Can War Novels Cure the Plague?

Seems weird to me but in these shut-in pandemic days my war novels are selling better than my other books and I can’t figure why.

Coming soon, I promise, even tho’ it’s not a war novel…

Does escaping into a war story beat watching one more computer-generated flash-bang action flick on Netflix? Or does a novel’s hard truth mean more in these hard times?

I was a soldier in the great Vietnam war but the stories in my war novels aren’t my stories. Just fiction.

Well, yes, Uncle Sugar wouldn’t give me a rifle. That’s a vague similarity in my history to these novels. Ours was a beggar-army and Uncle expected me to find my own. I grabbed one dropped by a dead GI. I didn’t think about how I got it. I had to have a rifle to keep from being dead myself.

Yes, Uncle wouldn’t give me a pistol to hug in my sleep to repel Chucks crawling up on my foxhole. I scrounged some Swedish submachinegun ammo for a battalion armorer who had a Swedish sub but no ammo. Yep, you can find anything in a combat zone. He gave me in trade a bright spanking new Mr. Colt’s semi-automatic .45 life-saving pistol. I slept with it in my hand every night in the boonies. That’s how scared I was. All the time.

Yes, Uncle wouldn’t give me a campknife for chopping down brush and tree trunks to layer over my foxhole to keep out enemy mortar bombs. So I bought one from a pretty, knife-selling Vietnamese girl at her roadside stall in the rundown, beaten up, impoverished refugee hamlet outside basecamp. She sold her knives to GIs in the daylight hours and to Chuck at night. What else could she do? She had to keep herself alive. She was scared of all of us.

We Army beggars also had to scrounge for eatable ration food, hijack beer from passing transport trucks, and beg or steal whatever else we needed. All Uncle gave us free was the chance to go into combat and be killed.

He gave Vietnam even less. My war’s Vietnam was a beautiful country and the people there, though not the ones anxious to kill me, were good and decent folks. We in Uncle’s beggar Army made that country a ruin and made its people beggars.

How we all – Americans and Vietnamese – stumbled out of that mess of war with even a trifle of humankindness for each other is a grand mystery. How we eventually came to be something like friends is a greater mystery. Sometimes human beings prove better than they ought to be.

And maybe that’s the good news that war novels can offer us in this grim plague year.