Acknowledgments
This is a book of fiction, hence any resemblance
to persons living or deceased is purely coincidental. The VFW Hall
on East Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee and the Heron Reservation are
completely fictional and were created for the sole purpose of the
novel.
While the battle of Khe Sanh actually did take
place in late January 1968—the beginning of the Tet Offensive—and
proceeded to escalate as the fighting continued toward Hue, the
characters are fictional as are some of the events created around
the Khe Sanh Combat Base. The soldiers are all fictional characters
and hence their opinions and feelings concerning the Vietnam
conflict and more importantly the immediate battles they fought in
are also fictional. While there were combat chaplains in Vietnam,
the chaplain in this book is fictional and his predicament and
actions that deviate somewhat from official military policy are
those of a fictional priest/chaplain suffering a crisis of faith.
What is not fiction is that the battle of Khe Sanh, like the rest
of our involvement in Vietnam, was terrible and lives were lost on
both sides of the conflict. What is not fiction is that the United
States’ role in Vietnam will forever haunt every American,
especially those men that fought and survived, and the families of
those men who were killed. We tragically fail, as a nation, to
learn from our mistakes.
In addition to my own experience as a girl whose
older brother served in Vietnam and who endured a long night with
my siblings and mother concerning that wounded brother, I am very
indebted to many books that were important to me in my research. I
tried to study the Vietnam War from many perspectives. Those books
are:
Dispatches, by Michael Herr; The End
of the Line, by Robert Pisor; Fire in the Lake, by
Frances FitzGerald; Semper Fidelis: The History of the United
States Marine Corps, by Allan R. Millett; The Pacific
War, by John Costello; Operation Buffalo: USMC Fight for the
DMZ, by Keith William Nolan; Combat Chaplain: A Thirty-Year
Vietnam Battle, by James D. Johnson; Chaplains with Marines
in Vietnam, 1962-1971, by Commander Herbert L. Bergsma, CHC,
U.S. Navy; Valley of Decision: The Siege of Khe Sanh, by
John Prados and Ray W. Stubbe; Free in the Forest: Ethnohistory
of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, 1954-1976, by Gerald
Cannon Hickey; The Montagnards of South Vietnam: A Study of Nine
Tribes, by Robert L. Mole; Reading Athena’s Dance Card: Men
Against Fire in Vietnam, by Russell W. Glenn; The Battle of
Leyte Gulf: 23-26 October 1944, by Thomas J. Cutler;
Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples, edited by Jean
Michaud; Vietnam: A History, by Stanley Karnow; Our
Vietnam, by A. J. Langguth; The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam
War: A Political, Social and Military History, edited by
Spencer C. Tucker; They Called Them Angels: American Military
Nurses of World War II, by Kathi Jackson; A Chorus of
Stones, by Susan Griffin; No Time for Fear: Voices of
American Military Nurses in World War II, by Diane Burke
Fessler; Ojibway Heritage, by Basil Johnson; and Farming
the Cutover; A Social History of Northern Wisconsin, 1900-1940,
by Robert Gough. I am also grateful for the terminology provided by
the Vietnam Project.
A very special thank-you to the editor and staff
of Leatherneck magazine (the official magazine of the United
States Marine Corps), for their thoughtful and sensitive answers to
painful questions I posed regarding the care taken to identify
those Marines killed and the Marine Corps policy of notifying the
families of those deceased men; and to Professor Edward Griffin,
for his reading of the manuscript and for his own perspective based
on military service.
Parts of the novel also appeared in slightly
altered form in The Bellingham Review and Glimmer
Train. I received wonderful support and encouragement from the
owners and editors of Glimmer Train, Linda B. Swanson-Davies
and Susan Burmeister-Brown, who have created an enduring literary
journal that embraces stories that might not otherwise get
published.
I am grateful to Marly Rusoff, my agent, for her
enthusiasm and belief in this book, and to Kathryn Court and Ali
Bothwell, at Viking Penguin, for their editorial help, support, and
enthusiasm. Many thanks as well to Steven Barclay and Kathryn
Barcos, for their advice and unfailing kindness; and to William
Merwin for his generous advice.
I should like to thank the following for their
faith, love, and continual support: Peg Johnson, Heather McIver,
Dawn York, W Kent Krueger, Trudy Lapic, Scott and Lisa King, Craig
and Sal Johnson, Deb Swackhamer, Jan Philibert, Gwen Ellis, Paul
Ellis and Viola Kien, Barbara Stoltz, Tracy Ellis and family, Edith
Mucke, Betty Johnson, Alan and Jeannie Steffen, Theresa Durand,
Patricia Galiger Schoenborn; my “other” parents, Darlene and Miles
Galiger; Brian and Jody Hayman, William and Margaret Hunt, Doris
and David Preus, Dan Guenther and Margaret Pennings, Patti
Brierbauer, and Donna Cotter. I received mentoring and guidance as
an undergraduate from Professors Charles Sugnet and Michael Dennis
Browne, and more recently, extraordinary assistance from Professors
Shirley Nelson Garner, Toni McNaron, and Madelon Sprengnether.
Also, a special thank-you to the staff and the chair, Kent Bales,
of the English Department at the University of Minnesota, and
Margaret Yzaguirre of the College of Liberal Arts. I am also
grateful to my mother, Relindes Catherine Alexander Berg, and all
the women who helped raise me and who were/are warriors in their
own right.
Tragically, Tom Lapic, senior aide to Senator
Paul Wellstone and husband to Trudy Lapic, died in the plane crash
on October 25, 2002, and hence did not live to see this book, which
he so supported and did not get to read in its entirety. But he
knew the conflicts, philosophically and morally, concerning all the
issues involved in this novel and worked constantly toward righting
those wrongs until the day he died.
The writing of this novel was assisted by the
financial support of a 1997 Minnesota State Arts Board Grant.