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Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam

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Although it did not garner national attention or give rise to any widespread outpourings of remembrance, this past April marked the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. The most lasting impression we have - aside from that gleaming granite commemorative engraved with 58,000 plus names on the Washington Mall - seems to be the quintessential "bug-out" photo of a chopper on the roof of the American embassy, a too-long tether of people desperate to clamber aboard.

As is often the case, the years have been kind to Vietnam annealing some of its sharpness, if not in the memories of the generation that served there, then at least in terms of the original stigma attached to it. Perhaps as a country we have mellowed enough to see that it had some unpleasant but necessary lessons to pass along. All wars do, though it is the young who must purchase that knowledge for us. But even with that, there remains the lasting stench of defeat, along with the awkward doling out and acceptance of blame by aging politicians, whenever the word 'Vietnam' is uttered.

According to the record books, American soldiers were long gone by the time those frantic Vietnamese began queuing up for the last chopper out. But when it comes to war in general and Vietnam specifically, the records aren't always on mark. Which is why three decades later books like Heinemann's Black Virgin Mountain are still being written and read. We simply cannot get enough of the subject to affix it with a permanent, acceptable label and then hang it away like an out-of-fashion coat.

The mountain of the title was the focal point of Heinemann's year in hell. He had already returned to the country a number of times in the 1990s, often in conjunction with writers' conferences, when he and another writer, Larry Rottmann, took the trip to what is known in Vietnam as Nui Ba Den.

The text crackles with an anger that, by Heinemann's own admission, remains unabated despite the passing of thirty-seven years since his tour in `Nam. Having lost two brothers to those residual emotional conflicts that simmer long after the actual combat is over, he is brutally frank about his experiences ("Every human vitality is taken from you as if you'd been skinned; yanked out like you pull nails with a claw hammer; boiled off, the same as you would render a carcass at hog-killing") and his opinions concerning the conduct of the war. It is difficult to decide which leader bears the greater brunt of his scathing commentary - LBJ or William Westmoreland.

Happily, the entire book does not focus solely on the author's lingering revulsion for the war. There are large travelogue segments, life slices of rich imagery showing how the Vietnamese have moved along with far less lingering acrimony than have we since the end of what they call the "American War." Included is a wonderful description of the French colonial era bureaucrat's home-turned-guest-house at which they stayed in Hanoi. Its exotic past (koi pond, louvered windows with a dozen coats of paint) resonates like something straight out of 1940s cinema - "Casablanca" on a different continent. Heinemann includes engaging snippets of a portion of one trip involving the Vietnam Railway and its sometimes idiosyncratic train station employees. Something we don`t expect after all those plane loads of bombs and Agent Orange, is the spectacular scenery. Perhaps most revealing of some kind of personal transformation is a statement he makes after watching the Southeast Asian panorama from the train`s window, "And there it was, the country at peace, the thing I had come to see."

In contrast to the many positive things Heinemann has to say about that nation, in the latter part of the book there is the unnerving visit to the tunnels at Cu Chi. Juxtapositioned next to his own middle-aged physical discomfort at "duckwalking" through a small section of the enlarged-for-tourists-maze, Heinemann gives us a palpably frightening description of what it was like for an outfit's smallest soldier to be pressed into service as a tunnel rat. Fear, claustrophobia, the myriad things to remember to listen for, to smell, to see in order to scope out a tunnel and stay alive - if after reading it you don't come away with the distinct itch of something crawling on your skin, the feel of dirt sticking to the sweat on your bare back, then you may already be dead.

Language rampages back and forth between politely literate and gritty street talk, oftentimes within the same sentence. Normally this would be where a caution against putting it into the hands of middle school children doing history papers would be placed. But there is little early teens have not already heard. For obvious reasons anything related to that period of time is best displayed in the lingo of the day. Heinemann's choice of words may have been his way of showing us that he can walk both sides of the line, i.e., that he is an accomplished writer with a well-developed, post-tour vocabulary, but whose awareness is forever etched with the earthy, peppery talk of men at war. He may also be enjoying his ability to keep the non-military reader a little off-balance: the seriously out-of-kilter, day-after-day world of the average soldier. And whoever predicted the pending demise of the semicolon, hasn't read Larry Heinemann.

But to the rest of those doing research on the embattled 60s and 70s, this is a seminal book, one that stands outside all the political posturing and sociological conjecture. It is an invaluable look into the dehumanizing influences of combat by someone who lived it.

So, once again to war and its lessons. Our unglamorous departure from Saigon over thirty years past remains a thorn in the side of many, though for an assortment of differing reasons. It is a picture we need to keep close to us as we devise our exit strategy for Iraq after destroying their corrupt, sadistic, but functioning political infrastructure. It would be lamentable if history were to look back on our crucial departure from Baghdad only to have it described by some future Heinemann as "an agony, and an orgy of unambiguous betrayal ... right to the end and still, a bungled tangle..."

As a veteran of two tours in Nam, consecutive as a Marine Sniper I have read everything I can about the war to better understand it from both sides so this was one I grabbed when it came out. I have really mixed emotions. Larry is a veteran and had some horrid experiences no doubt. He wrote Paco's Story which I really liked. But in this book his love of the Vietnamese, which is fine, is so lavish, his praise for every single thing they do on his journey so sappy, all at the expense of everything America did or does, leaves me with a sour feeling in the least. He questions John McCains service as a POW, every single thing we, America did was wrong, every single thing the North Vietnamese did was wonderful ... its more than a bit much for me. He conveniently leaves out all the atrocities committed by the NVA and their leaders. I for one am not a fan of our leadership at the time for sure. But the extent to which the Author goes to make the NVA out to be the patriots of all time and then denigrates the 'lifers' and 'patriots' in our armed forces ... well, I am only surprised he hasnt moved his family over to Nam.

Larry Heinemann has long been a legend among those of us who served in the Vietnam War. His award-winning novel 'Paco's Story' told the public about the Vietnam War as it was - bitter, cruel, humiliating, destructive and unwarranted.

Now Heinemann brings yet another view of the atrocities of war in this memoir that references not only his war years, but also shares his responses to his return to Vietnam in 1990, this time with a different band of warriors - fellow writers of the Vietnam War who were invited to Hanoi to meet their Vietnamese counterparts. What he encountered during that and subsequent visits to the country he once viewed with disdain and tortured memories was a country of people who were full of forgiveness, providing Heinemann with a path toward healing. He even made the trek from Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in the south, ending in a climb of the Vietnamese symbol of folk mythology - Black Virgin Mountain - where he recovered his sense of healing.

Heinemann's writing is lucid and still retains the raw vigor of his previous works, but his writing is now more tempered with time. 'Since Vietnam, other wars have come our way, including Iraq and Afghanistan...and I don't know about you, but I have watched and been appalled by the horror-struck nonchalance with which we seem to enjoy them. We are fascinated and repelled simultaneously by the endless loop of televised imagery and skimpy narration, oiled with the patina of exaggerated patriotism that begins with the dusty, desert-bred bogeyman, travels clean through the bloody wrath of the Old Testament, and ends with those prickly little tingles in the scalp, the moistened eyes, and the grand old flag...But there remained, still, the itchy, undeniable sense of unfinished business...'.

Heinemann's book is important. It speaks of healing while it still pleas for us to keep the watch for the opportunity to end the horrors of war. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, November 05

... or "Black Virgin Mountain." "It was as if you placed Mount McKinley in the middle of Kansas." The lone mountain, rising unique from the plain has had a primordial pull on humankind's imagination long before the written word. Consider Kilimanjaro, Fujiyama, and to a lesser extent, one of the four cardinal points of the Navajo universe, Mt. Taylor, loaming 70 miles to the west of Albuquerque. So too in Tay Ninh province, in what was once called the "Parrot's Beak" section of Vietnam. Heinemann had been there for an entire year, with the 25th Infantry Division, "Tropic Lighting," back when... The mountain was a perennial source of danger, virtually always held by NVA / VC units, and only the imagination could ascend it. This book is the story, with many a diversion, of Heinemann's trip(s) back to Vietnam, culminating in finally climbing the mountain, in a country now, finally, at peace.

Heinemann's prose is visceral; it is laced with the idioms of the war, that war. The "90th Repple Depple" has laid dormant in the memory of almost all Vietnam veterans, only to be suddenly awakened by this book - yeah, that is what we all called it - not particularly reflecting on the absurd manner the military would name units and areas, as though there were 89 others. His point of view on the war is unambiguous, and he clearly states it in loftier terms: "Even so, it seemed clear to us that the war was not simply a pointless waste, but egregiously and iniquitous. Though those were not the words we used..." And he immediately follows with the GI's lingo of the time. His anger at the American leadership of the time is unabated, with serious jabs at Johnson, Nixon, Westmoreland, McNamera, all in the manner of: "No less a person than Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stood on his hind legs at a press conference and asserted that there would be `many executions.'" (after the North Vietnamese took over the South). Like the 90th RD, it was refreshing to be reminded of the GI's attitude during the war: "In Vietnam, to be called a `John Wayne' was a flat-out insult." (p 8).

Both Publisher's Weekly and Booklist got the year wrong. It was 1990, and not 1992 that Heinemann was invited back to Vietnam for a literary conference. (Which reviewer was plagiarizing from which?) It was at this conference that he underscored, without any sense of polemic, but only a very sad guffaw, yet another of America's strategic mistakes during the war: he had a conversation with Nguyen Lien, a professor of American literature at Hanoi University concerning which books about Vietnam the American soldiers had read before they came. Of course there were none, and in my own case, I remember only a hurried, disorganized one hour "block of instruction" in my entire training, entitled: "Why we are in Vietnam." By contrast, the Vietnamese read America's greatest writers to gain a better understanding of our mental framework. How many Americans would ever have dared asked the point Heinemann makes on page 63: "In other words, what can the Vietnamese teach us"? Concerning the Vietnamese attitude towards us now: "I was a soldier once, as was just about every Vietnamese of a certain age I have met: WE know what that means, and leave it at that. I've come to see that the Vietnamese have a deep (not to say historical) sense of melancholy, and are more than empathetic with Americans returned to settle a grief that will not sit."

In the entire book I found only one point that I would quibble Heinemann about: his footnote on page 119, in which he says: "I have not heard anyone speak of the French returning to Vietnam in the same spirit that Americans travel there..." In 1963 the French writer, historian, and yes, a soldier once, Jules Roy, went to Vietnam to request that the French be allowed to construct a memorial at Dien Bien Phu for their war dead. His brutally honest answer to the Vietnamese question concerning their own war dead resulted in an approval in the project. In 1993 President Francois Mitterand paid homage to the nation's dead at DBP, standing on former strongpoint Dominique 2 at sunset. In contrast, during President Bush's "diplomatic" mission to Vietnam, he pointed out to his Vietnamese hosts that one of the lessons of the war is: "that we would have won if we had stayed long enough."

Of all the lessons, real or alleged, of the war, the one that resonates the strongest was made by Heinemann on page 25: "...the war was not a pleasant business: what happened there is not pleasant to recall. We generally rode roughshod over the countryside....and I have no doubt we radicalized more southern Vietnamese to Ho Chi Minh's nationalist revolution than we `saved.'" A question to be asked on every military operation we undertake today: Have we created more terrorists than we have eliminated?

On three separate occasions I went back to Vietnam in the mid-90's. In all those travels, I still never made it to Tay Ninh, so I'd like to thank the author for `taking me along' on his trip. This is a truly a great book, as well as a Cri de Coeur. Based on its current rankings, it is sadly unappreciated; one can only hope for an improvement, in the meantime I'd like to add a "plus" next to my 5-stars.

This book has its moments. The author returns to Vietnam years after being a soldier there and travels around the country.
I really wanted to like the book more than I did. However, even though it is a small book, I got the feeling that at least 25% of it was sort of filler. I understand his Paco's Story is a great book. I need to read it. In the meantime, I wouldn't recommend this book.

This is a wonderful combination of achingly-real men-at-war memoir and modern-day Vietnam travelogue -- written with unforgettable raw intensity. The author was one of three brothers to be drafted into the Vietnam War and is the only survivor, one having committed suicide after his return to the US and the other disappeared and presumed dead. Despite the tragedy of family losses, Heinemann writes clearheadedly about his youthful experience in the steaming jungle and then about his warm meetings with his former enemies while touring the country on multiple trips in more recent times. His distinctive voice made such an impact on me that immediately upon finishing the book, I ordered the audio version and am enjoying reliving the experience of Heineman telling his bittersweet stories. Highly recommended in both book and audio format.

There are some significant factual errors in this book (e.g., Westmoreland was never chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; South Vietnam collapsed because it was attacked by 19 North Vietnamese division equivalents, not because of internal collapse)but it describes in interesting detail what tourists might expect if they follow the author's route.

I hoped to get insight about the war in Vietnam from a veteran. What I got instead was an endless list of gripes. I'm aware the war was a horrible thing, and I'm open to opinions that differ from my own about its necessity and its cost. I am not entertained by the adolescent level of the dialog, the endless ad hominems, the dull political cliches, or the fawning, patronizing respect given to a bloody tyranny.

Heinemann glosses carefully over the pogroms and re-education camps as well as other atrocities that occurred after the fall of Saigon. He lacks more than an MTV version of the politics and complexities of South-east Asia during and after the war period. He seems to remain personally offended that he was drafted and that his family suffered as a result.

Well, there were hundreds of thousands of draftees. Heinemann and all his brothers came home; 58,220 Americans were killed, and 1687 remain missing. Better men than Heinemann have more reason for bitterness and suffered more than he or his family did. In that light, the tone of this memoir is astonishing in its callous narcissism.

Heinemann blames the broken families of his brothers on the war. Again, many good men served in Vietnam and did not commit suicide, did not abandon their families, and did not throw their medals over the White House fence.

I stuck through the book for some interesting perspectives of the long impacts of the conflict and the devastating mistakes American leaders made. The abiding residue it left, however, was one of petulant oikophobia. I might recommend Fields of Fire by James Webb or Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes as better, more intellectually honest (though fictional) accounts of the war. For the North Vietnamese side, there are native authors who don't burden their narrative with their personal contempt for politicians or their fellow countrymen.

My dad was in Vietnam and I have often wondered what went through his mind when he returned in the late 60's. This book gave me some idea, though of course each man is unique, and Larry Heinemann's story is brilliantly written. He pulls no punches and tells it like it was and like it is. Truly an honest look into the heart of the average Vietnam Veteran. God bless everyone of them for their courage in the face of a nasty, bloody, unjust war. They didn't deserve the kind of misery they got when they were drafted into the US Army. Larry shows us the heart and soul of Vietnam and his story is a beautiful thing!

I went to Vietnam as a tourist in 2004 and I wish that I had read this book before the trip. We did visit Cu Chi and some war memorials, but it was mostly the spirit of the people that impressed me, as it did Heinemann. His memories of the war and his military service for a year there are very painful but have the ring of truth and experience. I have notified my tourist agency that they should put this book on a reading list for future tourists.