Black Virgin Mountain - A Return to Vietnam

Zusatztext “A brilliant! masterful piece of writing. . . . Loving! smart! angry! tender! blunt! heartbreaking! tough! edgy! funny! bitter! redemptive! and so incredibly well-written. . . . Black Virgin Mountain ! I promise! will endure.”–Tim O’Brien! author of The Things They Carried “No American novelist has written about the profound issues of military combat better than Larry Heinemann. Now he has written—in that ravishingly dynamic narrative voice that is distinctly his own—the finest memoir to come from the Vietnam War.” –Robert Olen Butler! Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain “Heinemann [is]. . . some would say! the best writer of the Vietnam generation. . . . [ Black Virgin Mountain ] puts the Vietnam War in the context of America’s other wars! at least in regard to what any war does to its veterans.” – Los Angeles Times “An excellent gateway to the war and its impact on families! American and Vietnamese. Heinemann takes the reader on an extraordinary journey of reconciliation both for himself and for Vietnam.”– Chicago Sun-Times Informationen zum Autor Larry Heinemann Klappentext In 1967 Larry Heinemann was sent to Vietnam as an ordinary soldier. It was the most horrific year of his life, truly altering him—and his family—forever. In his powerful memoir, Heinemann returns to Vietnam, riding the train from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh city and confronting the memories of his war year. Black Virgin Mountain confirms Heinemann's legendary plain-spoken reputation as one of the essential chroniclers of our war in Vietnam Leseprobe 1 Several Facts I was a soldier once, and did a year's combat tour in Vietnam with the 25th Infantry Division at Cu Chi and Dau Tieng from March 1967 until March 1968. The town of Cu Chi, twenty miles or so northwest of Saigon, straddled Highway #1 (see map) and was profoundly undistinguished. The American base camp was just outside of town. Nowadays it is famous to the world for the Tunnels of Cu Chi, built by the South Vietnamese guerrillas with ordinary garden tools over a decade and more, and which spread out (if you stretched it) beneath us two hundred kilometers' worth. I am told that the local Vietnamese revolutionaries looked on in astonishment as our division engineers laid out and then built the base camp of considerable acreage over a portion of the tunnels. This was not to be the last of the 25th Division's fuckups. Is it any wonder that when asked to describe the Americans during the war, about all that occurs to the Vietnamese is that we were "brave" and "valorous"? That's what armchair historians say about the Federal troops who assaulted the Stone Wall at the foot of Marye's Heights during the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, and who disappeared, said one participant, like snow falling on warm ground. Dau Tieng was the base camp for the division's 3rd Brigade, squat in the middle of the Michelin Rubber plantation--forty miles north (and a touch west) of Saigon as the crow flies--in Cochin China; the classic image of a company town in every sense of the word. The Americans lived in run-down tents with dirt floors and slept on cots (the canvas all but rotting off the wooden frames), and shared the base camp with half a dozen large French colonial manor houses that had galleries all the way around where the plantation management and extremely senior brigade officers lived, tile-roofed plantation outbuildings, and an aboveground Olympic-size swimming pool (of all things); the lanes and gardens were lushly shaded with plane trees--just like in the movies. Outside the perimeter, the village streets were lined with offices, block-long clusters of company-owned housing, and somewhere in there was the ubiquitous company store. Down by the river was a huge latex processing plant that gave off a heavy industrial stink rivaled only by the leade...

Product details

• Authors: Larry Heinemann
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.06.2006
• EAN: 9781400076895
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7689-5
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 15 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > General, dictionaries