Customer Reviews

Wandering Souls: Journeys With the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam

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As an infantry soldier in Vietnam, I had an experience similar to Homer's, and the story of reconciliation drew me. But, the book gave me much more. Wayne Karlin delved into the postwar lives of the combatants, and their families. Through these stories I found myself gaining a better understanding of things I had been dealing with for years. It was kind of reassuring knowing that I wasn't the "Lone Ranger". I think reading "Wandering Souls" will give folks a better idea of what combat soldiers deal with long after the nations involved declare a war over.

I cannot recall being moved more deeply by a book than I was while reading Wandering Souls. Wayne Karlin's beautifully crafted account of compassion, grace and forgiveness is made even more amazing in the knowledge that a despairing Homer Steedly somewhow found his way to Karlin -- the one person whose sublime understanding and enormous talent could fully capture the essence of that experience. I have no doubt that this honest and enlightening book will soon rank among the most highly regarded works in the literature of the Vietnam War.

was Homer Steedley's mission as he helped bring the body of Hoang Ngoc Dam, back to his home village outside of Hanoi, almost 40 years after he had killed Dam in battle. Wayne Karlin's masterfully-written book is a complete picture of two young men from opposite parts of the world who meet one fateful day in Vietnam. Steedley, the son of a WW2 soldier and a German war bride, was raised in South Carolina as a farm boy. He joined the army at the height of the Vietnam War and was sent, as a 2nd Lt, to an infantry unit north of Saigon. Steedley saw brutality in battle and in the everyday life of a soldier in Vietnam. He served for a little over a year, and one fateful, and fatal, day, he met a young soldier - a medic - from the north, named Hoang Ngoc Dam. Dam, also the son and grandson of soldiers and raised as a farmer, had left his village and his large family to fight against the Americans. After five years in uniform, he was shot by Steedley as they abruptly encountered each other in the field.

After Steedley shot Dam, he took documents from his body - a notebook, some papers of identification, and other things - and instead of turning them over to US army intelligence, he sent them home to his mother, who kept them wrapped in paper in her attic. Dam's body was recovered by his fellow soldiers and buried in a mass grave with about 20 other soldiers. His family was notified of his death, but they were unable to recover his body for reburial in his home village.

Thirty five years passed and Homer Steedley returned to the US, and like many Vietnam veterans, fell into an uneasy peace. He had some problems and lived by himself, becoming a computer whiz in the early days of the computer age. In his early 40's, he met and married a woman who was instrumental in giving him some calming days. But he never forgot the man he shot and the papers he took from the body and sent home. In the late 1990's, he retrieved the papers and notebook from his mother's attic and attempted to find the soldier - Dam's - family to return the documents to them. Through an organisation run by Wayne Karlin, the soldier in the papers was identified and Karlin went back to Vietnam in 2002 and returned Dam's belongings to his still-mourning family. Homer Steedley himself returned to Vietnam in 2008 and helped to rebury Dam's body in his native village. The body's location was identified by a Vietnamese psychic.

The return of Dam's body and belongings was accompanied by an acceptance of his family of Homer Steedley as the man who took their brother's life in battle. Acceptance by Dam's family was a sort of blessing on Homer Steedley, a lightening of sorts of the burden he had carried for 40 years.

Karlin's writing is excellent through out his book. He's never heavy handed in describing the victims - and there were many on both sides - and the battles both Dam and Steedley participated in. It is, in the end, an almost joyous accounting of love and acceptance from both sides. A real winner.

I just finished reading Wayne Karlin's remarkable book, "Wandering Souls: Journeys With the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam." Without a doubt, given the broad reach and emotional depth of this book, one that appeals to all veterans from both sides who served there, it is perhaps the finest memoir of the Vietnam War that I have ever read. This book will stand the test of time and become a classic. Thanks to Wayne Karlin for writing it. I was particularly moved by the passage where the author illuminates the writer's need to confirm what happened the way he remembered it, the obligation being to validate our anecdotes and memories without turning those experiences into more acceptable myths, or nostalgia for a falsely idealized past. Wayne Karlin has made our understanding of that war, and what we all went through, more complete through telling the powerful story of Hoang Ngoc Dam's death and of Homer Steedly's redemption. An amazing book! Captain Dan Guenther, USMC

It was with some trepidation that I bought this book not knowing a great deal about Vietnam or the war. No matter. Not only did the book teach me a great deal, it was so compelling that the beautifully woven narrative profoundly touched me. Seldom does a book succeed to such a lofty perch, but this book does. Wayne Karlin has crafted a terrific book in telling Homer Steedly's tragic, heroic, inspiring and ultimately rich human story. This book deserves more stars than five!

"Wandering Souls"; Journeys With The Dead And The Living In Vietnam by Wayne Karlin is one book that belongs to that special clan of authors and Vietnam that go so well together with the name of, Tim O'Brien (and just a few others).

"Wandering Souls" is about former 1st Lt. Homer Steedly who turned down a small trail in Pleiku coming "face to face" with a North Vietnamese soldier by the name of Hoang Ngoc Dam. For a split second, the two faced each other unsure of what to do, and then each began to automatically raise their rifles like two gunfighter from some Zane Grey novel. 1st Lt. Homer Steedly fired first and ...Hoang Ngoc Dam was dead before his body hit the ground.

The killing incident lasted but a few seconds at most, and yet... the recoil from the 1st Lt's M-16 have lasted him a lifetime.

The notebook and papers taken from Hoang Ngoc Dam were sent back to the United States where they were kept for over 35 years, but the psychological demons continued to plague Homer Steedly until he was finally forced to open the cork on the Genies lamp in order to face his many tormentors. This decision ultimately leads Homer Steedly back to Vietnam not only to meet the family of the man he killed, but...participate in his belated funeral services.

This is truly a poignant story and at times, I had to put the book down in order to keep from being sucked into the tar pits of deep sadness brought about by Mr. Karlin's superbly descriptive writing and the emotional flaying that it produces. None the less, this is a great read, and a spiritual story that should not be overlooked. The book also carries a myriad of Vietnamese poetry, and cultural antecedents of great interest.

To read this book is to help understand the horrors of war, the sadness of physical and psychological pain, and...the beauty of man's spiritual nature.

One of the great books, not just about the Vietnam War but about all wars and their effects on those who fight them and those who lose family members to them; and, perhaps more importantly, about the possibility of forgiveness and redemption for the soldier who has come to sincerely regret his or her participation in war. As a Vietnam veteran, I have read most of the books about that war, and many more on war in general. This is one of the finest.

Wayne Karlin, the author and a Marine Corps veteran of the war, recounts the true stories of Homer Steedly, an American infantry lieutenant, and Hoang Ngoc Dam, an NVA medic whom Steedly kills in a sudden encounter, leaving Dam's body in the jungle. Steedly takes a notebook from Dam's body, and sends it home to his own mother.

3 decades later, deeply troubled by his memories of the war and Dam's death, among many others, Steedly assigns himself the mission of returning the notebook, and eventually Dam's body, to Dam's family. The story of Steedly's rapprochement with the Hoang family, and the process of their grieving and forgiving, makes this book absolutely unforgettable.

Karlin combines the stories of Steedly, Dam, and their families, during and after the war. The anguish and isolation of many combat veterans, and their loved ones, is depicted in Karlin's narrative. But Karlin also adds the voices of American and Vietnamese poets and authors who have written about the war to tell a story about telling war stories. I am familiar with most of the American, and a few of the Vietnamese, writers Karlin quotes. He has chosen the very best of the voices of the war, not the least of which is Jonathan Shay, whose books on combat and its effects on veterans are among the finest.

This is a must read for any understanding of war and war's consequences. Karlin extends his topic from Vietnam to our more recent wars, reminding us that they all carry the same consequences of Steedly's and Dam's stories: suffering that goes on long after the last rounds are fired.

The reviewer is an ex-army captain, veteran of service with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam 1969-1970.

Wayne Karlin has written a much needed book whose central topic is reconciliation among people who once viewed each others as enemies. The act of reconciliation is personified by the lives of two individuals, former First Lieutenant Homer Steedly, Jr. and a former medical corpsman in the North Vietnamese Army, Hoang Ngoc Dam. They met for only fleeting seconds on a trail high on the hill overlooking the Mang Yang pass, in Vietnam's Central Highlands. Both men reacted instinctively, both men tried to kill the other; Steedly was "quicker on the draw." Steedly took the young medic's diary, and after a review by S-2 (Intelligence), he sent it to his mother in South Carolina, who kept it in the attic for decades, where Steedly eventually rediscovered it. In the intervening decades Steedly was haunted by the face of "The Man I Killed," and Karlin knows his history, and authors connected with the Vietnam War, so he references this story with the same name in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried Karlin also references another classic account of the Vietnam War, written by Neil Sheehan (A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (Modern Library), but does not reference the section in which Sheehan says that the face-to-face killing of a soldier on the other side rarely happened. By far, the number of deaths during the war, combatants, and civilians, were attributed to "impersonal" killing at a distance, by bombing, and shelling. The "face-to-face" aspect of the story makes it particularly important due to its relative uniqueness and the particularly haunting aspect for the survivor.

Karlin told the story very well, and like Sheehan, carefully depicted the antecedents of both men's lives prior to their fateful meeting on that trail. The author also details the aftermath of that meeting, including how difficult it is for survivors of war to fully return to civilian society. Karlin took the lead, doing what Steedly felt he could not do at the time, and returned the diary and papers to the Hoang family around 2005. It took a couple more years, but Steedly decided to return and face the family of the man he killed. It is a remarkable tribute to the Vietnamese people that the family and all the villagers received him well; indeed, "to everything there is a season," and now is the time for reconciliation. Karlin references at least three other books that are essential to understanding the particulars of the Vietnam War: The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh, which starts with a haunting scene about the Vietnamese trying to placate the souls of their own MIA's; The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Graham Greene which I've read three times; and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations), the quintessential anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque, from the First World War.

Like Remarque, Karlin ends Steedly and Hoang's story on a powerful note, and it should not be a "spoiler" to quote it: In referring to Steedly, who now has the fresh earth of Hoang's new grave in his hands: "I know that he is not who should be here, helping to bury the remains of the man he killed. I know who should be here, bearing the weight of this grief all around us, and I know that will never happen." The author in his epilogue wisely and appropriately ties this story to the many that are now being generated by the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. He also wryly says that "like all true Viet Nam War stories, this one had ended ambiguously." Ah, so true.

I arrived at Camp Enari, and joined the 4th Infantry Division two weeks after Steedly. I was a medic, and was assigned to a tank unit, the 1/69th Armor. We traveled many of the same roads, literally, and had many similar concerns. I once took a picture of the stream which must be forded to enter Polei Klang from almost exactly the same spot. On one of my returns to Vietnam, in 1996, my two children, ages 12 and 11 at the time, climbed one of the hills surrounding the Mang Yang pass, to almost the same spot where Steedly killed Hoang, though at the time I certainly didn't know it. My concerns were the impact of Agent Orange on the area, the graves of the French soldiers from Groupe Mobile 2000, and yes, the now peaceful view over an area that had once contained much terror for those who entered it. Memory is such a tricky thing after almost 40 years; like Steedly, I felt the topography of the land was burned into my brain, and I was right, so I strongly suspect Steedly could also identify certain places from the location of a tall tree. On the other hand though, I noticed a few mistakes. It may be a "typo," but the hills surrounding the Mang Yang were only 600 ft high, not 6000 (p 103). With a 70 pound ruck sack, it might have FELT like 6000! And Highway 19 was definitely paved the entire way from Pleiku to An Khe, though it was often mined under the asphalt. And it never went from 120 F to freezing in the Highlands, though in exposed positions it might have felt it. No doubt my own memory has played similar tricks on me, and I await suitable corrections.

How much is forgotten, particularly if the memories can be embarrassing? Yesterday I asked six quite intelligent, quite knowledgeable young college graduates if they had ever heard of Dien Bien Phu. None had. And of the six, only one had ever heard of My Lai. This is an essential book, which really should be taught in our schools, in order to avoid the infinite cycle of George Santayana's famous axiom. An essential 5-star plus read.

An engaging read, the author describes the fateful meeting of two men on opposite sides of the war on a secluded jungle path. One died, and the other lived with the heavy burden and guilt for 30 years, before embarking on a journey of reconciliation with the family and relatives.

It's not often that one walks in the shoes of one's enemy, and the author does exactly that - meticulously describing the background and past of the two men, their upbringings and ideals and what motivated them to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. It is an eye-opening insight into the Vietnamese psyche and culture as well, their superstitions and how they deal the horrors of war and their concept of loyalty and fate. After seeing life from the other person's perspective, a great sense of futility is also embodied, raising many questions on how one justifies wars and whether the human toll is all worth it.

On a literary note, I felt that the book could do with some tighter editing in terms of pacing and perhapssome trimming of unessential narratives - but ultimately does not detract in any way from this powerful and evocative story.

My thanks to Wayne Karlin for penning such a powerful book and to Homer Steedly and the Hoang family for giving permission for it to be published. This book takes readers beyond the hype of war and into human lives. We clearly see that people who are "enemies" could be close friends if history was not manipulated but people in power who wish not to think of alterntives other than war for solving disputes and differences.

The book also shares the deep sense of humanity and forgiveness that most Vietnamese have. Despite having their country and their lives so disrupted by the war, they find within themselves the compassion to understand and forgive. I have experienced that forgiveness many times while living and working in Viet Nam.

Books like this should be required reading in schools. We need to see the reality of war and the reality that humanity is stronger than hatred. If everyone, especially those in power, read books like "Wandering Souls" they might approach global politics in a much different and positive way. Thanks for a very moving book.

Max Ediger, author of Friendships of Gold