Memorial Days

The conflict in Vietnam has been rewritten and reframed

into many corners of American life and has long shadowed contemporary political

science and foreign policy. The war and its aftermath have engendered

award-winning films and books. It has held up a mirror to the twentieth century

and to the wars of the twenty-first.

Set in wartime Vietnam and contemporary Vietnam, in

wartime America and in America today, the stories that comprise Memorial Days were written from 1973 to

the present. As our continuing reappraisals of the war's shadow have unspooled

over the last half-decade, so too has Wayne Karlin returned to the subject in

his fiction, collected and published together here for the first time.

A girl in Maryland runs away from Civil War reenactors

she imagines to be American soldiers in Vietnam, while a woman in Vietnam hides

in the jungle from an American helicopter and another tries to bury the relics

of the war. A man mourns a friend lost in Iraq while a helicopter crewman in

Quang Tri loads the broken and dead into his aircraft. Extras playing soldiers

in a war film in present-day Vietnam model themselves after other war films

while a Marine in a war sees himself as a movie character. A snake coiled

around the collective control of a helicopter in Vietnam uncoils in a soldier

come home from Iraq. The chronology is the chronology of dreams or nightmares

or triggered flashbacks: images and incidents triggering other images and

incidents in a sequence that seems to make no sense--which is exactly the sense

it makes.

Some stories burn with the fresh experiences of a Marine witnessing

war firsthand. Some stories radiate a long-abiding grief. All the stories

reflect and reconfigure the Vietnam War as it echoes into the present century,

under the light of retrospection.