Black Virgin Mountain by Larry Heinemann

The rash of newly published Vietnam War memoirs speaks to a vibrating pent-up energy finally gushing through America’s forebrains (and the doors of Barnes and Noble). This may imply that the relative political blandness of 1980s and ’90s USA didn’t arouse the kind of urgency that the Iraq War era decade inspires. Perhaps the 30th anniversary of the pullout has jogged the memories of veterans heretofore inhibited by ambivalence or shame. A coming out of the collective closet seems natural as popular support for our present “conflict” dwindles.

One such recently published tome is Black Virgin Mountain, the third Vietnam War inspired offering from Larry Heinemann. Heinemann doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to his feelings about what happened to him and thousands of others. “We understood perfectly well that we were the unwilling doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful,” he notes near the beginning of the book. Often scathing, always provocative, Heinemann has no trouble elaborating upon incidents of stupidity and tragedy on governmental (and individual) levels.

Blunt, succinct, and powerful honesty is Black Virgin Mountain‘s strength. Focus, however, is not.

Anyone who writes with Heinemann’s sort of concise potency deserves accolades — no doubt, his punchy style helped him win a National Book Award in 1987. Casual, conversational quipping works brilliantly in the book’s first half, which portrays a plethora of non-linear memories from the War. Descriptions of the past’s bulldog superiors, ignorant friends, and nights on grass in the arms of whores feel authoritative and unapologetic.

A description of such incisive passages would illustrate his brazenness no better than such a passage itself: “The arrogant and small-minded Senator Helms was a genuine bumpkin with a stingy, backward imagination… He had a head like a great shaggy marble, the rumpled, disorganized look of a man who spits and drools when he’s drinking, and could palaver and pound sand with the best chuckleheaded windbags of our long and glorious congressional history.” He’s not one for subtlety. My first thought? Even after much exposure to accounts of the Vietnam War, this feels like the first truly honest expression I’ve come across in print.

Then, the present day arrives. What had been an arresting memoir morphs into a meandering travel tale, and a less engaging part of the book. Many of the scenes are truly unique, like Heinemann’s meeting with the idiosyncratic General Vo Nguyen Diap, who is treated with an admirable amount of cultural respect. Still, Heinemann seems content to provide us with anecdotes and curiosities while skirting the emotional core of his stories. To counter this, it’s as if his editor sat him down in office one day to say, “Larry, you’re a Vietnam veteran returning to Vietnam. Where’s the emotion?” Then, cut to Heinemann at a keyboard, plucking out a few strategic paragraphs of glossy regret. As a result, the parts that do mention emotion (usually directly) feel contrived.

Does this reflect the narrator’s true detachment? I don’t know. There’s enough evidence in the first part of the book to indicate that repressing painful memories is simply part of protocol for vets. There exists the distinct possibility that Heinemann truly does feel as removed from the experience as it seems. That revelation alone, then, is worth more than any particular episode in this part of the book; but no such conclusion can be drawn clearly.

Fortunately, Heinemann regains his footing toward the end, during a trip into the Cu Chi tunnels, a vast network Americans did not manage to penetrate during the course of the War. Heinemann launches into a second-person narrative guiding the reader through a tense meditation as a soldier exploring the dark and dangerous unknown. The book breathes again (a stale, humid, underground breath) and it’s as if we had never left the genuinely captivating part of his colorful brain.

The climax is meant to occur with the bittersweet homecoming at the Black Virgin Mountain. Heinemann could sustain my interest to the end, but I had wondered why he chose the end of the book to make virtually any mention of the mountain at all. Certainly, telling the tale of its legend earlier would have built some dramatic tension throughout. As it was, my lack of attachment to the book’s namesake accentuated the notion that Black Virgin Mountain is like a joke without an effective punchline. A little restructuring of the elements, and it would have been one of the best I had ever heard. An ex-soldier walks into a bar in Vietnam. And?