Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What struck me about it is the similarity of the feeling between people who just by the grace of God, by luck, were on different sides. He was born in North Vietnam, I was born in a logging town in Oregan and we end up in the same war on different sides.
The Sorrow of War, Bao Ninh.
This is a great piece of writing and the guy is obviously a talented writer. What struck me about it is the similarity of the feeling between people who just by the grace of God, by luck, were on different sides. He was born in North Vietnam, I was born in a logging town in Oregan and we end up in the same war on different sides and yet the experience of it is so similar for the individual soldier and he, of course, talks about the havoc wreaked on his country which didn’t happen on our side. But I had a sense of the humanity of ‘the enemy’. We love to pseudospeciate our enemies – in a way you can’t get the job done if you don’t. But reading this piece of writing about an individual soldier in a war on the other side was just very moving for me.
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Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes was a Rhodes Scholar and Yale graduate. He served as a Marine in Vietnam and was awarded two Purple Hearts, the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two navy commendation medals for valour and ten air medals. In 1977 he began writing his novel about his experience of combat in the jungle. The book ended up taking Marlantes 30 years to write while raising a family of five children and working full-time in the newly emergent field of energy consultancy both in the US and internationally.
