Dear America

...Life in the boonies, reported one vet, consisted of long periods of fatigue and boredom broken by periods of utter mayhem...

...A World of Hurt" contemplates every imaginable source of human pain and suffering...

...Soldiers do...

...They reflected on war, on the fear of being wounded, on the friendlies, on their begrudging respect for the North Vietnamese soldiers, and on the carnage they brought to Vietnam and to themselves in the process...

...Being wounded was only the most obvious — "They pulled a few stitches out...

...The rediscovery process, like the memorial itself, is an attempt to 187 come to terms with the young men and women who served in Vietnam, not with the politicians who sent them there...

...Dear America — like the music, films, and other books mentioned earlier — touches on the warrior, not the war, and that is just as well, because the two must be separated before the nation can come to terms with either...

...But like the military phases of the war and the sentiment at home, the soldiers changed later in the decade...

...Whatever peace the-nation makes with the Vietnam vets must not be extended to our Vietnam policy or the politicians and generals who crafted the policy and then continued it long after it served no purpose other than to preserve national pride and vanity...

...if the one moves you, the other will shock you...

...Grunts" write about "Humping the Boonies," slogging through the canopied jungle, struggling over mountains, and wading in leech-filled water on search-and-destroy missions...

...I close my eyes and try to sleep, but all I can see is Jenkins lying there with his brains hanging out or Lefty with his eyes shot out...

...For those familiar with the era, the vocabulary in Dear America alone will stir memories and emotions of another time, certainly another place: friendlies, fragging, lurps, claymores, Hueys, hoochies, Charlie, humping the boonies, short-times, body bag, body count, medevac, gook, dink, hot zone, and much more...

...Michael Herr's Dispatches (Avon, $3.95, 288 pp...

...and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War (Ballantine, $2.50, 328 pp...

...And there was the blunt fatalism that set in after too many friends were killed or wounded — "It's happened before, happened then, and it will happen again...

...For all its richness in human emotion, there is something missing in Dear America...

...The process began with the memorial in Washington, D.C...

...Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A...

...Even when they were on their way home, their joy at leaving Vietnam did not match their dread of being there...

...No mention of necklaces of human ears, no jokes about building a Viet Cong from pieces, no Zippo democracy (burning villages), and no rapes, murders, and random abuse of civilians — that dark corner of the war does not exist in Dear America...

...A world of hurt could be brought on by any number of emotional and physical experiences — bad news from home, no news from home, a refused R & R, too long in the bush, and on and on...

...The crowds are quiet except for those who weep and those who give comfort...

...I will never forget it...

...Early on, through the mid-sixties, they wrote about serving their country, about stopping Communism, and about being young men at war, as if they had listened too long to John F. Kennedy...

...Mainstream American language proved inadequate to describe life in Vietnam, and that, too, helps define the experience...

...Fear of death and dying came later...

...Read Dear America, but read Nam, too...

...Well, it is all over now...

...No Rambos there...

...C. Peter Ripley A fter years of ignoring their longest and costliest conflict, Americans are reex- amining the Vietnam War...

...I sat down and cried...

...Mark Baker'siVam (Morrow, $12.95, 324 pp...

...The endless fatigue...

...We Gotta Get Out of This Place" is at once the title of a sixties' rock song and the soldiers' plea for getting out of Vietnam and back to "the world," alive...

...It is not a gathering place for festive tourists...

...many were pulled into an unwanted war, inadequately trained for fighting a guerrilla war, and then greeted with indifference and hostility on their return home...

...their objective was to make contact with the enemy, who was seldom seen but was somehow always close enough to make contact on his own terms...

...Yet the citizen-soldiers, most of whom were college age, used simple language when writing about their passions and emotions — of dead friends, of relentless exhaustion, of painful loneliness, of exhilaration when killing (and sometimes the shame that followed...

...is a collection of interviews with Vietnam vets...

...Now it's time to forget these things...

...Setting that straight is a worthwhile national purpose...

...A body count was the official measure of military success...

...I don't know where to start except to say I'm tired...

...is an anthem to the Vietnam vet whose patriotism is abused, whose sacrifice is forgotten, and whose problems are ignored by an indifferent government...

...is one of the finest books ever on men at war ("I think Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods"), and it is arguably the best of the new journalism ("I went to cover the war and the war covered me," wrote reporter Herr...

...Beyond the Body Count" describes the myriad ways combat tormented the soldiers...

...Some, like Peter Roepcke, seemed to understand that getting out of Vietnam did not mean Vietnam was finished with them...

...I couldn't stop...

...That full expanse of black marble with its finely chiseled names, of the war dead has become the most visited of our national monuments...

...Policy, strategy, tactics, and ideology do not yet interest the nation...

...The best of what we read, see, and hear about Vietnam examines the soldiers' experiences, and much of that is personal, private, and often mournful...

...With no clear end in sight and their mission growing steadily more ambiguous, some troops began doubting the value of the sacrifices they and their friends were making...

...Straightforward, stark, revealing, and even shocking at times, these interviews help define the Vietnam experience and give expression to the emotional and physical baggage that came home with the soldiers...

...Hell, I don't know why I am writing all this...

...Dear America is organized in thematic chapters that reflect the experiences and attitudes shared by those who spent their 365 days in-country — thirty more if you were a Marine...

...It seems that's all I ever say any more.'' The death of a friend — "No other KIA of WIA hit me like that...

...The "Cherries'" tell of their arrival as they awaited their first combat with a mix of apprehension, eagerness to serve, and fear of failure to measure up...

...What Am I Doing Here'' unfolds the slowly souring attitudes toward the war held by the men who fought it...

...Countless combat soldiers who returned alive and unhurt are among the victims...

...Dear America is a collection of soldiers' letters published by the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission...

...Their stories, plainly told to friends and loved ones in private messages, are dramatically understated as individual letters and enormously revealing as a collection...

...which have been out for several years, are being reread...

...But any goodwill that comes from such a reconciliation should be kept separate from our assessment of America's involvement in Vietnam...

...so I only have about a thousand to go...

...Frustration and bit188 terness creeps into their letters as it did their lives...

...These authentic voices from Vietnam are mostly silent about the mean side of America's presence in that foreign land...

...That demands a separate accounting...

...Wheelchair-bound Ron Kovic's memoir, Born on the Fourth of My (McGraw Hill, $7.95,204 pp...

...Two recent books of documents personalize the war with revealing snippets and fragmentary bits of information and emotion in ways that no other kind of literature can...

...We are acknowledging that there were no winners in Vietnam, only survivors and losers...

...I can still see his face now...

...The early movies, the good ones—Coming Home and Deerhunter— tell stories about the personal side of that war, about the pain, suffering, and death of people we come to care about...