Arts of War on the Web

Tim O’Brien, the much-honored novelist whose work is strongly influenced by his Vietnam War service has an interesting essay called “Telling Tails” that deals with what he calls “the centrality of imagination in enduring fiction” in the current, 2009 fiction issue of The Atlantic.

He begins with the tail story, a lighthearted on centering on his two young children (Timmy and Tad), which may or may not be true,and probably isn’t. Then he goes on to discuss his subject.

“In general,” O’Brien says, fictional topics are “born out of writing workshops, in which I’ve noticed, almost always to my alarm, that classroom discussion seems to revolve almost exclusively around issues of verisimilitude. Declarations such as these abound: I didn’t believe in that character. I need to know more about that character’s background. I can’t see that character’s face. I don’t understand why that character would behave so insipidly (or violently, or whatever).

“These are legitimate questions. But for me, as a reader, the more dangerous problem with unsuccessful stories is usually much less complex: I am bored. And I would remain bored even if the story were packed with pages of detail aimed at establishing verisimilitude. I would believe in the story, perhaps, but I would still hate it. To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.”

If you’re in the San Antonio, Texas, area, you can hear Tim O’Brien in person. He’ll be doing a reading on Monday, Sept. 21, at 10:00 a.m. at St. Philip’s College’s Watson Fine Arts Center in The President’s Lecture Series. O’Brien (that’s him above in Vietnam) will be reading from his critically and popularly acclaimed 1990 book of linked-short stories (featuring main character Tim O’Brien) The Things They Carried.

For additional information, call 210-486-2376, or go to http://www.alamo.edu/spc/main/pls.aspx

When you think of entertainment for the troops in Vietnam during the war, you naturally think of the Bob Hope USO extravaganzas. But the U.S. military also provided lots of stage entertainment–including rock music by Philippine bands, comedians from the states, and folk, soul, country and rock bands and even musical comedies performed by Special Service GI’s under a unit called the Command Military Touring Shows.

That includes 1969-70 run of the famed Off Off Broadway sensation, The Fantasticks, put together by a group of eleven soldiers and one female civilian employee. There’s a great article about that not very well known production in the current issue of Esopus, the eccentric, eclectic, glossy black and white nonprofit arts magazine.

The article, “OFF-OFF-OFF BROADWAY,” is an oral history by four of the GI’s who were in the show: Rick Holen, Joe Mauro, John Nutt, and Bob Sevra.

“The GIs seemed to be transported to another plane of existence during the performances,” Holen says. “The play lasted only about an hour and a half, but for that short period of time, we felt that we could put at least a temporary stop to the death and devastation, the boredom and total terror of war. The audiences would sometimes give us a standing ovation for five minutes. That is the magic of theater.”

Yusef Komunyakaa, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet who served in the U.S. Army in the Vietnam (and whose war-time service is a theme he often returns to in his work), had a terrific article in last Sunday’s (January 18) Washington Post Magazine. The article, “The Colors in My Dreams,” is a thoughtful reminiscence/essay in which the poet (who teaches creative writing at NYU) goes back to his childhood in Louisiana and to discuss matters of race, focusing on the personal politics of skin color. The long article is well-written, well-thought-out, and insightful.

Photo by Tina Barney

There’s a terrific profile of the playwright David Rabe by John Lahr in the November 24 New Yorker. In the article, headlined “Land of Lost Souls: David Rabe’s America,” Lahr deconstructs all of Rabe’s work for the stage, including Streamers, one of four of Rabe’s plays set during the Vietnam War.

Lahr tells us that Rabe began Streamers—which is now playing through January 11 at the Roundabout Theatre in New York—”soon after he was discharged, in 1967, from the Army’s 68th Medical Group.” According to the article, Rabe was drafted into the Army in 1965, when he was 25, after having dropped out of graduate school (in theater at Villanova). He spent a year in Vietnam “doing clerical work and guard duty and building hospitals.” Rabe’s unit, Lahr notes, “was not under daily threat; he was not exposed, he said, ‘to the horrors of risk.”’

Although Rabe felt “secondhand guilt about not being in a combat unit,” his service in the Vietnam War had a long and strong impact on his post-war life and his writing career. To find out the details, check out the article on line.

I’m always puzzled, and more than a little annoyed, when I see established media outlets give former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger space to write about the Vietnam War and its lessons. I cannot fathom why he is looked upon as an oracle about matters of war and peace. It’s akin to asking the designer of the Edsel for advice on the next generation of automobiles. What we’re likely to get is a blueprint for a fleet of gas-guzzling, environmentally polluting monster SUV’s.

So I wasn’t surprised that Newsweek magazine gave Kissinger two pages in its November 3 issue to expound on “What Vietnam Teaches Us.” To my way of thinking the war should have taught us not to put people like Henry Kissinger in charge of matters of life and death. But, of course, that’s now how Henry the K sees it.

“Entered into with a brash self-confidence after a decade and a half of creative and successful foreign policy, our engagement ended with America as divided as it had not been since the Civil War,” he starts out. Here Kissinger conveniently neglects to mention that the nation was divided so deeply and bitterly primarily because of his policies that dragged out the Vietnam War for four long years at a cost of some 20,000 American lives and no one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

Then Kissinger starts pointing fingers–not at himself, of course, but at Congress. Because of the nation being so divided, he says, “Congress cut off aid to Vietnam two years after the troops had been withdrawn, and the last Americans left Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) by helicopter from the roof of our embassy.” Blaming Congress for losing the war by ending American aid to Vietnam years after the overwhelming majority of Americans wanted to wash their collective hands of that war has been Kissinger’s M.O. since leaving office in disgrace.

It’s a bankrupt argument, but one Kissinger has espoused in his own self-serving books and in newspaper and magazine articles, including the new one in Newsweek. If, for some reason, you want to read the article, which contains a review of a recent book about JFK and LBJ Vietnam War adviser McGeorge Bundy, it’s on line. Click here.