Things They Carried / In The Lake Of The Woods: A Mystery

Good book

Excellent

Had been years since I visited "The Wall of the Wasted" in Washington to visit fallen friends by date of death.Years since I had first read Tim's timely tome on the tragedy seen up-close and personal.Had long since passed on my copy to a child of a generation that doesn't remember mandatory conscription,where you had to have the money --for college or bone spurs-- to stay out of the lines of fire and the paddiesand the leeches and the malaria and the dysentery and the disenchantment and all the other Things We Carried.And now I get to continue with "In the Lake of the Woods" between the same covers,and take another deep breath before going on to O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato" and"f I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home,"and watching where in the world we're wasting young lives... today.""In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons." - Herodotus

My favorite uncle was in Special Forces in VN, came back a greatly changed man and to this day will not speak of his experience over there but did write a book--in which he tried to write down what happened but I know he seriously cleaned it up and sanitized it greatly. I do remember asking him if what Lt. Calley was being accused of actually happened "over there" and my uncle very quietly said that things like that happened a lot, maybe not to the same extend or number but it was fairly common place. O'Brien's writings on VN have helped me understand a little better about what the boys (oh, and they were just boys, average age for a soldier in VN was 19) went through, how there was no sane transition from home to being there to home again (if you made it), how the generals and politicians made the war into something else and the soldiers into automatons that just did their (gen'ls and pol'ns) bidding. Lake of the Wood brought it home--'cause I know a lot of vets suffer with nightmares and other psychological/emotional things that they don't know what to do with. I did think the story in Lake was a little contrived, too many things that don't jive going on (but I don't remember what CSI forensics were like during the time period the story takes place in; I know by today's forensics there would be no mystery murder). But the deeper troubles the main character had from both his own childhood growing up under an alcoholic father and then immediately going to Vietnam are real. The story made me research the My Lai massacre--because when it happened there was so much media and political manipulation it was hard to tell what was real and what was exaggerated and--those of us who hadn't fought in that war had no real idea of what a helter skelter it was. Body counts and all that--I mean, great way to turn normal, honest, wonderful young [men--but there were women there too] into warped human beings who will spend the rest of their lives bent. The VN war to the greater degree brought a completely different way of making war, which has now been transferred to the Middle East. Anyway, O'Brien made me think, made me research what really happened (40 or so years after when maybe more unspun info is available) to help me understand how incidents like My Lai could have, and did, often happen. War is hell, in so many ways.

I would never have read this book except it was on the reading list for my book club. War is so horrible. How it effects the minds of the people that experience it first hand. what they do and think while they are in the midst of it. Insane in the middle of insanity. There was a man at our book club study that had been in Vietnam. He said this was his favorit book about the war. He choked up. So did the rest of us.