Every generation of male, American writers has felt compelled to document the ravages of war: from “The Red Badge of Courage” and “All Quiet on the Western Front,” to “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Thin Red Line,” to “Going After Cacciato” and “The Aardvark Is Ready for War.”
Each time the United States gets involved in a military conflict, novels pour forth about the brutality of war and the comradeship that develops among soldiers like a stream of blood from a fresh wound.
One classic that is often overlooked, “The Forever War,” is given short shrift by the academic community because it was written as a science fiction novel. Author Joe Haldeman wrote it as an analogy to his experience in Vietnam, and even though it remains in print and won handfuls of awards from the genre community, it should have attracted an even larger audience.
Perhaps Haldeman’s latest collection – “War Stories” – will remedy that situation.
Though the core of this collection consists of stories that are science fiction or horror, these tales are book-ended by two mainstream novels that deal with both the Vietnam War and the civil unrest that took place in the United States.
“War Year” is a short novel Haldeman began writing while still in the thick of combat in Vietnam. Because of the constraints of a publisher’s paperback original format (only a certain amount of words were allowed), Haldeman’s first novel has a Hemingwayesque sparsity about it. But it works well for a novella that deals with the shock of being dropped into a war zone, which mirrored the author’s experience as a combat engineer. One practically hears the bullets whizzing past and feels the sweat on the upper lips of the young GIs as they head off on patrols.
The genre-related tales in the middle of the book are no less harrowing, especially “Graves,” which won a World Fantasy Award and a Nebula nod from the Horror Writers of America. Its “Twilight Zone” type horror is a great analogy for the trauma that many soldiers often experience long after the battle is over.
Haldeman also includes a few of his award-winning poems as well. One of them, “DX,” is a powerful, autobiographical tour de force with a heart-rending endnote.
Finally, “1968” is a novel that was criminally overlooked by the mainstream press when published. Begun while Haldeman was under the tutelage of the late Stanley Elkin at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, it is yet another tour de force in a book riddled with them. Following the fate of its protagonist, “Spider,” Haldeman’s novel takes on the Vietnam War during the year of the Tet Offensive as well as life back in America as viewed through the eyes of Spider’s girlfriend, who writes him love letters, protests the war and experiments with drugs and sex.
This was a pivotal year in our nation’s history, when the Vietnam War truly started to get out of control, when JFK and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and Haldeman’s tightly written, quirky novel brings all of it into sharp focus.
“War Stories” is a book that is every bit as important as Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” or Tim O’Brien’s “Going After Cacciato.” This is a gathering of stories and novels that lay bare the feelings of dread and mortality and comradeship – and the abiding love for life – often experienced by young men in times of war.
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelance writer from Kansas City, Mo.
War Stories
By Joe Haldeman
NightShade Press, 450 pages, $29
