In an interview on Vietnam

365 Days.

That was a book I read before I went to Vietnam and it was written by an army doctor who wasn’t even there. I think he was in Japan. But what he did was he interviewed the people he was treating and it was one of the great examples of breaking through the statistics. It’s like an army doctor can say: ‘I treated 33 head wounds, did 14 amputations… boom, boom, boom, boom.’ But if you talk to one of the 14 amputation cases and realise this is a real human being with a real story about how he got there it gives you this perspective so that the next time you read the paper and it says, ‘We took light casualties’, you can take the next step and think: ‘I wonder who they were, I wonder what happened to them, I wonder if they kept their leg or they didn’t.’ So I was already in the reserve when I read this but it was like: ‘Oh my God, this is real stuff.’ It’s just an army doctor showing the human side of the word ‘casualties’. 

Were you injured yourself?

Yes. I got two Purple Hearts. One was an easy one and one was a tough one – I ended up on a hospital ship, from a hand grenade. 

So, tell me about your book. 

Well, where do I start? It was a book I just had to keep working on because of this need to be understood. I always used to grate at words like ‘casualties’ and ‘the enemy’ and the ability of us to abstract away from those we’re talking about. You hear people talking about Marines and the image is of these grizzled 35-year-olds, but the reality in Vietnam and mostly today too is that they are 19. They’re not grizzled, not close. They’re competent and well-trained but they’re kids and what they’re interested in is girlfriends and fast cars and drinking and that’s who they are. They have to grow up and assume enormous responsibilities at an age when quite frankly most people are not prepared for that. So how do they manage that? I wanted to write a novel that meant that, when someone who’s read it sees in a newspaper that the Marines have landed, they’ll go like: ‘I know who that is. Not the ones in the movies. The ones in Matterhorn. That’s who’s doing the job.’ The book is about combat. It’s very focused. I don’t get into the politics of the war. I don’t talk about anything that these characters wouldn’t think or talk about – getting the job done, racism, class issues, unfairness. People have said about my book: ‘He doesn’t talk about the suffering of the Vietnamese.’ But my characters wouldn’t have thought of it. They just didn’t. 

Have you found it cathartic or are you mourning the loss of it now the book’s out? 

That’s a funny question. I was telling someone the other night: ‘I lived with this book for 35 years.’ It’s like living with your wife for that long and you agree that it’s time it’s over but then you see her with another guy it’s like – waaaaaah! 

But do you feel as if you’re supposed to have finished thinking about Vietnam?

No. I’m happy it’s done. I’m done with that. What I remember from Vietnam has little to do with the novel. I wake up every day and I think about death, dying, things I did every day. It doesn’t go away. You don’t talk about it. It flits through your mind while you’re doing your daily work. Luckily for me I’ve had lots of help with PTSD and I’ve got medicine and it just sort of comes in one side and goes out the other side. There it was, there it went. But you go on with your life and it will be with me until the day I die.