Without the intensity or vividness of much Vietnam fiction (e.g.,
Tiger the Lurp Dog, p. 837; Meditations in Green, p. 843), this
short, episodic novel follows narrator Bill Morgan - young,
college-educated, but a willing draftee from a conservative
background - through training, combat, and homecoming. At first,
Morgan takes a passive "grunt"-dike approach to the pressures and
dangers of infantry duty: "We were in the army, the Green Machine,
and we were heading for the green, primal jungles. Between the two
of them, there was nothing for a soldier to decide. He only did
what he had to do." But then, after two new buddies are killed
during a meaningless mission, "All at once it seemed to me that the
Green Machine was a lie." So Morgan volunteers for the more
aggressive, focused duties of a "Blue Team," teaming up again with
his training chum and fellow NCO: Jim Neumann, a charismatic,
forceful, friendly guy who plays jazz flute - and "accepted
responsibility for every damned thing he did. Neumann's way was the
blues, the tones and sequences he dragged out from within himself,
the cadences of his own heart." Not only is Neumann heroic in the
scattered missions that follow. He also spends all his free time in
a nearby village - befriending the Vietnamese, falling in love with
lovely Tuyet, leading the villagers in reconstruction projects. ("
'It's just that we have to leave them something,' he said.") Why,
then, does Neumann end up killing Tuyet and her entire family
during a village battle against the NVC? That's the question that
troubles Morgan, even after he comes home, thoroughly
disillusioned, to his proud parents. So there's a final, rather
limp confrontation between Morgan and Neumann - with explanations,
revelations, guilt, pain, and a predictable fade-out. ("And if I
wept at all, it was not for the dead.") Unfortunately, in fact, the
novel's one distinctive thread - the melodrama around Neumann - is
thin and somewhat romanticized throughout. Fuller's prose, too,
frequently strains for eloquence - with hollow, sentimental
results. And though there are some solid evocations of now-familiar
Vietnam sights and combat-feelings in this modest, decent novel, it
has neither the commanding credibility nor the poetic fervor of
front-rank Vietnam fiction. (Kirkus Reviews)
Fragments is a story about how war can make everything
explosive--even love--and how two friends try to put the pieces of
their lives together again. "[Fragments] makes the usual
semi-autobiographical account [of the Vietnam War] ...seem flimsy
and discursive in comparison...The shapeliness and sense of larger
design [is] so elegantly executed in Fragments."--Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times "The plot is believable, the characters sharply
drawn, the prose clean and distinctive...Stand[s] with Tim
O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, James Webb's Fields of Fire, Josiah
Bunting's The Lionheads and John Del Vecchio's The 13th Valley...A
strong, compelling novel."--Marc Leepson, Washington Post "There
have been many books on Vietnam, and there will be many others.
This is more a novel than the rest...Fuller has reassembled the
exploded grenade."--Bob MacDonald, Boston Sunday Globe "Should our
children ask about Vietnam, we would not go wrong to place this
book in their hands...[Fragments] purveys more than information--it
gives the war a literary form."--David Myers, New York Times "The
best novel yet about the Vietnam War...It ranks with Norman
Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's From Here to
Eternity. "--Daniel Kornstein, Wall Street Journal
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