Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam
By Larry Heinemann (Doubleday, 192 pages, $22.95)
Larry Heinemann’s memoir of his return to Vietnam couldn’t be more timely. Heinemann is the award-winning author of two war novels, Close Quarters and Paco’s Story, tales which stem from his own experiences as a soldier in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. As a young man Heinemann spent a year’s tour of duty in Vietnam, and early in the book, he recalls the war in brutally honest terms. “We understood perfectly well that we were the unwilling doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful,” he writes.
Although he spent a full year fighting in Vietnam, at the end of his tour of duty, he didn’t know anything more about Vietnamese language, military or social history, literature or music, religion or customs, or “sociology” than when he arrived. The only thing he had learned about the Vietnamese was that they made great beer and “a countryside hooker would cost you a five-dollar bill.”
Upon his return Heinemann was under the illusion that he could act as if the “whole mad, ugly business had been a dream.” But he was plagued by that war year as if it had lodged in his bones, and he developed a compulsion to learn how to write so he could somehow get it out of him. Writing about the war, he says, stemmed from a smothered rage “perhaps more bitter than tongue can tell.”
In the 1990s when Heinemann returned to Vietnam as part of a group of visiting writers, one of his motives was to try to better understand the people with whom he had battled nearly 30 years earlier. Imagine his surprise when he learned that while he and his comrades were forbidden from “fraternizing” with the Vietnamese or from learning anything about them during the war, the Vietnamese soldiers had been studying Mark Twain and Walt Whitman as part of an effort to understand the Americans in their midst.
Heinemann’s attitude upon returning to Vietnam is quite different from the rage that fueled his war year. Throughout several visits, Heinemann transforms the “death-green place” of his memories into an often enchanting world filled with interesting and admirable characters. Rather than remain isolated tourists, he and his traveling partner, another war veteran, take to the city streets on bicycles. While they are out among the Vietnamese people, they meet former soldiers who invite them home for tea and conversation, eager to talk about their own experiences in the war.
In further travels, the two take a railway journey through the country. They understand it is a great honor when they meet General Vo Nguyen Giap, “one of the great, ruthless military minds of the 20th century.” They also travel to the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh for a celebration honoring the North Vietnamese leader’s birthday. Finally, the pair reach Black Virgin Mountain where they are offered a vista of the past and a chance to make some peace with it.
Heinemann’s writing is powerful and heartfelt without a trace of sentimentality. Opinions, facts, impressions and memories pile up like a stack of photographs, each one with an informative anecdote attached. He sums up the reasons we found ourselves in Vietnam and unveils the arrogance that kept our soldiers there long after the war had become a lost cause.
And Heinemann pulls no punches. In discussing the overdue diplomatic recognition of Vietnam by the United States, he refers to the sandbagging efforts of North Carolina’s own erstwhile senator, Jesse Helms, “a genuine bumpkin with a stingy, backward imagination who hailed from a region of the country that otherwise produced intelligent minds.”
Though Heinemann compels readers to confront the stupidity and waste of the United States’ blunders in Vietnam (his own brother, a veteran, committed suicide) the book also offers a sense of hope that comes from the Vietnamese people themselves and their ability to forgive, if not forget.
This memoir coincides with the early stages of another potentially lengthy and disastrous overseas involvement. Although Heinemann doesn’t dwell on our current situation, he does take note of the easy amnesia in which we seem to operate.
“Since Vietnam, several other wars have come our way,” he writes. “I have watched and been appalled by the horror-struck nonchalance with which we seem to enjoy them . . . On television, at least, the war has been justified and prettified in a way that is truly pornographic.”
Heinemann takes the opposite tack in his recounting of the Vietnam War and the devastating toll it took on one soldier’s life and family.
This article appears in May 4-10, 2005.
