The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories

14. The Storyteller I Looked for Every Time I Looked for Storytellers

14 The Storyteller I Looked for Every Time I Looked for Storytellers The Storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller’’ And then there are those killers of men whose violence leaves not a corpse behind, who tell everything they know and are finally guilty of nothing at all. How can they get away with it? Let me tell you about one of them, a man I call Jim Bennett because there is no point telling you his real name. Lydia’s Call My friend Lydia Fish called one fine autumn day and asked, ‘‘Are you still working on that book about oral histories from the Vietnam War?’’ I told her that I’d left the project for a while to do other things and that I’d never gotten back to it. ‘‘Well,’’ Lydia said, ‘‘I’ve got someone who wants to meet you. When you meet him, you may find yourself back in it again.’’ Not likely, I told her, not likely at all. I was deep in the editing of a film, a job that would consume most of my nonteaching time for the next several months. There were other projects and speaking commitments, too. There were more compelling reasons, but I didn’t tell Lydia what they were. I’d begun the research for the oral history book in 205 1976. I thought it would be useful to record how veterans were remembering the war and what they had to say about coming home. I knew well enough how the past is rewritten constantly by memory and that the further you are from an event, the further you can be from any accurate redaction of it. The stories would change over time, as is the way of stories in active tradition. The project properly should have begun six, seven, or eight years earlier, but back then I had been too deeply involved in antiwar activities to have thought of or been able to do anything like it. The politics of which-sideare -you-on were pretty much over by the mid-seventies.1 Former war-resisters had realized that the vets weren’t the guys who had kept the war going, and many of the vets had tired of defending a war that made sense in no terms other than sunk costs. It was hard to write off the antiwar movement as subversive and the vets as right-wing militaristic thugs when war hero John Kerry and paraplegic Vietnam vet Ron Kovic (in speeches and in his book Born on the Fourth of July) were, by their own witness, contradicting those stereotypes. Even so, I thought we’d be at least as long coming to terms with the emotional residue of that war as we would the economic burdens it imposed on us and our children. So the interviews seemed like a useful thing to do. They were more conversations than interviews, but there was a small group of questions I asked in the course of nearly every one, each of which produced long and involved answers. One was, ‘‘What did you do in Vietnam?’’ Most men would answer, ‘‘What do you mean by do?’’ to which I’d shrug or say, ‘‘I don’t know. Whatever you think it means.’’ And then they’d take some meaning of ‘‘do’’ and hang a bunch of narratives on it. Another question was, ‘‘What happened when you came home?’’ To which several said, ‘‘What happened in what regard?’’ to which I’d also shrug or say ‘‘I don’t know,’’ and that would occasion another narrative or string of narratives. Lydia was teaching a class that semester called ‘‘The Vietnam Experience.’’ She had asked me to talk to her students, nearly all of whom were Vietnam vets, about the antiwar movement at home. 206 The Story Is True She said I would find the visit interesting and that I needn’t prepare a formal talk. The class had a pattern of a lot of vigorous give and take. She and I had been friends a long time, so I said okay, but I expected a lot of flak. The flak didn’t materialize. Maybe it was that the war was, by then, long enough in the past or because Lydia...