Learning to heal a wounded soul

For years, novelist Larry Heinemann has been legendary in the Vietnam veterans’ community -- known as a wild man with a profound conscience, a joker, an angry man’s angry man, a raconteur par excellence and, some would say, the best writer of the Vietnam generation. “Black Virgin Mountain,” his memoir of the war and its effect on his life, will do nothing to dispel any of those myths.

But it does something else. For one thing -- no small thing -- it puts the Vietnam War in the context of America’s other wars, at least in regard to what any war does to its veterans. A lot of people have spilled a lot of ink on this subject, but this is one of the best to offer a grunt’s-eye view of the psychological damage war inflicts.

His father was a Chicago bus driver, and Heinemann was raised in the genteel poverty of the working class. Struggling to get through high school, he and one of his brothers were drafted into the Army when they lacked the money to continue their schooling, while another brother joined the Marines -- none of them having a clue about why Uncle Sam needed them or that they were about to do the dirty work of American foreign policy in place of the sons of the rich and privileged, for whom there were legal outs.

No surprise, then, that Heinemann, like so many other Vietnam vets, is a guy with a permanent chip on his shoulder. But what makes “Black Virgin Mountain” so extraordinary is that Heinemann -- against all odds -- became a man of vast learning, who, he suggests, has read almost the entire spectrum of literature on war, from Homer up through his own contemporaries.

“Soldiers’ work is always the same,” Heinemann writes, and what it inflicts is an estrangement that has variously been called soldier’s heart after the Civil War; after World War I, shell shock and neurasthenia; after World War II and Korea, combat fatigue, and more recently, impacted grief and post-traumatic stress disorder. But what it boils down to, he shows, is a stock of sensory impressions, topped by the stench of blood and death, that forever disturbs and skews one’s relations with the rest of the world.

Clearly, Heinemann wants to warn others away from the hell he himself has gone through. He began writing books, he says, to show “that the work of war will transform you into something you don’t recognize; that the inevitable reverberations of the war are irresistible and virtually irremediable; that this is what you make when you make war.” He also confesses, with a shudder one can almost feel, “My war-year was like a nail in my head, like a corpse in my house....”

And yet, given such an approach, “Black Virgin Mountain” is a strangely upbeat book. Largely this is because Heinemann sees the honest recognition of such horror as possibly our only hope for ever understanding the true nature of war and our only slim chance for ever ending it. His chief aim in writing “Black Virgin Mountain” is to reclaim the memories and stories of war in a way that can stop them from being used either to generate a false patriotism or seduce people with what he calls “pornographic” images of war, and to find some worthwhile, redeeming human truths at the bottom of them:

“Since ‘Vietnam,’ other wars have come our way, including Iraq and Afghanistan (as of this writing), 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 [for Heinemann himself] there remained, still, the itchy, undeniable sense of unfinished business....”

Returned home from the war, Heinemann took a class at Columbia College in Chicago, where the teacher handed him a stack of books to read -- “body count stories” like “Moby-Dick,” Heinemann says only half-joking -- and told him to “write about how the war worked” and to treat being a soldier “just like any other work with its rules and results.” The outcome was Heinemann’s first novel, “Close Quarters,” published in 1977, which received little in the way of literary fanfare but was quickly discovered and treasured by a loyal coterie of combat vets for its graphic, down-and-dirty realism. When Heinemann’s even more brutally descriptive second novel, “Paco’s Story,” won the National Book Award in 1987, at least one major critic questioned the rightfulness of the award, implying that Heinemann was another “dumb ox of literature,” as Hemingway had once been called.

“Black Virgin Mountain” puts those doubts to rest once and for all. The memoir is filled with passages of eloquent and at times exquisitely beautiful prose. There are tour-de-force descriptions of combat unsurpassed anywhere. But the heart of the book is not the Vietnam War: It is Heinemann’s return trips there, beginning in 1990 with an invitation from the William Joiner Center in Boston to join a delegation of American Vietnam War writers traveling to Hanoi to meet their Vietnamese counterparts. “It was important for me to see the country at peace,” he writes, “to see ordinary folks leading ordinary lives without ordeal of the war.”

Doing just that, he is surprised that his former enemies welcome him so warmly, that they actually like Americans and are “able to make the distinction between the American people and the American government.” He is also surprised that the North Vietnamese have read Whitman, Twain, London, Fitzgerald and Hemingway and understand the subtleties of American culture, while he had previously never even thought about their literature, history or daily life. Indeed, he claims, he had been discouraged by the Army from doing so.

The success of that first trip causes Heinemann and another 25th Infantry veteran, Larry Rottmann, to return with the intention of traveling the country by bicycle and train, from Hanoi in the north all the way down to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Their ultimate destination is Cu Chi, once the headquarters of the 25th Infantry Division. Famous for its miles of Viet Cong tunnels directly beneath the American base camp, the place also has a striking landmark called Black Virgin Mountain, a 3,300-foot-high peak rising out of the plains -- for centuries a centerpiece of Vietnamese folk mythology. Their climb to the top, which is deftly woven together with Heinemann’s first encounter with the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, provides one of the most stunning conclusions of any book yet written on the Vietnam War.

“Black Virgin Mountain” contains something to offend everyone. Not only do the obvious targets get walloped -- like Gen. William Westmoreland, whose “stupidity” and “extraordinary lies,” Heinemann says, “will always be his special shame” -- but also Bob Hope, a “grandiose, stuffy old hack” surrounded by “over-the-hill celebrity bimbos”; John Wayne, whose movies Heinemann deems “patronizing and insulting”; and even the former commander of the North Vietnamese Army (a traditional favorite of lefties), Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, whom Heinemann ridicules as an arrogant, banana-munching showman.

If Heinemann sometimes seems to be laughing at all-too-serious subjects, it may be the only way he could possibly get through such an immensely painful book. At times, one can see him struggling from sentence to sentence, as if one more strong surge of emotion might lay him low for good. The book often moves along at a crawl, but it is a massively determined and deliberate crawl -- and in some ways Heinemann’s bravura re-creation of a harrowing passage through the tunnels of Cu Chi, near the end, serves as an apt metaphor for the whole book. Similarly, his imagined face-to-face confrontation with an armed Viet Cong soldier in a tunnel provides the dark moral of the book, the fatal curse on all war, no matter who is waging it. A second before each soldier pulls the trigger of his pistol, both realize they are doomed. “The world has come to this,” Heinemann writes, summarizing so much in six words.

A little too often and too loudly Heinemann protests that he doesn’t “come back [to Vietnam] to ‘heal.’ ” But, in the end, “Black Virgin Mountain” is about just such healing. And the proof that he has healed is the sincere love for Vietnam and the friendship with all its people that the book manifests from start to finish.