had to write a Vietnam novel.”

He had also heard about some islands in Puget Sound where he could live cheaply. He evolved a pattern of nursing in California for a few months to build a nest egg, then taking off to Friday Harbor and writing for as long as the money held out.

He began working in emergency rooms. “I’ve seen enough trauma to be able to handle it well. You’re dealing with real people, and the majority of them you can make better in a hurry.”

That first Vietnam novel, “Phantom Pain,” was about medics in an infantry company, clearly autobiographical. It did not find a taker but it was admired and well remembered by Bruce Lee, a Morrow editor, to whom Sean later sent “Fair Weather Foul.”

A second novel, “African Standard,” is set in West Africa and involves two couples and what Sean calls “changing perceptions of masculinity and femininity.” It hasn’t sold, but the author hasn’t abandoned hope that both of them may yet sell.

“Fair Weather Foul” is a swift and economical story, full of action but also thoughtful, about a Vietnam veteran named Mike Randel (“Captain Hook,” for an artificial hand), who is trying to get his life back together running a salmon-fishing boat on Puget Sound. He befriends a Vietnamese boat person named Tu who is being hassled by other fishermen and who becomes Randel’s crewman.

The crewman proves to be a North Vietnamese veteran, and thus a sometime enemy. Randel deals with that, with his own father’s displeasure with him and with murderous attacks on his boat by a racist rival skipper who hates Tu’s presence.

The workings of the fishing boat and the look of the land and water in calm and storm have a fine immediacy born of close observation.

“I’ve been on the boats but haven’t worked them,” Sean says. “But my fishing friends say I’ve got it about right.”

Just now he is sweating out a paperback sale and interest from a film company. (The book is nothing if not visual and loaded with conflict.) He is still commuting between hospital work in Los Angeles and the state of Washington, where he writes, but he has just been licensed to nurse in Washington as well.

“Haven’t started writing the new novel, but it’s taking shape in my head. It’s about two brothers.”

Sean hasn’t played softball in a long time, and neither have I.