CRITIQUES

Reading Catch-22 and the screenplay back-to-back frustrated me to no end. Every time I sat down going over scene-by-screen revisions with Larry or re-revisions of re-re-revisions of Sergeant by changing scene sequences, pulling characters out of this scene and inserting them into the next all the while dumbing down the clinical aspects of the novel to suit a clueless audience’s understanding of war-related psychological “disorders”. . . it was more maddening than writing the damn novel itself.

As I opened my eyes again that night after first closing them from reading Sorrow, I began to get an inkling of why Ninh’s “version of The American War” was so much easier to follow and much more emotionally charged than mine-at least in the beginning with Kien physically “revisiting” and retrieving the remnants of his dead comrades lying on a rotten, blood-soaked battlefield while mine starts in media res in the confines of a small, air- conditioned office on a closed psych ward with my protagonist, Andy Collins, in the midstof a dislocated “conversation” with his Army shrink, Dr. Nieland. Right there, in these first few footsteps into print, two authors’ journeys began to diverge along a common theme staring into the same hearts of darkness from two different angles: action in Sergeant is more often triggered by sudden, spontaneous recollections of the immediate past in mentally remastered “flashbacks,” whereas conscious thought in Sorrow is less apparent and overshowed by fight-or-flight hindbrain impulses, at least in the early stages of Ninh’s novel.

In that sense, my characters are reacting more cerebrally to their pasts relative to their current, involuntary confinement in an Army psych ward (like Capt. Pollard) while Ninh’s are immersed in surviving the present (like Kien and Phuong) trying to stay alive to face yet another day of grueling pain and agony. Ninh “tortures” his characters. Mine “torment” themselves and each other on the ball field, volleyball court, mess hall, day room and while on “outings” (like the discombobulated “tour” of The Alamo)-with the relentless incoming shrieks of unforgiving memories raining down on them like ordinance from yesterday’s Tet while locked up in a bone-white cinderblock box of barred windows with nowhere to run for cover. (And Ninh and I . . . were we writing about the same war?)

More importantly for me at the moment was how do you write those scenes into a screenplay? Neither Larry nor I was talented enough to do so: it would take a real pro, and Bernie was distracted enough relaunching his career as an independent producer after his successful stint with CBS to put out an earnest search. But Larry persevered long enough to finish a third draft, one that he felt was good enough for Bernie to “shop around,” starting with Bernie’s new replacement at CBS running the “made-for-TV miniseries department.” Bernie had me fly out from Logan to LAX for the meeting. I was justifiably worried: in my heart-of-hearts, I knew the screenplay was a far cry from the gripping, seriously emotive and engaging content of the book: you couldn’t put enough Tinsel Town lipstick on this pig! But who was I? A scrawny twenty-something still wearing his dog tags hanging from his neck like some albatross while eating Raisin Brand for breakfast with Bernie in the Polo Lounge and staying at the Beverly Wilshire staring out the window at the forlorn palm trees like some celebrity actor’s disillusioned son.

Bernie’s replacement was as snarky as they come, from the get-go, and alarmingly arrogant in her interrogative style of “whys” and “whats” to the point of near hostility ending with:

“For Christ’s sake, Bernie, you know better than to bring me a script to kick off an MS without a single woman in it? Who do you expect gonna want to watch a bunch of fucked up Army retards trying figure out if they should shit or go blind on the viewers’ time and CBS’s dime?”  She turned to me with the look of a blind date that’s not going well: “How could you write a novel without women in it in this day and age?” I was more shocked by the angry look in her eyes and the tone of her voice than the question itself, to which I sheepishly replied: “Because there weren’t really any to speak of.” She sighed: “Did you ever read A Farewell to Arms? Even Mister Macho MCP himself wrote about a wartime American ambulance driver and his love affair with an English nurse. Did it ever occur to you that his farewell to arms wasn’t just to his firearms, but the arms of his lover who would die giving birth to his stillborn child!?!” She turned back to Bernie: “Put some women-some strong women in the story line or don’t bother coming back.” We never did either. But we did come back to the table with a solid plan for going forward with an entirely different “posture” (Bernie’s word) for a Sergeant remake.

That meeting was a wake-up call that came too late for me. I’d somehow slept through the class on Putting Women in Novels 101 even when they didn’t really belong in some, like mine, but unlike in Ninh’s where at least one prominent, “strong woman” stands out as Kien’s co-protagonist, Phuong. Here again, Ninh succeeded in keeping his tragically scarred heroine pretty much front and center in Sorrow much like Hemingway does with Catherine Barkley in A Farewell-but under very, very different circumstances! In that sense, Sorrow is another love story set against the backdrop of another war, like so many others before it and so many that will follow as time goes by, as Ilsa hums and Sam dutifully plays and sings:

It’s still the same old story

A fight for love and glory

A case of do or die

The world will always welcome lovers

As time goes by.

Not so in the case in Sergeant: there’s nothing love-storyish about it, not a hint of it even slightly resembling a tale as dark as in Sorrow’s. Sergeant is more about the loss or absence of “love” than about promoting it as a “normal” human emotion. Not that my male characters hadn’t been in love before, but their ability to seek out and involve themselves in a new love relationship, to express love and to accept love in return was no longer possible in the traditional “boy-meets-girl” sense as part of the fallout of the post-Vietnam War phenomenon. Maybe the needle on their “love meter” swung all the way over from Eros to Thanatos: I don’t know, but something died deep inside the day their music died. Maybe their hidden psycho-sexual numbness was the price some paid to survive the effects of their psychological intimacy with the ultimate femme fatale, like Captain Pollard does with Madame Duprey in that warehouse in Saigon. Regardless, for the restless souls that paced the drab olive floors of Chambers, whatever love story they may have later written into their lives likely won’t have a Hallmark ending, just like Kien’s and Phuong’s didn’t or-to switch to a post-WWII example-the vets in The Best Years of Our Lives.

That meeting with Bernie’s successor was the harbinger of worse things yet to come, though I never put the pieces together until a bit later, and it had to do with some of the content and one historical figure in particular I’d written into Sergeant. In writing even the earliest draft of what would be called Sergeant Back Again (my working title was The Catalogue of Chameleons, which Ted immediacy nixed because Random House had just published Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons five months before Harper & Row was scheduled to release my novel), I did my very best to include historical fact among the fictitious when-and wherever possible, one of which was a highly disputed “historical fact”-the so-called Body Count Report.