Potawatomi Tracks (The Ballad of Vietnam and Other Stories) (review)

Potawatomi Tracks is the story of Larry Mitchell’s personal triumph after years of struggling with drugs, alcohol, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. He concludes this thin volume with a list of successes: his marriage is put back together, he is named an Honored Veteran on the Prairie Band Potawatomi Reservation and given a parade (thirty-two years after returning from Vietnam), his wife is getting her master’s degree in education at the University of Kansas, and his two sons are enrolled in universities. In that sense, it is a good story. Life. Renewal. Hope. Success. Happiness. Gratitude. All good stuff. Potawatomi Tracks joins the growing list, though still a short one, of autobiographies by American Indian veterans of the Vietnam War. Taking its place in the larger, national narrative of that war and the years that followed, its story of ultimate triumph is welcome and healing for the men and women who served, for those who waited for them, and for the entire nation.

Although Potawatomi Tracks joins the list of American Indian narratives of the Vietnam War, it is not typical of them. Mitchell’s drug use, for instance, starts in Europe, after he has seen active duty in Vietnam. And he goes AWOL in Europe, where he travels on forged papers and discovers his joy of reading. What other American Indian authors can say they got their thirst for reading after an encounter with a biography of General Erwin Rommel and were inspired to start writing by the works of Henry Miller? Once Mitchell returns to the United States, his story becomes more conventional of Vietnam War narratives, as he tells a story of depression and drinking. He finds new hope and a purpose in his life in the woman he courts and then marries. His story is heroic in its mundanity—it is the story of holding a family together against the burdens of alcoholism, depression, and poverty. Mitchell’s story is the convergence of issues known by many American military veterans and issues known by many members of America’s poorest reservations.

Mitchell’s story is also peculiar because of the way it is presented. On first picking up the book, I thought I had encountered an autobiography in the form of an epic poem. The text looks like a long poem and the title suggests the story will be told as a song—a “ballad.” However, a search for poetic devices, such as enjambment, figurative language, symbols, and tropes, is relatively futile. For instance, early on Mitchell writes:

There was no healing ceremony waiting for me on the

reservation.

(32)

Why break “the” to its own line here? Why emphasize “reservation” with indenting? Why not emphasize “no healing” with a line break instead? Perhaps Mitchell’s story is recounted as a modern version of a coup tale—a warrior’s story of his exploits in battle; perhaps Potawatomi Tracks is intended to be more like a transcribed oral telling, similar to something the Dauenhauers present with their Tlingit oral narratives. Regardless of the book’s intended narrative structure, its publisher needs to be castigated for the book’s sloppy editing. I do not hold this against Mitchell. It is enough that he has shared his story with us; ensuring that his manuscript reached us with careful preparation was Heliographica’s responsibility. I wish Mitchell continued health and happiness, and I hope he explores the possibilities of his narrative style further (with a better publisher).