Sometimes to love the simplest things in this life, people have to experience blood, death and desperation, two US writers said in a talk with VietNamNet.

 

Writer Nguyen Quang Thieu: The title of this talk - “War, Fish-sauce Ambassador and Fair Tales” – partly reveals its content. Our guests today are the two American writers, who joined the Vietnam War several decades ago when they were very young. They recognized the absurdity, devastation, cruelty and the darkness of this war. They returned to the US with penitence, torment and nightmare, as writer Larry Heineman said: “For me, the obsession of the Vietnam War is like a dead body in a house”.

 

They have returned to Vietnam after the war. One loves the very simple ingredient of  Vietnamese food – fish sauce, while the another loves fairy tales that Vietnamese kids are often told by their parents before bedtime. This shows that sometimes, to love the simplest things in this life, people have to experience blood, death and desperation.

 

The first guest is writer Larry Heineman and the second guest is American pet Bruce Weigl.

 

I would like to start with a question for both guests: The Vietnam War finished a long time ago, the memory or the syndrome of the Vietnam War in the US has also reduced. Some even say that Americans don’t have the Vietnam War syndrome anymore. Do you think that this is true?

 

Poet Bruce Weigl: I know a very popular syndrome among US veterans, the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I’m not a doctor so I’m not an expert about this syndrome but I know that it appeared around 50-60 years ago and it is returning.

 

The US government doesn’t want to talk too much about this syndrome because it is complicated and it is not useful for the image of the US. But there is a fact that this syndrome is returning to the US, especially when thousands of soldiers returned from the war in Iraq are suffering this syndrome.

 

When I realized that fact, it seemed that the syndrome returned to me. I thought that only I felt it but when I talked to other veterans, I knew that they shared the same feelings.

 

Doctors told me to forget the war and left it behind but I don’t think that is the best. We have to take responsibility for what we did and we need to accept that war as part of us.

 

My solutions returning to Vietnam to work with Vietnamese friends in publication and poem translation.

 

Writer Larry Heineman: I understand the PTSD syndrome in the following way: impacts of the war made changes to the health and bodies  of American soldiers. When they return home, the impacts continue to go deeper into their bodies and affect their psychology, thought and feelings.

 

Poet Bruce Weigl

Weigl told about the vicious circle of this syndrome, that’s true. Veterans of the Second World War are now 70-80 years old, including my father, begin to lose sleep, have headache and nightmares though the war finished a long long time ago.

 

To cope with my own crisis, like Weigl, I have returned to Vietnam several times, not to relief obsessions of war, but to enjoy the most wonderful things in the life of Vietnamese people – cuisines, cultural values, etc.

 

Writer Nguyen Quang Thieu: I was very surprised when poet Bruce Weigl called himself a “Fishsauce Ambassador” of Vietnam. The authority of Phu Quoc Island, where the most famous fish sauce  in Vietnam is produced, has invited you to come. Why do you love this specialty of Vietnam?

 

Poet Bruce Weigl: I think the most special thing about Vietnamese cuisine is the flavor.

 

Writer Bao Ninh (a famous Vietnamese writer) told me that in the war, when he and his comrades found out canned food of American soldiers, they were very happy because finally they had something to eat. But I couldn’t eat that kind of food.

 

I tasted fish sauce the first time when I was in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Some Vietnamese soldiers in my group invited me to take it with roasted duck and raw vegetables. I immediately “fell in love” with it. I asked them how to process fish sauce.

 

Writer Larry Heineman

When I returned to my country, I couldn’t find fish sauce at any store so I processed it myself. I caught fish and dried in the backyard of my father’s house but I forgot it. One morning, some police officers visited my house and said they suspected that there was a dead body in my house.

 

That was the first time I processed fish sauce. Now I understand a lot about fish sauce and know many kinds of fish sauce. I also cook food with fish sauce. I like cooking and I often invite my friends to my house to enjoy my food. They often asked me what ingredients I used that make my food so special. I have never disclosed my secret, which always makes my dishes much more delicious.

 

Writer Nguyen Quang Thieu: You should be officially conferred the title “Fish-sauce Ambassador” by Vietnamese fish-sauce producers. I’m a writer but I don’t know anybody who writes and talks about fish sauce so interestingly as you do. Though I take fish sauce every day, my love for fish sauce is not as big as yours. That’s a wonderful thing!

 

You and other American writers have discovered many new things about Vietnam that Vietnamese people don’t know or are losing. Your stories and experiences of Vietnam are very meaningful for us.

 

As I know, after the Vietnam War, teaching about this war was an important subject in American schools. You talked and taught about the Vietnam War in school, too. Today, American schools still teach about this war?

 

Poet Weigl: The subject about the Vietnam War has been and will still be an important subject, which attracts American students, especially after the Iraq War.

 

Writer Heineman: In the 1970s, theVietnam War was taught the first time at the California University. The first class attracted up to 400 students.

 

Not only the Vietnam War but also Vietnamese culture and literature have been taught at American universities.

 

I had lecturers about the Vietnam War at the Texas University. This is part of the curriculum of the History Faculty. I was invited as guest lecturer and my talks always attracted 400-500 students.

 

 

Larry Heinemann, 66, is an American novelist born and raised in Chicago. His body of work - three novels and a memoir - is primarily concerned with the Vietnam War.

 

Heinemann served a combat tour as a conscripted draftee in Viet Nam from 1967 to 1968 with the 25th Infantry Division, and has described himself as the most ordinary of soldiers.

 

Heinemann's prose style is blunt and straightforward, reflecting his working class background. He drew most directly on his Vietnam experience in his first novel Close Quarters which was published in 1977. His second and most critically acclaimed novel is Paco's Story (1986), which won the 1987 National Book Award for Fiction, topping Toni Morrison's Beloved.

 

Paco's Story relates the postwar experiences of its protagonist haunted by the ghosts of his dead comrades who provide the novel's distinctive narrative voice. The story deals with the seemingly contradictory and morally ambiguous role of the soldier as both victimizer and victim.

 

The Women's Publishing House of Ha Noi published Paco's Story in the fall of 2010, translated by Pham Anh Tuan with an introduction by celebrated Vietnamese novelist Bao Ninh. The novel is the first American-written war novel published in Vietnam.

 

His third novel, Cooler by the Lake (1992), is a comic story about Chicago, and deals with the awful trouble a petty thief gets into when he attempts to return a wallet with eight $100 bills in it to the rightful owner. Thematically lighter than his first novels, it was less positively received.

 

Heinemann's military experiences are documented in his most recent work, Black Virgin Mountain (2005), a memoir. The book chronicles his several return trips to Vietnam and his personal and political views concerning the country and the war. He has often referred to his two war novels and the memoir as an accidental trilogy.

 

Heinemann's short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, GRAPHIS, Harper's, Penthouse, Playboy, and Tri-Quarterly magazines, as well as Van Nghe, the Vietnam Writers Association Journal of Arts and Letters in Ha Noi, and numerous anthologies including The Other Side of Heaven, Writing Between the Lines, Vietnam Anthology, Best of the Tri-Quarterly, Lesebuch der wilden Männer, The Vintage Book of War Stories, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (edited by Maxine Hong Kingston), and most recently in "Humor Me" edited by Ian Frazier. His work has been translated into Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

 

Bruce Weigl, 61, is an American contemporary poet who teaches at Lorain County Community College. Weigl enlisted in the United States Army shortly after his 18th birthday and spent three years in the service. He served in the Vietnam War from December 1967 to December 1968 and received the Bronze Star.

 

When he returned to the United States, Weigl obtained a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College, and a Master of Arts Degree in Writing/American and British Literature from the University of New Hampshire. From 1975-76, Weigl was an instructor at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio.

 

Weigl's first full-length collection of poems, A Romance, was published in 1979. After he received a Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1979, he was an assistant professor of English at the University of Arkansas and later held the same position at Old Dominion University. Weigl additionally served as the president of the Associated Writing Programs.

 

During the 1980s, Weigl published two more poetry collections, The Monkey Wars and Song of Napalm. In 1986, Weigl became an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and was later promoted to a professor of English. In 1999, he published two more poetry collections, Archeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems and After the Others. He left Penn State in 2000 and took a position at Lorain County Community College as a distinguished professor.

 

He also published a memoir that year titled The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir. Many of Weigl's poems are inspired by the time he spent in the U.S. Army and Vietnam. In The Circle of Hanh, Weigl writes, "The war took away my life and gave me poetry in return...the fate the world has given me is to struggle to write powerfully enough to draw others into the horror."

 

In addition to writing his own poetry, Weigl worked with Thanh T. Nguyen of the Joiner Research Center to translate poems of North Vietnamese and Vietnamese soldiers captured during war. Weigl and Nguten accepted an invitation from the Vietnamese Writers Association and traveled to Hanoi to receive assistance in translating the poems. His poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.

 

 

 





































































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