James Webb (2001), 367 pp (hb)
Lost Soldiers marks the fourth of James Webb's six published novels that I've read. Let me backtrack just a bit to sketch in some context. I think it would be fair to say that, around the mid to late 80's at the United States Naval Academy, Webb was something of an iconic figure. After all, he was a grad, class of '68, who had gone on to serve with distinction as a Marine Corps platoon commander in Vietnam. After leaving the military, he earned a law degree at Georgetown, and around that time (mid 80's, remember), while serving as an Assistant Sec. of Defense, he was an articulate and forceful voice on behalf of the military, its needs and its capabilities. In 1987, he was nominated to be Secretary of the Navy. I attended his swearing-in ceremony in the summer of '87, held on the steps of Bancroft Hall, with the audience seated in Tecumseh Court (parenthetically, that ceremony marked the beginning of my loathing for Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A"--he performed it live, and it was just as overwrought then as it is now. I don't disagree with the sentiment one iota, but damn, I hate that song).
That personal history is the first part contributing to his enhanced status at USNA. The second part has to do with his novels. Probably his most well known novel is his first, Fields of Fire, set as it is in Vietnam at the heart of the war. The one that really hit the Brigade of Midshipmen where it lived, though, was his second book, A Sense of Honor, which was set at the Academy itself. Life as a midshipman had undergone a pretty marked evolution in the two decades between Webb's time (the mid to late '60s) and the mid '80s, but the core story (in brief: pansy naïf newly arrived at the Academy toughens up and becomes a man under tutelage of hard-core but fair upper-classman) struck a chord, playing as it did on the perennial Brigade obsession with leadership and what constitutes a good officer. I can still recall mimicing the action in the book by finishing runs around the Academy perimeter with a sprint on the seawall--a several hundred meter stretch of large rocks lining the side of the Academy facing Annapolis harbor, a hard, dangerous, but exhilarating test of stamina and foot-eye coordination--and I was by no means the only one, as it was a fairly common activity (don't know if anyone ever broke a leg doing it, but I wouldn't be suprised).
Webb's earlier novels dealt largely with combat, preparation for combat, the military and it's appropriate uses, and so forth. Lost Soldiers shifts that emphasis somewhat, dealing with the fallout of war well after the fact. Brandon Condley is an ex-Marine who first encountered Vietnam when he served as a combat officer in the late '60s--much the same as Webb himself. Condley spent five years in Vietnam, then, after leaving the military, did a stint with the CIA for a few years. The remaining time up until the opening of the narrative itself in, give or take a year, 2000, he has spent kicking around Asia. He's been unable or unwilling to go home to America, which really holds nothing of interest for him. As a young soldier, he fell in love with a Vietnamese woman--a student, not a prostitute, this is not Miss Saigon redux--who was subsequently assassinated for living with the enemy, and he's never been able to put that behind him and start a family or form lasting relationships. As the book opens, he's got a gig representing the U.S. in its ongoing efforts to recover the remains of soldiers who fell in Vietnam. As he explains himself:
"I believe in God. Does that surprise you? And so I ask myself, why did He take me on this journey? Why did I wander through Asia for all those years, never fitting back in with my own people, never at ease with them anymore, in those false little kingdoms where they spend their days clutching their fragile idols of money and false power? And why was I led back here--simply to be swallowed up by bitterness, or to again become obsessed with death? I don't think so. Maybe something good was supposed to come out of it....I have a certain power, Professor. Let's call it the power of the uninvolved. I can talk to both sides, and both sides can talk to me."
"It seems to me you're very involved."
"Not when it comes to payback. If you're not Vietnamese they don't really keep you on their score sheet."
Our first glimpse of Condley comes as he and his anthropologist compatriot (an older American scientist stationed in Hawaii, for whom Webb pulls out all the stops to portray as goofy/eccentric. It's a not entirely successful bit of characterization, but he has a few fun moments) head up a river in central Vietnam to check out a set of remains newly brought to light in a remote village. It's territory Condley knows well, since he served in the area, back in the day. The skeleton they find is Caucasian, and it has dog-tags around its neck, but back in the lab in Hawaii, it becomes clear that the skeleton is not who the dog-tags claim it should be. The dog-tags themselves belong to a notorious deserter from the U.S. Army who took up with the Viet Cong and, on one occasion, was a leader of an ambush against Condley's own company. Condley becomes convinced that said deserter managed to escape Vietnam and is still alive, and he's determined to even a score against him:
"What about Salt and Pepper?"
Condley now laughed coldly, his skylike eyes growing molten once again. "That's different, Professor. They killed Marines. That's the American score sheet. And it's all about payback."
That's the set-up, but the overall plot really seems to me to be secondary. Oh, it comes to a sufficiently emphatic resolution in the end, but really it mostly provides a backdrop for an examination of some of the people that were powerfully affected by the war. It's this examination that is much more interesting than the minutia of a search for the bad guy. There's Condley's friend Dzung, trying to support his family at bare subsistence level on what he can earn running a pedicab, a mode of transport quickly becoming obsolete; it's a job he's permanently stuck with by virtue of having served in the South Vietnamese army once upon a time. There's Colonel Pham, former Viet Cong leader, with whom Condley shares a mutual respect, and Pham's daughter Van, the near-stereotypical fair damsel, who just wants to leave Vietnam and see the outside world.
The portrayal of these assorted characters is sometimes clumsy, but on the whole, there's something really interesting going on in Lost Soldiers. It's a look at the country and its people twenty five years after the U.S. pulled out of Saigon, and the tale of a man's love affair with a country, because in the end, that's what Condley loves as much as anything:
Viet Nam, Viet Nam. It had suborned him all those years ago like a wily beggar, luring him inside the tangle of its tragedies and stealing away his boyhood. It had wounded and punished him as he dared to believe he could change it. It had shown him that he could love and then relentlessly destroyed the very treasure it had offered him, finally driving him away as if he were a demonic madman. And after all the years in the wilderness it had welcomed him back again only to tease him, asking everything of him but giving nothing in return except his heart, the same heart it had once cruelly stolen.
But despite it all he had remained, unable to end his passion for its jungles and alleyways. Was that not a monumental sort of love?