The Big Muddy

Editor’s Note: The Vietnam War wasted little time occupying the American literary imagination. What lay hidden in the jungles became apparent on the page. The following opening passages of a number of novels, published between 1972 and 1999, are among the best fictional considerations of the war.

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ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

I have no hatred in me. I’m almost certain of that. I fought for my country long enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps it bothers me a little that his deformity was something he was born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn’t matter. In the end, my country itself was lost and I am no longer there and the two of them are surely suffering, from what I read in the papers about life in a unified Vietnam. They mean nothing to me, really. It seems strange even to mention them like this, and it is stranger still to speak of them before I speak of the man who suffered the most complicated feeling I could imagine. It is he who makes me feel sometimes that I am sitting with my legs crossed in an attitude of peace and with an acceptance of all that I’ve been taught about the suffering that comes from desire.

There are others I could hate. But I feel sorry for my enemies and the enemies of my country. I live on South Mary Poppins Drive in Gretna, Louisiana, and since I speak perfect English, I am influential with the others who live here, the Westbank Vietnamese. We are all of us from South Vietnam. If you go across the bridge and into New Orleans and you take the interstate north and then turn on a highway named after a chef, you will come to the place called Versailles. There you will find the Vietnamese who are originally from the North. They are Catholics in Versailles. I am a Buddhist. But what I know now about things, I learned from a communist one dark evening in the province of Phuoc Tuy in the Republic of South Vietnam.

From “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories” (Penguin), which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993. Robert Olen Butler is also the author of “The Deuce: A Novel,” “Mr. Spaceman” and “Tabloid Dreams: Stories.”

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ROBERT STONE

There was only one bench in the shade and Converse went for it, although it was already occupied. He inspected the stone surface for unpleasant substances, found none, and sat down. Beside him he placed the oversized briefcase he had been carrying; its handle shone with the sweat of his palm. He sat facing Tu Do Street, resting one hand across the case and raising the other to his forehead to check the progress of his fever. It was Converse’s nature to worry about his health.

The other occupant of the bench was an American lady of middling age.

It was siesta hour and there was no one else in the park. The children who usually played soccer on the lawns were across the street, sleeping in the shade of their mothers’ street stalls. The Tu Do hustlers had withdrawn into the arcade of Eden Passage where they lounged sleepy-eyed, rousing themselves now and then to hiss after the passing of a sweating American. It was three o’clock and the sky was almost cloudless. The rain was late. There was no wind, and the palm crowns and poinciana blossoms of the park trees hung motionless.

From “Dog Soldiers” (Houghton Mifflin), which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1975. Robert Stone is also the author of “Damascus Gate,” “Outerbridge Reach” and “Bear and His Daughters.”

TIM O’BRIEN

It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker. Billy Boy had died of fright, scared to death on the field of battle, and Frenchie Tucker had been shot through the nose. Bernie Lynn and Lieutenant Sidney Martin had died in tunnels. Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead. The rain fed fungus that grew in the men’s boots and socks, and their socks rotted, and their feet turned white and soft so that the skin could be scraped off with a fingernail, and Stink Harris woke up screaming one night with a leech on his tongue. When it was not raining, a low mist moved across the paddies, blending the elements into a single gray element, and the war was cold and pasty and rotten. Lieutenant Corson, who came to replace Lieutenant Sidney Martin, contracted the dysentery. The tripflares were useless. The ammunition corroded and the foxholes filled with mud and water during the nights, and in the mornings there was always the next village and the war was always the same. The monsoons were part of the war. In early September Vaught caught an infection. He’d been showing Oscar Johnson the sharp edge on his bayonet, drawing it swiftly along his forearm to peel off a layer of mushy skin. “Like a Gillette Blue Blade,” Vaught had said proudly. There was no blood, but in two days the bacteria soaked in and the arm turned yellow, so they bundled him up and called in a dustoff, and Vaught left the war. He never came back. Later they had a letter from him that described Japan as smoky and full of slopes, but in the enclosed snapshot Vaught looked happy enough, posing with two sightly nurses, a wine bottle rising from between his thighs. It was a shock to learn he’d lost the arm. Soon afterward Ben Nystrom shot himself through the foot, but he did not die, and he wrote no letters. These were all things to joke about. The rain, too. And the cold. Oscar Johnson said it made him think of Detroit in the month of May. “Lootin’ weather,” he liked to say. “The dark an’ gloom, just right for rape an’ lootin’.” Then someone would say that Oscar had a swell imagination for a darkie. *

From “Going After Cacciato” (Broadway Books), which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979. Tim O’Brien is also the author of “The Things They Carried,” “In the Lake of the Woods” and “Tomcat in Love.”

WARD JUST

I will insist at the beginning that this is not a war story. There have been plenty of those and will be many more, appalling stories of nineteen-year-olds breaking down, frightened out of their wits, or engaging in acts of unimaginable gallantry; and often all three at the same time. The war stories were from a different period, later on, when the war became an epidemic, a plague like the Black Death. Society was paralyzed by fear. Order broke down. Duty and honor were forgotten in the rush to survive. Commanders deserted their units, friends turned their backs. Among the population, individual burials were replaced by burials en masse. The American morgue was expanded again and again. Aircraft that brought fresh troops returned with coffins. I remember watching a doctor perform an autopsy while humming through his teeth, the identical note repeated monotonously. His fingers were rigid as iron.

When he saw me, he looked up and whispered, Bring out your dead.

But that time was not my time. That time was later on, when things went to hell generally, and the best of us lost all heart. My time was early days, when civilians still held a measure of authority. We were startled by the beauty of the country, and surprised at its size. It looked so small on our world maps, not much larger than New England. We understood that in Vietnam Americans would add a dimension to their identity. Isn’t identity always altered by its surroundings and the task at hand? So this is a different cut of history, a civilian cut, without feats of arms or battlefield chaos. If love depends on faith, think of my narrative as a kind of romance, the story of one man with a bad conscience and another with no conscience and the Frenchman and his wife who lived in the parallel world, the one we thought was a mirage from the century before, a bankrupt colonial milieu that offered--so many possibilities, as Dicky Rostok said.

From “A Dangerous Friend” (Peter Davison / Houghton Mifflin), published in 1999. Ward Just is also the author of “The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert” and “Echo House.”

JACK FULLER

You didn’t really start noticing things again until the very end. The strange smell of the place, like spice on bad meat. The way the barbed wire moaned in the wind.

You climbed aboard a truck and rode through the countryside for the last time. And you finally opened your eyes to it, as if you were coming up from under a mortar barrage, lifting your face warily off the ground, blinking out the dust. This is what you saw: figures in conical hats moving through the paddies on line, as riflemen might, except that when you looked closely they were only women tending the rice. Ramshackle villages thrown together from material too worthless for war. Fields pocked by craters, and children playing in the pools that formed there.

You saw things you had never expected. Buddhist pagodas gaily lavished with bright icons and odd, unsovereign flags. Flame trees as delicate as garlands. Little children at the side of the road, waving and laughing and shouting “OK! OK! OK!” as if you were the first soldier on earth. Or the last. And despite everything, despite the numbness, despite the whole wasted year you had spent closing your eyes to these things, suddenly they blossomed out before you, as sad and beautiful as the fragile, momentary flowers in a rain forest.

Then you arrived at your destination, the last stop before you got on the airplane they said would set you free. You threw your duffel bag on an empty bunk; you paced back and forth. You examined your hands, how dark and hard they had become, your heart. Day after day you fell into formation and heard them call the names of other men for their flights. But the names meant nothing. The men meant nothing. You were putting everything behind you, or at least you were trying to, in your head.

But still in the dark you could hear the artillery firing in the distance, indifferent as thunder, and you worried whether the rounds would land short. You could hear foreign voices chattering in the night, and you craned your neck to hear what they said and wondered whether it was true. You tried to make connections. Nothing fancy. The simple things. Chronology. Cause and effect. When did each man die and how? It was hard just to get even that much straight. But you kept at it anyway. You had to. You were going home.

From “Fragments” (University of Chicago Press), published in 1984. Jack Fuller is also the author of “Convergence” and “News Values: Ideas For An Information Age.” His new novel, “The Best of Jackson Payne,” will be published in June by Alfred A. Knopf.

JOSIAH BUNTING

Headquarters Briefing Room

Twelfth Infantry Division in Vietnam

0730 Hours, 12 March 1968

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Ennoblement is earned by merit in the American Army. The depleted ranks of peers are annually replenished by fresh appointments from the ranks of its higher squirearchy, the appointments being made from a list annually prepared in the pentagonal Camelot. It is co-option with a courtly vengeance; and the new peers, the brigadiers and major generals, assume their mantles and styles with the guarded zest of the most sensitive parvenu. George, earl of Lemming, Regis Gratia Major General: Honoris Causa, long and distinguished service as measured by its acceptability to those who command the armed hosts of the Republic.

Among these senior warriors, a major general commanding a division in Vietnam is an earl, a Marcher Lord, and he maintains a briefing-court, a formal masculine assembly which meets regularly and according to a fixed protocol to enable him to take counsel of his greater feudatories and his household knights. All here is order, degree, heraldry, pomp, deference.

From “The Lionheads” (George Braziller), published in 1972. Josiah Bunting is also the author of “An Education for Our Time” and “A Ceremony of Lessons.”

JOHN M. DEL VECCHIO

From that day on they called him Cherry and from the night of that day and on he thought of himself as Cherry. It confused him yet it felt right. He was in a new world, a strange world. Cherry, he thought. It fits. It made little difference to him that they called every new man Cherry and that with the continual rotation of personnel there would soon be a soldier newer than he and he would call the new man Cherry. Cherry. He would repeat it to himself a hundred times before the day ended.

For James Vincent Chelini the transition began early on the morning of 12 August 1970. He was at the 101st Airborne Replacement Station at Phu Bai for the second time; there now to receive his final unit assignment for his year in Vietnam. The air in the building was already stifling. Chelini sweated as he waited anxiously for the clerk to dig through a stack of personnel files.

From “The 13th Valley” (St. Martin’s), which was an American Book Award nominee in 1982. John M. Del Vecchio is also the author of “Darkness Falls,” “Carry Me Home” and “For the Sake of All Living Things.”

BOBBIE ANN MASON

“I have to stop again, hon,” Sam’s grandmother says, tapping her on the shoulder. Sam Hughes is driving, with her uncle, Emmett Smith, half asleep beside her.

“Where are we?” grunts Emmett.

“Still on I-64. Mamaw has to go to the restroom.”

“I forgot to take my pill when we stopped last,” Mamaw says.

“Do you want me to drive now?” Emmett asks, whipping out a cigarette. He smokes Kents, and he has smoked seven in the two hours they have been on the road today.

“If Emmett drives, I could set up front,” says Mamaw, leaning forward between the front seats. “I’m crammed in the back here like a sack of sausage.”

“Are you sure you feel like driving, Emmett?”

“It don’t make no difference.”

“I was just getting into it,” says Sam, irritated.

It is her new car. Emmett drove through the heavy traffic around Lexington, because Sam wasn’t experienced at city driving, but the interstate is easy. She could glide like this all the way across America.

From “In Country” (HarperPerennial), published in 1986. Bobbie Ann Mason is also the author of “Spence + Lila,” “Shiloh and Other Stories” and “Clear Springs: A Memoir.”

LARRY HEINEMANN

The first clean fact. Let’s begin with the first clean fact, James: This ain’t no war story. War stories are out--one, two, three, and a heave-ho, into the lake you go with all the other alewife scuz and foamy harbor scum. But isn’t it a pity. All those crinkly soggy sorts of laid-by tellings crowded together as thick and pitiful as street cobbles, floating mushy bellies up, like so much moldy shag rug (dead as rusty-ass doornails and smelling so peculiar and un-Christian). Just isn’t it a pity, because here and there and yonder among the corpses are some prize-winning, leg-pulling daisies--some real pop-in-the-oven muffins, so to speak, some real softly lobbed, easy-out line drives.

But that’s the way of the world, or so the fairy tales go. The people with the purse strings and apron strings gripped in their hot and soft little hands denounce war stories--as a geek-monster species of evil-ugly rumor. (A geek, James, is a carnival performer whose whole act consists of biting the head off a live chicken or a snake.) These people who denounce war stories stand bolt upright and proclaim with broad and timely sweeps of the arm that war stories put other folks to sleep where they sit. (When the contrary is more to the truth, James. Any carny worth his cashbox--not dead or in jail or squirreled away in some county nuthouse--will tell you that most folks will shell out hard-earned, greenback cash, every time, to see artfully performed, urgently fascinating, grisly and gruesome carnage.) *

From “Paco’s Story” (Viking), which won the National Book Award in 1987. Larry Heinemann is also the author of “Cooler By The Lake” and “Close Quarters.”