Really interesting memoir of Vietnam and life afterwards...

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	• Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam Larry Heinemann Vintage, 2006 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I Really Wanted to Like it More

This book has its moments. The author returns to Vietnam years after being a soldier there and travels around the country.
I really wanted to like the book more than I did. However, even though it is a small book, I got the feeling that at least 25% of it was sort of filler. I understand his Paco's Story is a great book. I need to read it. In the meantime, I wouldn't recommend this book.

The Truth Will Set You Free

There's no shortage of blood and guts in this text; nor is there a shortage of the enumerations of military equipment that insures fellow Vietnam War writer Tim O'Brien a place in every college literary anthology. In fact, the literary nature of the text is a sub-theme of the work: Heinemann is either enough of a gentleman or schooled enough to make direct references to other writers, and does so in the casually learned style of hooks' use of author/title rather than formal citation. Ironically, Heinemann refers to Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain -an amusement, to be sure, for the reader-and the text of Black Virgin Mountain itself echoes a social acid reminiscent of the much-lauded, much banned Huckleberry Finn.

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The Power of Revisitation

Although it did not garner national attention or give rise to any widespread outpourings of remembrance, this past April marked the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. The most lasting impression we have - aside from that gleaming granite commemorative engraved with 58,000 plus names on the Washington Mall - seems to be the quintessential "bug-out" photo of a chopper on the roof of the American embassy, a too-long tether of people desperate to clamber aboard.

As is often the case, the years have been kind to Vietnam annealing some of its sharpness, if not in the memories of the generation that served there, then at least in terms of the original stigma attached to it. Perhaps as a country we have mellowed enough to see that it had some unpleasant but necessary lessons to pass along. All wars do, though it is the young who must purchase that knowledge for us. But even with that, there remains the lasting stench of defeat, along with the awkward doling out and acceptance of blame by aging politicians, whenever the word 'Vietnam' is uttered.

According to the record books, American soldiers were long gone by the time those frantic Vietnamese began queuing up for the last chopper out. But when it comes to war in general and Vietnam specifically, the records aren't always on mark. Which is why three decades later books like Heinemann's Black Virgin Mountain are still being written and read. We simply cannot get enough of the subject to affix it with a permanent, acceptable label and then hang it away like an out-of-fashion coat.

The mountain of the title was the focal point of Heinemann's year in hell. He had already returned to the country a number of times in the 1990s, often in conjunction with writers' conferences, when he and another writer, Larry Rottmann, took the trip to what is known in Vietnam as Nui Ba Den.

The text crackles with an anger that, by Heinemann's own admission, remains unabated despite the passing of thirty-seven years since his tour in `Nam. Having lost two brothers to those residual emotional conflicts that simmer long after the actual combat is over, he is brutally frank about his experiences ("Every human vitality is taken from you as if you'd been skinned; yanked out like you pull nails with a claw hammer; boiled off, the same as you would render a carcass at hog-killing") and his opinions concerning the conduct of the war. It is difficult to decide which leader bears the greater brunt of his scathing commentary - LBJ or William Westmoreland.

Happily, the entire book does not focus solely on the author's lingering revulsion for the war. There are large travelogue segments, life slices of rich imagery showing how the Vietnamese have moved along with far less lingering acrimony than have we since the end of what they call the "American War." Included is a wonderful description of the French colonial era bureaucrat's home-turned-guest-house at which they stayed in Hanoi. Its exotic past (koi pond, louvered windows with a dozen coats of paint) resonates like something straight out of 1940s cinema - "Casablanca" on a different continent. Heinemann includes engaging snippets of a portion of one trip involving the Vietnam Railway and its sometimes idiosyncratic train station employees. Something we don`t expect after all those plane loads of bombs and Agent Orange, is the spectacular scenery. Perhaps most revealing of some kind of personal transformation is a statement he makes after watching the Southeast Asian panorama from the train`s window, "And there it was, the country at peace, the thing I had come to see."

In contrast to the many positive things Heinemann has to say about that nation, in the latter part of the book there is the unnerving visit to the tunnels at Cu Chi. Juxtapositioned next to his own middle-aged physical discomfort at "duckwalking" through a small section of the enlarged-for-tourists-maze, Heinemann gives us a palpably frightening description of what it was like for an outfit's smallest soldier to be pressed into service as a tunnel rat. Fear, claustrophobia, the myriad things to remember to listen for, to smell, to see in order to scope out a tunnel and stay alive - if after reading it you don't come away with the distinct itch of something crawling on your skin, the feel of dirt sticking to the sweat on your bare back, then you may already be dead.

Language rampages back and forth between politely literate and gritty street talk, oftentimes within the same sentence. Normally this would be where a caution against putting it into the hands of middle school children doing history papers would be placed. But there is little early teens have not already heard. For obvious reasons anything related to that period of time is best displayed in the lingo of the day. Heinemann's choice of words may have been his way of showing us that he can walk both sides of the line, i.e., that he is an accomplished writer with a well-developed, post-tour vocabulary, but whose awareness is forever etched with the earthy, peppery talk of men at war. He may also be enjoying his ability to keep the non-military reader a little off-balance: the seriously out-of-kilter, day-after-day world of the average soldier. And whoever predicted the pending demise of the semicolon, hasn't read Larry Heinemann.

But to the rest of those doing research on the embattled 60s and 70s, this is a seminal book, one that stands outside all the political posturing and sociological conjecture. It is an invaluable look into the dehumanizing influences of combat by someone who lived it.

So, once again to war and its lessons. Our unglamorous departure from Saigon over thirty years past remains a thorn in the side of many, though for an assortment of differing reasons. It is a picture we need to keep close to us as we devise our exit strategy for Iraq after destroying their corrupt, sadistic, but functioning political infrastructure. It would be lamentable if history were to look back on our crucial departure from Baghdad only to have it described by some future Heinemann as "an agony, and an orgy of unambiguous betrayal ... right to the end and still, a bungled tangle..."

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"Burn, baby, burn": an American echo

The voice of violence is heard in cities and among the rural poor across America today, and its not just because the corporate statists have successfully veiled the voices of peace that have been ignored by corporate media or sometimes forcefully silenced; but also because violence is the voice that America has taught to its own disenfranchised for a long time now. America is a violent teacher. Violence is as American as apple pie.

Author Larry Heinemann grew up in an American working class family with a "straight arrow upbringing", a result "of all those belt whippings" by his old man who had a "fierce and violent temper". This was normal for most working class families living in what would become known as cannon fodder neighborhoods - neighborhoods from which Uncle Sam conscripted draft slaves to fight his war in Vietnam. Heinemann tells us that when his draft notice arrived in the mail box back in '66, there was another draft notice with it for his brother. These two young men and later another brother were all drafted into the armed forces, instructed in the use of deadly weapons, taught how to kill, and then brainwashed into believing it was honorable to wage war against innocent civilians. That whole draft affair and military induction was violent instruction.

For over two hundred years America has permitted genocide against its own native peoples as well as thousands of lynchings of African-Americans. America has burned babies in Alabama and in Vietnam. Heinemann was in Vietnam shooting "Vietnamese down like dogs", napalming or strafing "them hard enough", and poisoning them and their farmland "with Agent Orange". Is it any wonder that the violent whirlwind haunts America with her echo "Burn, baby, burn"?

Heinemann returned to America, the Violent, only to find one brother a post-war suicide while the other left his family never to be heard from again. Heinemann realizes that America has a class system, though not as apparent as Europe's, and that the children of fat cats never paid the sacrifices that blue collar do. As Tom Paine once put it - "War is the gambing table of governments, citizens the dupes of the game", or as Heinemann says - citizens are "an integral, even dedicated, party to a very wrong thing".

Heinemann is still trying to get over growing up in America, the Violent, and his killing experiences in Vietnam in order "to be rid of it". He is unable to become proactive in today's peace movement. Heinemann doesn't address current concerns, such as what is the future of violence in America? Will Bush's information warfare against Middle Easterners give way to riots with whites against Arabs and Blacks? What are the corporatists in power teaching those not in power? The crop of peace or blood depends on the seeds sown today - so move on Heinemann! There's peace to reclaim.

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Really interesting memoir of Vietnam and life afterwards...

My dad was in Vietnam and I have often wondered what went through his mind when he returned in the late 60's. This book gave me some idea, though of course each man is unique, and Larry Heinemann's story is brilliantly written. He pulls no punches and tells it like it was and like it is. Truly an honest look into the heart of the average Vietnam Veteran. God bless everyone of them for their courage in the face of a nasty, bloody, unjust war. They didn't deserve the kind of misery they got when they were drafted into the US Army. Larry shows us the heart and soul of Vietnam and his story is a beautiful thing!

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reviews: page 1, 2

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

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