Lost Loves

The Vietnam War has a special place in the country’s imagination. It was the first we lost and it was massively unpopular. Love beneath the Napalm, James D. Redwood’s debut collection, explores the human side of the conflict, but from the perspective mostly of the Vietnamese. The stories add up to a baker’s dozen and are set in both the North and the South. The struggle for independence, first against the French and then the Americans, is the thread that links them, that and the theme of lost love. Two of the stories are set in the U.S. though the crucial backstories take place in Vietnam. One of the stories is set in 1895 and the protagonist is the French composer Camille Saint Saens.

Redwood taught English in Vietnam and all but two of his protagonists are Vietnamese. Robert Olen Butler did much the same thing in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (2001), but the two are very different writers. Butler is the more experienced writer by far, but Redwood has made a solid beginning.

Full disclosure here: I have never met the author or read his work before, but we do share a publisher, as Notre Dame Press had previously put out my own story collection.

The concluding story, “The Summer Associate,” brings the destructive impact of the war home. Carlton Griswold is one of only two main characters who are not Vietnamese, the Frenchman Saint Saens of course being the other. Griswold is a disaffected San Francisco lawyer and former Special Forces operative who is haunted by his failure to save the life of the Vietnamese woman he loved. The Associate, Mary Thuy, is a child of Vietnamese immigrants and a bright, ambitious law school grad. Griswold resents her and senses the vulnerability beneath her confident manner. During a celebratory night at a bar he schemes to keep her drinking and then to take her home, “stupid and senseless, to the only place still dark enough to give him any peace.”

Most of the soul-destroying action takes place offstage, part of the back story. It is the aftermath that we see close up, once the damage has been done. It is everywhere and cuts across boundaries social and political. The narrator of “Numbers” had been an analyst in a ministry charged with tracking North Vietnamese deployments. He has lost his position, however, by for concealing the fact that one of his sons is with a unit that has been avoiding the enemy. A second son has apparently deserted outright, and now he waits for the return of his daughter who has run off to join the Viet Cong—or as he likes to think of it, has been kidnapped by the wood nymphs of peasant lore. Once you are taken, so they say, you never return again. But of course he is too sophisticated to believe this, and so he continues to wait.

If the siren song of revolution is compelling, so is the power and wealth of the Americans. It is exotic and sexy, an overthrowing of another sort. In “Brother Daniel’s Roses” the title character is a Catholic priest who has raised his teenage niece and serves as her guardian. Daniel is conservative in outlook and sees the Americans as a threat to his authority. He is therefore deeply shamed and humiliated when his niece defies him and takes up openly with her American English teacher. Redwood nicely captures the generational strife that takes place as a counterpoint to the ongoing armed conflict.

The lost love that haunts the characters blinds them to nearly all else. In the title story the war is long over and Mr. Tu has survived it. He has paid a terrible price though. His face was severely burned in a raid and people invariably recoil when they see him. Once a proud, handsome ARVN lieutenant, Tu now lives in Schenectady, N. Y. where gets by, barely, working as a gardener.

One day as he is bent over...