Letters Home

...Mother, I don't want to die.' We called a helicopter to take him to the hospital, but he died before the ship arrived...

...For the most part, these letters home were written by young men in their late teens and early twenties...

...Indeed, it is disturbing, though hardly surprising, to read with such frequency in these letters from virtual adolescents so much preoccupation with dying...

...Against the background of every conceivable cliche and sentiment, and generally within a historical void, these writers report faithfully the previously unimagined realities of war, detailed with those peculiarities of Vietnam—like the body-count mania—that spotlight an alienation and hostility to life that history will someday record as a trademark of Pax Americana in this, our imperial era...

...Much of Dear America is a record of frustration at never being able to engage the enemy, yet having your buddies drop like flies around you while endlessly patrolling terrain saturated with trip wires linked to devastating booby traps...

...involvement in Vietnam cannot fail to be moved by the many accounts of genuine heroism, acts that transcend their tainted contexts...

...We have not seen a single verified dink the whole time, nor have we shot a round at anything...

...At a time when mainstream writing on Vietnam is dominated by wishy-washy analysis if not outright falsification of the war's factual history, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam restores some firmness to the documentary foundation from which more disinterested interpretation, not to mention good combat fiction, must ultimately come...

...I went to his side and he said, 'Doc, I'm a mess.' He then said, 'Oh God...

...But because the book clearly owes its publication in part to the agendas of certain New York City officials (Mayor Ed Koch, parks commissioners) who aided a committee of Vietnam veterans in the construction of a war memorial in Manhattan, Dear America is freighted with a lot of pulpy pseudo-literary baggage in the form of a preface (Koch again), a foreword, an introduction, three pages of acknowledgements, and hype aplenty on both covers...

...Without the slightest embellishment, one medic writes to the mother of a fellow medic who died in his arms: "The enemy opened up...

...One reason this absence of a "great war novel" from Vietnam seems paradoxical is that wars can compel a kind of truthfulness, a crucial exercise for literary-minded veterans for whom writing becomes a ritual of sorts to cleanse the soul of its lingering homicidal torments...

...For example, there has yet to emerge from the Vietnam experience a novel that conveys the unsettling immediacy of the fiction produced by eyewitnesses and surviving combatants of World War I. Vietnam veterans-turned-novelists have remained one-sided observers, confining their efforts to genre war-stories or fantasy...

...But he saw an officer had been hit, and he rolled over several times until he was by the man's side and began to treat him as best he could...

...At twenty-three years of age, George Olsen was one of those whose luck ran out...

...The people in the village that my platoon sergeant went through were laughing at him because they knew we had been hit...

...I've developed a hate for the Vietnamese because they come around selling Cokes and beer to us and then run back to tell the VC how many we are, where our positions are, and where the leaders position themselves...

...And maybe all that tawdry hype will cause Dear America to become fashionable, increasing its distribution within high schools where it will do the most good...

...In contrast to the unselfconsciousness of the text is the verbose wrapping in which the book is packaged for the marketplace...

...Richard was shot in the leg...

...He's home safe—we're not...

...The literature of World War I has become the standard by which war fiction is measured in our time, but World War I was only a nightmare, not dishonorable, while there was something about Vietnam that was shameful, perhaps still too shameful to be faced either as history or as art...

...The pointman," Olsen writes, "is now on his way home...

...Editor Bernard Edelman's deft ordering of the letters thematically (arrival in-country, combat patrols, the death or wounding of comrades, last letters, and so on), along with his restrained commentary at the beginning of each chapter, are by themselves sufficient introduction and clarification for letters that otherwise speak for themselves...

...In that distinction lies the difference between those who have luck, and those who aren't yet sure if they have it or not...

...I felt like turning my machine gun on the village to kill every man, woman, and child in it...

...The reader would be well advised to skip all this preliminary hogwash and get right into the letters...

...While few of the contributors write with the elegance of good fiction or with the clarity of good history, each has a distinctive way of revealing something insightful about the war and about the values and attitudes of the Americans who fought in it—the very information that has been so transparently absent from most contemporary writing on Vietnam...

...In more than one letter, immediately following the description of a comrade's death or wounding, a soldier will speculate on the unmentionable: his own potential violent end...

...Michael Uhl (Michael Uhl served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969, and is today a free-lance writer and carpenter who lives with his family in Brooklyn...

...I told him to lay there until I could drag him back...

...Dear America returns us to the scene of the crime...

...And no one in Dear America approaches this sobering subject with more objectivity than a GI from Brooklyn named George Olsen, a portion of whose remarkable correspondence with a female friend from college appears in this collection...

...And in a sense, these soldier-correspondents represent a minority among those who fought, self-selected by a need to express themselves and an ability to write coherently...

...Even the most uncompromising opponent of U.S...

...He was the luckiest one out there, going home to his wife in one piece, while we'll be going back out again until either our time or our luck runs out...

...Richard was hit several more times, twice in the chest...

...The letters cover most of the war period, though they tend to bunch around the key years 1968 to 1970...

...One platoon leader writes: "In the months I have been with the company, we have lost four killed and about thirty wounded...