Fiction. "In this fine book, Rick Christman carries me back to Vietnam as few writers can. With his tight, compact prose, each paragraph stripped to essentials, Christman offers vivid and memorable snapshots of that horrifying piece of history--the ghouls, the whores, the decadence, the gallows humor, the redeeming moments of human courage and human kindness. This is a book that makes me remember"--Tim O'Brien, author of Going After Cacciato.
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Christman's soldiers are rear-action enlisted men serving as clerks, as interrogators, and in intelligence; they drag through their jobs and then disappear inside air-conditioned trailers, where they lose themselves in rock music and stimulants. Minor atrocities--such as the pelting with Coke cans of bedraggled garbage looters, or the offstage roughing-up of North Vietnamese POWs--abound, and long afterward, the unreality and the pointlessness of the war continue to haunt Christman's veterans. They wander dazed through the world, as if awaiting the last small shove to send them into complete oblivion. Christman settles for literary effects, many times, rather than allowing his men their sad fullness, but he also has a knack for a deeply understated irony, as in "When Only Too Long Is Long Enough." Here, a veteran is beset with guilt over leaving behind his beautiful, middle-class Vietnamese sweetheart; much later, when he is broke and out of work, he discovers that she is living in New York. So he tracks her down, thinking to do right by the poor girl, but it turns out she is prosperous and doesn't need him; in fact, at first, she doesn't even remember him. Christman's sour, pitiless quality may doom him to a small audience, but he has a lot of talent. John Mort
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