The same is true with this novel. First, it is a novel, not a memoir. I never served in Vietnam or in any branch of the US military. The Vietnam War, however, always interested me. I don’t know why exactly, much like I don’t know why Elvis Presley interested me. Maybe because they were a part of my life. I was born in 1961 and, like Vincent, graduated high school in 1979. I do recall, as a young boy, watching the news at night and seeing the helicopters in Vietnam, the soldiers fighting over there, the wounded, and the dead in body bags being flown from the bush. I recall thinking about how young those men were, how their lives had been cut so short. I watched the protests on television and felt the protestors were justified, but I worried that our country was being torn apart.
Mostly, I recall being interested. The war captivated me, particularly the thought that so many young men and women were being sent halfway around the world to fight not an invader—like the Nazis—but a political theory. Communism.
I graduated from high school in 1979 believing, like many young men, that the world was my oyster, and my future, limitless. My sister’s boyfriend did get me a job working on a construction crew with two Vietnam veterans, and I did get the education of a lifetime over that summer. Like most Vietnam veterans, the two men didn’t talk much about their experiences. Stories usually came when we were out drinking a few beers. They would open up and tell me what it was like to one day be an eighteen-year-old living in America and, seemingly, the next day be in the jungles of a foreign country, with a foreign climate, fighting against a foreign enemy you didn’t know and didn’t have anything against who was actively trying to kill you. Neither man understood the war, or his place in it, how it would have any impact on his life or the lives of Americans in general. They both said no one ever could offer them a good explanation as to why they were supposed to shoot and kill Vietnamese people living in Vietnam. Both expressed the feeling that they were the foreigners and that their presence never felt justified. What also struck me were the similarities between these two men, despite differences in age, branch of service, and experience. One was a marine, the other, army. For men still young, they seemed old to me that summer, and fatalistic. They did not believe in God, they drank too much—in my opinion—they were quick to get into fights, and when they did, they usually picked the biggest opponent. They seemed to live day to day, like they no longer trusted the promise of a future.
Mostly, though, I recall they were good men.
My work on the construction team that summer, and thereafter during every break from school, helped finance my college tuition at Stanford. I could not have afforded to attend had it not been for that employment. My boss could have let me go any number of times when the work got too light, but he never did. He always found work for me, and he always paid me. I have tried to find him, without success, to thank him for what he did for me. I hope someday I have that chance.
In college, I found the book Nam by Mark Baker, true stories of men and women who served in Vietnam. I read it cover to cover, then a second time. I still have my first edition. The stories fascinated me, in part, because I felt as though I had heard so many of them that summer between high school and college. I rushed to find other books and read accounts equally as raw and honest. I watched Apocalypse Now and Platoon and Full Metal Jacket and many other movies on the Vietnam experience multiple times. I watched The Deer Hunter just once, but I have never forgotten it.
When I set out to write this novel, I had no intention of writing about Vietnam. I intended to write about that critical moment in every boy’s life when he goes from being a boy to being a man. There is no set timetable, but it seems the moment society expects this transformation to occur is when the boy graduates high school. We are expected to go off to college and come home a man. Or go off to work in the real world or join the military and magically understand what it means to be a man, a husband, and a father. There are no classes to help us. At least, there were none in 1979. Most of us, I assume, learn by emulating the men we know. Mostly I emulated my father, a good, decent, and moral man.
I also emulated a big brother who came into my life when I was in the eighth grade, a young counselor. Chris took me under his wing and helped me to grow up. He liked to say, “There’s no owner’s manual.”
And I emulated the two men I worked with that summer. I did not have a choice. They did not treat me as a boy and did not allow me to act as one. They did not have that luxury when they were my age. They depended on me to be at work every morning on time to do my job and get the work done, because they knew the dire consequences that could occur if one man failed to do his job. They expected me to earn my paycheck. And they relied on me because they needed me to be reliable.