It just so happens that I am reading Matterhorn and Love Like Hate one after another. The former depicts the Vietnam War from a GI‘s perspective, the later from a Vietnamese viewpoint.
Coincidentally, people depicted in both novels came across as victims of an uncalled-for conflict and whose lives were disrupted and devastated. I found glimpses of truth in these novels: camaraderie, self-transformation and shifting policies (Matterhorn crew depended on choppers for medivac and ration drops, Viet Kieu in Love Like Hate depends on Boeing for home visit).
One can’t wait to get home, state side (after the drafted tour of duty), the other, can’t wait to save up for the next visit (to show off).
Long ago, I had an idea for a movie script. I called it “OK Salem”, after wartime popular street greet (it’s either Pall Mall or Salem).
The two central characters in my imaginative “OK Salem” are a lieutenant like Mellas and a shoe-shine boy (like the sidekick kid in Raiders of the Lost Ark). The two befriended and bonded (communicated mostly in numbers e.g. number 1, number 10).
Later, the street kid drifted to America and made it through college. The veteran, meanwhile, turned homeless. A chance encounter brought the two together, albeit with a role reversal. Now, moving on to the other side of the Pacific for a mis-en-scene, each serves as a mirror for the other’s former self.
I could never finish my script, since it is a work in progress (struggling writers all say that). But I know many are still living in the shadow of America’s lost war.
Matterhorn was said to be an epic novel, thirty years in the works. In the novel, there were occasional race and class in-fightings. I felt the exhaustion just trying to imagine what’s like to follow these Marines deep into the jungle of futility.
And ironically, in Love Like Hate, I found sub-texts of in-group discrimination
(Viet Kieu against the native and vice versa).
To enjoy both novels which cover same region and same time span helps put the war in perspectives (Apocalypse Now 2.0). To read these two novels side by side, is analogous to see “OK Salem” on my desk (unlikely coupling brought together in war).
I know many of us are sore losers (and sore winners) frozen in time (with occasional relapses). I have walked pass many campaign signage in Little Saigon, whose sidewalks have been used as platforms for frequent war rematch.
I am not sure there will ever be real winners in war. But it sure looks like Matterhorn will endure as a safe repository of memories of a place and time far away, yet whose vested emotions remain so close to the heart.
Even mine.
Thang Nguyen 555 