Black Virgin Mountain
By Larry Heinemann
Doubleday, $179
As a 22-year-old draftee, Larry Heinemann spent a year in Vietnam as a combat soldier stationed at Cu Chi and Dau Tieng. By the time he received his discharge papers in March 1968, bitterness over the war had consumed him. Heinemann flew home, 'pissed off and ground down by a bottomless grief', and, courtesy of the GI Bill and Columbia College, Chicago, began writing about his 'war year of soul-deadening dread'.
In Black Virgin Mountain, his third book based on wartime experiences, Heinemann writes: 'The impulse to tell the story of the war rose out of an undeniable authenticity of exhausted and smothered rage perhaps more bitter than the tongue can tell.'
Whereas his previous books, Close Quarters (1977) and Paco's Story (1987), winner of the National Book Award, recounted fictionalised episodes from the war, this time round Heinemann turns to non-fiction.