Book review: 1968

Book: 1968 Author: Joe Haldeman
Overall grade: A

My brother told me about this book a few weeks ago in an email, and since I couldn't find it at the library decided to bite the bullet and buy it used from Amazon.com. That turns out to be a wise choice, as I think it will be reread several times in the future, and hopefully I will remember it any time I begin to think war is somehow 'worth it.'

The story focuses on John Speidel, nicknamed 'Spider' for his last name as well as his lanky limbs, a childhood name that stuck. He is drafted into the Army and serves in Vietnam during the Tet offensive of early 1968. He is wounded badly enough to eventually be shipped back to the States, and the story follows him throughout the rest of the year - hence the title.

I have to say, this is one of the more riveting, heartbreaking, poignant pieces of fiction I've read in ages. I remember writing in a review of another Joe Haldeman book that I didn't much care for the sci-fi element to Haldeman's writing. And...well, while I realize that sci-fi IS Haldman's literary forte', this is a masterpiece if I have read one.

Without going into too much detail on the story, it is the story of so many returning Vietnam vets (as is Haldeman himself). Drafted into a war he did not want to fight, to kill people he did not want to kill. A girlfriend who goes off with another guy while Spider's in 'Nam. Losing his virginity to a prostitute while there, and gaining instead a nasty case of syphilis. Watching buddies and enemies alike get blown to smithereens. A stay at Walter Reed, several diagnoses that may or may not be true - in Spider's case, not. (Apparently back then, homosexuality was still a psychiatric diagnosis, and Spider was diagnosed with same based on the locations of his syphilis chancres - which brings me to the point that, while I didn't much care for the level of detail surrounding his encounter with the prostitute, it did end up having something to do with the later story.) A system that was broken and let our vets down, as much 40 years ago as today. A run of bad luck and family issues, and well, the rest you will have to read to find out. The end does have a redemptive, if unfinished, quality to it.

I am still processing some of the story, as I just finished it an hour ago. Suffice to say that it hit close to home, and it breaks my heart. Equally as heartbreaking is Haldeman's acknowledgement section at the end, which was what my brother emailed me those weeks ago, and it's what I'll end with:

...And then there are two veterans whose names I never learned.

On the 4th of October, 1968, I was in the army hospital at Tuy Hoa, Republic of Vietnam, my first day on crutches after being confined for several weeks to bed and wheelchair with multiple bullet and fragment wounds.

The hospital was suddenly crowded to overflowing with injured Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children. It had been Election Day, and the Viet Cong decided to demonstrate against the election by simultanously attacking various polling places.

The hospital was a madhouse, a charnel house. Orders came down to transfer to other areas every American patient who could be moved. I hobbled aboard a crowded DC-3 borrowed from Air America, the CIA's airline, and as I moved toward the rear I passed the man who would become the rough draft of Spider.

Most of the passengers were obviously wounded or ill, but this man was tanned, healthy-looking, smiling - and strapped down to a stretcher, confined within a straitjacket, staring, evidently Thorazined to the gills. Pinned to his straitjacket was a tag saying PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIC. I sat down behind him and wondered about using him in a story - maybe you had to be crazy, to make sense of this crazy war. This crazy time.

Two years later, happily out of uniform, I was visiting patients in the neurological wing of Bay Pines VA Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. There were some sad cases there, and no doubt some of them are still there, but the one who sticks in my mind is certainly dead by now. He was about ninety, the hospital's only patient left over from the Spanish-American War. He was legless and blind. They said that for forty years he had done nothing but call out for his mother.

This book is for those two men, obviously, and for men and women everywhere who are trapped day and night, locked away in the dark prison of their memories of war.