With Everything We Had, edited by A1 Santoli (below), this is one
of the first two books composed entirely of the words of Vietnam
vets - the one that confronts the reader with every type of
American atrocity, every form of brutalization, once alleged or
reported. Baker purportedly interviewed 150 veterans, including
several nurses, none of whom are identified; one passed him along
to another, he says, but it is impossible to gauge the range or
representativeness of his sampling. Their responses have been
chopped up into brief segments, some as short as a couple of
paragraphs, and apparently scattered through the book's four major
sections: Initiation, Operations, War Stories, The World (i.e.,
Homecoming and Casualties). There is thus a very rough sequential
structure; but except in the first section, when we learn something
of the veterans' backgrounds and how or why they got into the
service (usually, some snafu or other), there is very little to
distinguish one person, or even one snippet of experience, from
another. So the book is in many ways indefensible: a collage of
horror stories without context or documentation. No one, of course,
would have wanted to put his (or her) name to much of what is said
here: "Next I had to start kicking a dead body in the side of the
head until part of his brain started coming out of the other side".
. . "I used to fight with a couple of guys just to get an ear. . .
It was encouraged to cut ears off, to cut the nose off, to cut the
guy's penis off. A female, you cut her breast off". . . As
excerpted, very few of the men express so much as a misgiving (only
in the last section does some unease surface); as excerpted,
indeed, very few of them appear to think. Baker's remarks,
introducting each section, are banal (and not infrequently
self-serving). There is a truth, obviously, in the very sameness of
the experiences and the attitudes; but there is a much fuller and
deeper view of Vietnam in the Santoli collection. (Kirkus Reviews)
Even now something is missing from the history of Vietnam. Behind the burning sense of horror and betrayal the personal stories remain untold. No one has bothered to talk to the men and women who went to Vietnam and fought the war.
What happened to boys and girls straight out of school who were plunged from the basketball park into the napalm jungle? Who were they fighting for? How did conscripts and volunteers live through the war and how can they live with the scars?
Mark Baker recorded conversations with dozens of Vietnam veterans. NAM is a unique and harrowing collection of those interviews, as raw and shocking as an open wound. This is the story of the human cost of a war that had no survivors, only veterans.
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