Vietnam Vet’s Search for Spiritual Peace

You see them everywhere--at the end of freeway offramps, huddled under bridges or begging for change on busy street corners. With their matted hair, dirty beards and filthy rags, they have become such a common sight, in fact, that often they elicit neither sympathy nor disgust.

They are the forgotten victims of the Vietnam War, the “MIAs” nobody cares about. And for 10 years John Mulligan was one of them--a battle-hardened Air Force combat veteran who survived the jungle only to turn up Missing In America.

“I went as one kind of person; I came back completely different,” the Scottish-born Mulligan says. “I’m convinced, in retrospect, that I lost touch with my soul during the war.”

To understand that transformation, and to recapture his soul, Mulligan wrote “Shopping Cart Soldiers” (Curbstone Press, 239 pages, $22.95), a novel that follows Scotsman Finn MacDonald on a hallucinatory journey from the war zones of Southeast Asia through 12 years of homelessness in San Francisco to a spiritual healing and reintegration.

It’s an unsettling story made mystic by an eerie mythopoeic style, described by Mulligan as “Scottish magic-realism with a slight leaning toward the surrealistic.”

It’s also a difficult book, a first novel deeply imbued with the writer’s own pain and passions.

Above all, it’s an important book, inspired by war but dedicated to each veteran’s personal search for spiritual peace.

“I wrote it in the main, I think, for my fellow Vietnam veterans,” Mulligan, 47, says in a lilting Scottish accent.

“Because when I see a homeless vet in the street, it’s just absolutely heartbreaking. I knew that I had something to say and I had to say it.”

Next week, he is scheduled to say it before members of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, who have invited him to Washington to read portions of his book to them.

It should be a scene as surreal and poignant as any in the novel, with Mulligan reminding the government that, although the war has ended, for many who fought in it, the conflict rages on.