A Checkered Novel of Vietnam
GRAVES, TOM
A Checkered Novel of Vietnam Meditations in Green By Stephen Wright Scribner's. 342 pp. $14.95. Reviewed by Tom Graves Contributor, "Playboy," "Southern Exposure" The floodgates finally seem...
...Appearance...
...One hopes he will cure himself of his propensity for low-grade film editors' tricks, and then have another go at it...
...Not surprisingly, Claypool goes berserk...
...Wright's treatment of drug abuse also deserves high commendation...
...The meditations (in green) take concrete form in a series of poems about the veteran's confusion and terror...
...Nonetheless, the tragedy has yet to produce the sort of great books and films that emerged quite rapidly after World War II...
...Along with Trips and a fresh-faced private first class named Claypool, he enjoys the spectacle of night fighting far beyond the base perimeter because of the psychedelic lighting effects...
...Why, one wonders with some frustration, does t he author squander his obvious fresh talent on passages like the following: "Lights dim, film begins, images burn through the screen: bursting bombs, dying French, gleaming conference tables, scowling Dulles, golf-shirted Ike, stolid Diem shaking head, Green Berets fromthesky...
...Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino chose to portray the war's violence metaphorically through gruesome tournaments of Russian roulette, a "game" our soldiers never played...
...Burnished surfaces were mandatory...
...The transitions are numerous and abrupt, muddying the sequence of events and ultimately distancing the reader from it...
...While the Vietnam masterwork remains to be written, one can certainly admire Meditations in Green...
...As Wright's focus drifts backward, we see that Griffin, like most of our soldiers in Vietnam, began his tour of duty as a reasonably patriotic young man who believed he had been sent to this remote country to defend America and democracy...
...and Chickenhawk, a helicopter pilot's powerful account of the early stages of American military involvement (see "Vietnam from the Air," NL, October 3), sold out its first printing...
...In a continuation of one of the conflict's most horrific subplots, veterans exposed to the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange confront a stonewalling Uncle Sam...
...We meet Griffin alone in an unnamed American city, his life still dominated by the war...
...intelligence personnel, attacks the base...
...Firm jaw...
...The grievous wounds inflicted by Vietnam still fester...
...During the course of the novel, he lapses back into dependence on the heroin he discovered in Vietnam, and he begins therapy with a quack psychologist who encourages him to meditate on growing plants...
...The most highly touted Vietnam films, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, failed to treat the naked reality of their subject...
...Christopher Buckley, writing in Esquire, went so far as to explore the guilt of those who lived through the war without fighting...
...In the military you couldn't ever forget...
...He simply drifts about out-of-synch...
...A sea of captain's wrinkles...
...Griffin is watch-\a%Night of the LivingDeadasihemox-tars begin hailing out of the sky...
...Kraft, though, interacts little with him, or with anyone else in the novel...
...The climax of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse comes when a search party discovers an insane, and rather ludicrous, deserter modeled on Kurtz from Conrad's Heart of Darkness...
...Blue eyes protected by the thick lenses of gold aviator frames...
...Probably Wright's least successful character is the CIA man, Kraft...
...This autumn alone, public television has broadcast a 13-part documentary on the war...
...One of his legs is partially crippled, and its use pains him...
...There is not much use for Holly in 'Nam, however...
...an exhaustive six-volume series, The Vietnam Experience, has been published...
...The unit's commanding officer, Major Holly, is a different sort of soldier: "Holly himself was blessed with The Look...
...Specifically, he rings the field telephone that sends powerful shocks to the scrotums of the men being interrogated...
...Wright, moreover, is young, and it is hard to believe he could have exhausted all his material on the war...
...His determination to turn his sloppy base into a shining example earns him several terrifying death threats that result in his virtually going into hiding from his own men...
...The hair, short as putting-green grass, too short to reflect any definite color...
...But he sabotages even the heart of his story with disorienting shifts in the narrative voice...
...Subsequently, he is sent on a mission where he witnesses a steady succession of jaws, hands and feet being blown off his comrades...
...The highminded sentiments fade quickly, and he comes to be concerned with little except his supply of narcotics...
...His task was studying reconnaissance photographs of the jungle, interpreting odd shadows as enemy outposts and wriggling snakes as supply routes...
...Wright does cut through the creative writing class nonsense often enough to forcefully recall the psychological ravages Vietnam wrought on so many Americans-the debilitating stretches of boredom combined with anxiety that led to heroin addiction, for example, among other acts of self-destruction...
...His drug-addled mind has trouble distinguishing between reality and the macabre scenes in the film...
...Stephen Wright's first novel, winner of the 1983 Maxwell Perkins Prize, suffers from the same malady, wavering between a gripping, no-nonsense, eye-level look at the war and a William Burroughs-like mush of verbiage that serves the reader little...
...Reviewed by Tom Graves Contributor, "Playboy," "Southern Exposure" The floodgates finally seem to have opened on our national reticence about Vietnam...
...Obsessed with having had his pet dog shot in Vietnam, Trips involves Griffin in a manhunt for the sergeant who was responsible...
...And ex-GIs, those who emerged whole as well as the physically damaged, tell of being awakened with a start from their sleep by nightmares of atrocities in the jungle...
...In an age when everyone's file was arranged to read as identically as possible, careers could be bent by such trifles as the pitch of a voice, the break in a smile...
...It is difficult to divine the rationale for inventing such "bizarre" twists when at least equally strange and absurd events marked the turmoil in Vietnam...
...In that overgrown land, pitted against those implacable guerrillas, he demonstrates, our Hueys and Puff-the-Magic-Dragons were no more capable of conquest than a swarm of angry wasps...
...Cleft chin...
...The smell of the dope pipes and the late-night acid trails are reported in ferociously vivid prose that avoids stooping to sensationalism...
...He is initially traumatized by being ordered to participate in the torture of suspected Viet Cong sympathizers...
...Are those really the splattered guts of his buddies, he wonders, or one more special effect...
...Claypool, the head of Wright's motley cast of supporting characters, is an inefficient but devoted translator of Vietnamese...
...The author seems unclear about what he wants to do with his spook...
...In a book with an already sprawling ensemble, one has the impression that Kraft has been jammed in because the author wants to be sure he has included all the prominent types in Vietnam...
...Meditations in Green climaxes when the Fifth North Vietnamese Army Regiment, after months of eluding an intensive search by U.S...
...His wartime experiences, told in the third person, are introduced as flashbacks from a first-person account of the fractured life he lives after returning home...
...He digs a tunneled entrance to his quarters and generally makes himself as scarce as possible...
...Accompanying an infantry unit on a mission, Kraft feels revulsion for the pimply-faced boys at his side...
...The novel's protagonist, Specialist 4 James Griffin, is, like the author, a veteran of a Vietnam military intelligence unit...
...Wright integrates the growing plant motif into the war sketches with frequent ruminations on the unconquerable Vietnamese jungle-which he writes about brilliantly both on its own terms and as a symbol for the Vietnamese people, whom no amount of American military technology will ever "pacify...
...After he acts as audience for one soldier who boasts about his expertise at killing gooks with a knife, the brutal young man tells Kraft he would like a job with the Company when the fighting is over...
...Later, Trips keeps him dosed on LSD for over five days...
...Griffin's closest Army buddy, another of the disaffected and drugged nicknamed Trips, shows up at his apartment after a long stay in a mental hospital...
...grinningpeasants,rubber-sandaled Ho, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh...
...Numerous other books and articles have explored the subject from a wide variety of angles...
...The search ends with Griffin being stabbed when he tries to stop Trips from attacking an innocent man on the street...
...The author makes it easy for us to understand how so many veterans came home addicts, and easy to give them our sympathy...
Vol. 66 • November 1983 • No. 22
