good novel but I find it odd that people can relate to a guy who gang rapes a girl

books:


	• Paco's Story: A Novel Larry Heinemann Vintage, 2005 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

good novel but I find it odd that people can relate to a guy who gang rapes a girl

The ending of this novel is pretty disturbing and gives the reader some idea of why Paco is so messed up. I wont go into detail but I will say that Paco is involved in a stomach-churning gang rape and murder of a young Vietnamese girl by a bunch of American soldiers.

I must admit, after reading that part I didnt have a lot of sympathy for the lead character and I find it amazing other readers could feel sorry for a guy who commited such an atrocity.

powerful, with a small hole in the center

Paco's story has some clever conceits: there is the narrator, who only reveals himself slowly and carefully, as a ghost from Paco's decimated company in Vietman, and appears to have some companion who he calls James; but we are never told who James is, and why it is necessary for the narrator to tell him Paco's tale. Paco himself is a type of ghost. For the protagonist of an entire novel, we get extremely little insight about Paco qua Paco. Even his odd name, Paco Sullivan, hints at some wider, more humorous story, which is never exploited in this novel. Paco acts more like a ghoul than the narrator, who in compelling ways, is more fleshed out than Paco. We know Paco is wounded physically and psychologically, but we never get his own voice. It is reflected through others, but it lacks immediacy. Yet even with this vital flaw, Paco's story is a moving elegy to war, its victims, both dead and alive, and the confounded human ability to forget the horrible price of waging war itself. And as a Vietnam novel, Paco's Story catches the cadences and vocabulary of the war with great nuance. Again, a novel like this illustrates the great power in writing vernacular slang with dexterity and skill.

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Snapshot of Life During/After Nam

Paco's Story is about young Paco Sullivan. Sole survivor of his unit's ambush, he has returned to the States to look for work. Left with painful injuries that require powerful painkillers every day, Paco encounters both curiousity and discrimination from the locals in the small town he ends up in.

Paco's story is written with graphic, lyrical language that brings his horrific war memories, and his trying to fit in as a veteran of a war that nobody really understood, to life. Heinemann writes in an unusual, dream-like way that just draws the reader in, until they feel like they are feeling what Paco feels. He writes of Paco's seemingly mundane experiences and transforms them into something cathartic. A must read for anyone interested in Nam.

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These wars have left us without a soul

When did America lose its soul? Or has it ever had a soul? Alexis de Tocqueville said it had--in the 1830's: "America is great because she is good. . ." he wrote. Langston Hughes implied it had when he states in a poem "Let America be America again."
But what goodness, what soul is there left in Paco, after the hell that was Vietnam?
And now that generation has fathered souls that are fighting and dying (and killing) in the hell that is Iraq.
Protracted wars harm nations, de Tocqueville warned. And his quote above finishes: "If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."
Will cease or has ceased?

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off the bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed?but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco?s Story?winner of a National Book Award?plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.

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