When I sat down to write this story, I told my friend Dale what my intent was, and he responded, “It’s like that adage. The world played chess while I played checkers.”
I had never heard it, so I looked it up.
Sometimes we know so little, we are not even playing the same game everyone else is playing. Chess is complex and strategic and requires that we think several moves ahead of our opponent. We need to map out our future and be prepared to make unexpected deviations when necessary. In 1979, I was still deciding whether to jump the checker in front of me and get crowned. That summer changed me.
When I realized my novel was really about three men—Vincent, the father of an eighteen-year-old son; Vincent, the eighteen-year-old boy; and William, the marine—I knew I had to do a lot more research, but that was okay because the subject interested me. I read more than a dozen firsthand accounts of soldiers serving in Vietnam. I read articles, treatises, and military papers on the marine experience in Vietnam. I watched just as many movies and documentaries, including Ken Burns’s legendary documentary. Neither William nor Todd is any one person; they are an amalgamation of the stories I heard in 1979, the stories I read, and the stories I witnessed on television, in theaters, and on my computer.
Even with all that information, I knew I had more work to do. So I called up a friend of mine, Gunnery Sergeant Bob Mannion, a United States Marine, who served during Vietnam, and I asked for his help. Bob, who is also a talented writer, never hesitated. He sent me manuals and documents to help me understand the marine experience in Vietnam, and he read my manuscript front to back multiple times, making sure I got the weapons and terminology correct, the marine procedures accurate, and the Vietnam experience, hopefully, authentic.
I owe Bob a huge debt of gratitude. I am certain I got some things wrong simply because I misinterpreted what he told me. Those mistakes are mine and mine alone.
I also want to thank Joe, my son. It was Joe who suggested the book would be stronger if I could re-create an authentic Vietnam experience, and do so through a journal documenting a soldier’s powerful tour of duty. Joe has helped me now with three novels. He sees things at a ten-thousand-foot level, and his observations and suggestions are usually spot on.
I have had the chance to go to Washington, DC, half a dozen times in my life, and each time I go, I visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I run my hand over the names etched in the black stone monument, and I try to remember those etchings are more than just letters. Those etchings represent real people who lost their lives far too young—deaths that forever changed the landscapes of their respective families, possibly this country, and maybe the world.
This novel is written with the utmost deference and respect to all those men and women who fought in Vietnam on both sides, as well as the Vietnamese people who lived through it. That includes my father-in-law, Dr. Robert Kapela, Major, United States Army Medical Corp on ground as medical doctor and recipient of the Bronze Star for his “meritorious achievement in ground operations against hostile forces” from May 1969 to May 1970. I have never had the chance to visit Vietnam, but Joe and other family members have, and each has said, to a person, that there are no finer people.
The racial slurs in this novel are not mine, and they do not represent me or the way I think or what I believe. They are far, far below the moral and ethical education I received from my mother and father. They do not even belong to the soldiers who uttered them. The racial slurs were part of the psychological warfare the military used to dehumanize the enemy so soldiers could kill other soldiers and not consider the reality of their actions. This, unfortunately, is a tactic that has been used throughout history, not just during the Vietnam War, or even limited to wars.
www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956180/criminals-see-their-victims-as-less-than-human
www.lassennews.com/racism-and-war-the-dehumanization-of-the-enemy
May we never forget, so we never again have to experience it.
I wish to thank Meg Ruley and Rebecca Scherer at the Jane Rotrosen Agency for their continued guidance and support. Thanks also to Jane Berkey, the agency founder, who took me out for a drink during one particularly difficult moment in this writer’s life and told me to keep going forward, that things would work out. She was right. They did work out, largely thanks to the agency’s incredible guidance.
Thanks to Danielle Marshall at Lake Union, my publisher, for her unwillingness to accept anything but my best. She read the first draft and told me I could do better, though she was kind about it. She was right. I worked with my longtime developmental editor, Charlotte Herscher, and together we improved the manuscript. Charlotte never lets me forget what readers expect when they buy one of my novels, and I’m grateful to her for pushing me.