WANDERING SOULS
"On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer Steedly, Jr. turned a bend in a trail in the Pleiku Province and came face to face with a North Vietnamese soldier, his weapon slung over his shoulder. The two stared at each other for an instant: a split-second later, Homer's bullets smashed into the chest of a young medic named Hoang Ngoc Dam."
So begins the jacket description of Wandering Souls: Journeys With the Dead and the Living In Vietnam written by Wayne Karlin and published by NationBooks. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in understanding war and the soldiers who fight them. The writing is poignant and at times so painful that I had to put the book down and pause to let the emotions settle. If you have any interest in the Vietnam War and have yet to read much of anything this is the place to start.
As someone who was there, I can tell you that everything rings true. The story centers around some captured enemy documents that Lt. Steedly sets out 30 years later to return to the family of the soldier he encountered and killed in the jungle. I remember the day that I saw a similar notebook taken from the body of an enemy soldier. I was overwhelmed by the understanding that this was a guy just like me, a guy who had a family and a girl friend, who saved letters from his mother and had pictures of loved ones.
As soldiers, we sometimes became so numb that we lost sight of our own humanity, never mind that of the enemy's. As civilians sending our sons and daughter, husbands and wives off to war, we sometimes became so taken up with the cause that we were too willing to overlook the effects.
Wandering Souls won't let you do that. Instead, it allows you to see the war from both sides of the lines. For the first time I understood the disillusionment that gripped Vietnamese society as the immense personal cost of the war could finally be stacked up against the slow to be realized benefits of victory.
To me this book does for Vietnam what Paul Fussel's book The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 did for World War II. It strips away the myth of war and forces the reader to grapple directly with the cruelty of war and the lingering impacts that every war has on soldiers and civilians alike.
April 12, 2010
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