Memorial Days: Vietnam Stories, 1973-2022 [Minkštas viršelis]

The conflict in Vietnam has been rewritten and reframedinto many corners of American life and has long shadowed contemporary politicalscience and foreign policy. The war and its aftermath have engenderedaward-winning films and books. It has held up a mirror to the twentieth centuryand to the wars of the twenty-first.

Set in wartime Vietnam and contemporary Vietnam, inwartime America and in America today, the stories that comprise Memorial Days were written from 1973 tothe present. As our continuing reappraisals of the war’s shadow have unspooledover the last half-decade, so too has Wayne Karlin returned to the subject inhis fiction, collected and published together here for the first time.

A girl in Maryland runs away from Civil War reenactorsshe imagines to be American soldiers in Vietnam, while a woman in Vietnam hidesin the jungle from an American helicopter and another tries to bury the relicsof the war. A man mourns a friend lost in Iraq while a helicopter crewman inQuang Tri loads the broken and dead into his aircraft. Extras playing soldiersin a war film in present-day Vietnam model themselves after other war filmswhile a Marine in a war sees himself as a movie character. A snake coiledaround the collective control of a helicopter in Vietnam uncoils in a soldiercome home from Iraq. The chronology is the chronology of dreams or nightmaresor triggered flashbacks: images and incidents triggering other images andincidents in a sequence that seems to make no sense—which is exactly the senseit makes.

Some stories burn with the fresh experiences of a Marine witnessingwar firsthand. Some stories radiate a long-abiding grief. All the storiesreflect and reconfigure the Vietnam War as it echoes into the present century,under the light of retrospection.