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By Larry
Heinemann
Biography & Autobiography, Current Affairs, Military
Doubleday Books
Hardcover, 256 pages
April
19, 2005
$22.95
038551221X
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From the author of the classic National
Book Award–winning novel Paco's Story, an equally
classic and haunting memoir of the Vietnam War.
In 1966 Larry Heinemann, a working-class twenty-two-year-old
from Chicago, was drafted into the Army just as the American
military buildup in Vietnam was going into overdrive.
He served one year of combat duty with the 25th Infantry Division,
from March 1967 to March 1968, most of it in the vicinity
of Cu Chi (of tunnels fame). It was the most horrific
and consequential year of his life and served as the raw material
for his two subsequent classic war novels, Close Quarters
and Paco's Story. The war also devastated his
family. Both of his brothers served in the military, and one
of them killed himself, while the other has been missing for
many years. Truly, the Vietnam War altered Heinemann's
life utterly and forever.
Black Virgin Mountain is structured along a railway
journey Larry Heinemann took in 1992 from Hanoi to Ho Chi
Minh City as the guest of the Vietnam Writers Association
and ends with a crawl through the Tunnels of Cu Chi and a
climb up the sacred mountain that provides the title's namesake.
From there, he can view the entire compass of his combat experience
in-country (including the horrific battle in which Oliver
Stone also fought and used as the bloody climax of Platoon).
Along the way, the author encounters Vietnamese veterans of
the war and views sites that trigger powerful memories. This
memoir is an unforgettable threnody and a moving act of reconciliation.
Larry Heinemann is the author of
three novels: Close Quarters (1977), one of the earliest
novels of the Vietnam War; Paco's Story (1987), winner
of the National Book Award; and Cooler by the Lake
(1992). He lives in his native city of Chicago, Illinois.
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