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Family and friends wondered why we were so angry. What are you crying about? they would ask. . . . Our fathers and grandfathers had gone off to war, done their duty, come home and got on with it. What made our generation so different? As it turns out, nothing. No difference at all. When old soldiers from “good” wars are dragged from behind the curtain of myth and sentiment and brought into the light, they too seem to smolder with choler and alienation. . . . So we were angry. Our anger was old, atavistic. We were angry as all civilized men who have ever been sent to make murder in the name of virtue were angry. michael norman, from These Good Men: Friendships Forged from War On March 18, 1969, Homer Steedly, a young American infantry lieutenant , turned a bend in a trail in Kontum Province and came face to face with a North Vietnamese soldier, his weapon slung over his shoulder. The soldier, who Steedly first took for an enemy officer, was a twentyfour -year-old medic named Hoang Ngoc Dam, from the village of Thai Giang, near Hai Phong—a fact the lieutenant would not discover for more than thirty years. There was no time then for more than a quick glimpse of each other. As soon as Dam saw Homer, he snatched his weapon off his shoulder and brought it around. “I shouted Chieu Hoi, the phrase to surrender,” Homer wrote in his journal, “but he continued to draw down on me. I fired just before he got his rifle on me. If I had not been so scared, I might have had the presence of mind to just wound him, but in my adrenalin-rush panic, I killed him with one shot through the heart.” : w a y n e k a r l i n Wandering Souls 1 8 0 | W A Y N E K A R L I N For a time he stared in a daze at the body. The man he’d killed was young, his pith helmet clean, his uniform starched, and the SKS rifle clutched in his hands new, the greasy cosmoline used as an antirust still gooped on its bayonet hinge—someone new to the war, Homer concluded . He bent down and went through the dead man’s pockets, drawing out a notebook with a colorful picture of a man and woman in what he took to be traditional or ancient Vietnamese dress on the front cover, and a daily and monthly calendar grid labeled with the English word schedule on the back; a smaller black notebook; and a number of loose papers— letters, ID cards, some sort of certificates. The spine and corners of the first notebook had been neatly reinforced with black tape. Thirty-five years later, as I handed that notebook to Dam’s brother, I was struck again with the care Dam had taken in binding it up. He was a soldier in an army in which nothing could be thrown away, nothing wasted , and I thought, not for the first time, of what the appearance of that book must have meant to Homer as he looked through it on that dark trail. Raised on a small, hardscrabble farm, Homer knew the preciousness of things that could not be replaced, knew how to shepherd them. The way he had shot Dam was unusual—a gunfighter duel in a war in which more often than not the enemy remained faceless to the Americans , only sudden flashes of fire from the jungle, targets to be annihilated . That invisibility was frustrating to the GIs, but at least it allowed the comfort of dehumanizing the enemy, making him ghost, demon, target. To see not only the face of the man he’d killed but also the carefully rebound covers, the force of will that the meticulous writing and drawings inside the book revealed, confronted Homer with a mirrored and valuable humanity. He tried not to think about it. There was scarcely the time anyway, and later that same day, he’d have one more encounter with a soldier who wanted to shoot him—this time, an American whom the war had broken, who had already had shot and killed another soldier. Homer was able to talk that man into laying down his weapon, and so that day he had taken a life and saved a life. He couldn’t dwell on the former . It was...

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