The conflict in Vietnam has been rewritten and reframed
into many corners of American life and has long shadowed contemporary political
science and foreign policy. The war and its aftermath have engendered
award-winning films and books. It has held up a mirror to the twentieth century
and to the wars of the twenty-first.
Set in wartime Vietnam and contemporary Vietnam, in
wartime America and in America today, the stories that comprise Memorial Days were written from 1973 to
the present. As our continuing reappraisals of the war’s shadow have unspooled
over the last half-decade, so too has Wayne Karlin returned to the subject in
his fiction, collected and published together here for the first time.
A girl in Maryland runs away from Civil War reenactors
she imagines to be American soldiers in Vietnam, while a woman in Vietnam hides
in the jungle from an American helicopter and another tries to bury the relics
of the war. A man mourns a friend lost in Iraq while a helicopter crewman in
Quang Tri loads the broken and dead into his aircraft. Extras playing soldiers
in a war film in present-day Vietnam model themselves after other war films
while a Marine in a war sees himself as a movie character. A snake coiled
around the collective control of a helicopter in Vietnam uncoils in a soldier
come home from Iraq. The chronology is the chronology of dreams or nightmares
or triggered flashbacks: images and incidents triggering other images and
incidents in a sequence that seems to make no sense—which is exactly the sense
it makes.
Some stories burn with the fresh experiences of a Marine witnessing
war firsthand. Some stories radiate a long-abiding grief. All the stories
reflect and reconfigure the Vietnam War as it echoes into the present century,
under the light of retrospection.
