A veteran makes peace in Vietnam

Serene is the word that comes to mind on finishing this exact and lovely book. By the end of his account of his visits and revisits to Vietnam, where he was a helicopter gunner in the 1960s, the estimable writer Wayne Karlin achieves a positively Miltonian effect: “Calm of mind, all passion spent.”

He reaches that point of equanimity, taking the reader with him, by empathetic reconciliation with his former enemies; before just unnamed targets, now real friends with faces, names and stories.

It is their stories that get to you. Of bombings, strafings, the wrecking of homes, villages, families -- the destruction of everything but a country, which the bleeding but unbowed winner of a long, long war survived.

Karlin, who has been writing about Vietnam off and on for more than 30 years, returned there most recently to work on a movie, “Song of the Stork.” The idea was to make a film more true to the actualities of the war than most other movies, whether made in Hollywood or Vietnam. It was finished just before Sept. 11, 2001, and shown at Cannes and other film festivals, but, Karlin says, its timing was not auspicious. The Vietnamese-Singaporean production was a low-budget operation and has not been broadly distributed.

The distribution of a book, though, does not depend on big bucks, and “War Movies” can nicely stand alone.

It pictures a people to whom what we call stoicism is a natural part of life.

Karlin writes of his friend and artistic collaborator Phan Thanh Hao, whose father had been imprisoned by the Communist government as the founder of a “politically incorrect” literary magazine. “[S]he hated the people who had arrested him, and she hated the Americans, but after a while she found she could hate no one. She was too tired. She didn’t have the energy.

“She understood, even before she could articulate it, that everyone -- the party functionary and the cops who had taken away her father, the American pilot who had blown up the house next door, were acting out fates they couldn’t control.”

But the attitude that Karlin encountered, and that led to reconciliation on the Vietnamese side, went beyond fatalism. Hao wrote to him to explain it this way:

“The national tradition is to forgive and forget. It is passed on into our subconscious from generation to generation, in lullabies, in folklore, and in ordinary life. For our country has learned to exist beneath a huge, culturally superior and angry China ... in our schools, we are taught that after the Chinese invaders were defeated, our kings had to take precious offerings to China and apologize.”

It is a hallmark of Karlin’s writing about the war that he treats the Vietnamese and the Americans in his book with the same sympathy and understanding; he does not, as too many chroniclers of the period do, praise one at the expense of the other. He gives his Americans as much humanity as the Vietnamese; he does not let American guilt about the war blur the personal and moral complexity of the American fighting men.

Karlin is well aware that some think it odd that he should still be writing about a war now long over. He has his explanation:

“What keeps me writing about the war is not that I was in it, but the ever-dimming and ever-brightening hope that rendering the complexities of human nature through the resonance of this story might just be the direct opposite of that ultimate lack of imagination, that ultimate lack of empathy, that, simply, allows us to kill.”

In “War Movies” Karlin summons up from his great store of empathy a wisdom that a generation later begins at long last to heal the wounds of war.

Anthony Day is a contributing writer to Book Review.