Any
veteran of Viet Nam (and i don't mean just combat vets like Drake, i
mean REMFs like myself) ought to recognise what this story is about;
it's about damnation and about people who don't deserve it who were
sent to Hell, and about redemption.
It's about something we didn't get. |
"I
think
my country got a little off-track;
Took 'em twenty-five years to welcome me back..."
(Johnny Cash, Drive On) |
It's
about the way that people who didn't understand what some of us had
been through regarded us... and it's about the only way those people
could possibly have been brought to understand that we weren't
(quasi-quoting Drake) toxic waste that sometimes explodes without
warning; a way that could never actually happen.
It's about letting the veteran prove his worth in his own eyes and in
the eyes of others; letting him buy back his pride and his sense of
himself as a man, and not as just a hunted/hunting animal/killer.
It's about admitting that we owe the people who fight our wars
something... if only a little respect. |
"This is your lucky day -- you been back from 'Nam
for only six weeks, and I am gonna
do for you what
it took someone six months to
do for me."
"Really? Thanks, brother -- what is
it?"
"Nothin'. Sign here, please."
(Robert Blake as an Arizona motorcycle cop,
as he tickets a truck driver,
in ElectraGlide in Blue.) |
The cover
painting for this book -- especially without
the huge sight-ring that is not part of the original painting;
Baen Books has a terrible record with regard to cover art
and treatment of same -- is one of the most striking i have ever
seen illustrating a war story, either "real" or sf war.
Simply, almost crudely, rendered, showing the cruelly stressed soldier
trying to shield the child's body from the blast with his own; on his
face the expression almost of a suffering Christ, his eyes fixed in the
"thousand yard stare" of what
earlier
generations called "shell shock" or "combat fatigue" (and God damn
George S. Patton to hell), still out there on the front, fighting for
what he himself may have almost forgotten... Right there, on that
anonymous grunt's face and in his actions, is the theme of sacrifice
and damnation and redemption that Drake is playing on in his text. (One
suspects that the artist himself may well have "seen the elephant".) |
"It don't mean nothin', snake."
(David Drake, Rolling Hot
[reprinted as part of The Tank Lords]) |
| This
book, at least as i read it, is an attempt to show that that the 'Nam
grunts' catchphrase isn't true -- that it does mean something
and that we are worth something. |
"You owe us, long and heavy is the score..."
(Robert W. Service, The March of
the Dead) |
Society
owes its soldiers support and gratitude and help.
Sometimes it pays off on those debts.
Sometimes it's easier to just ignore the redliners you create. |
"But it's 'Special train for Atkins!' when the troopship's on the
tide..."
(Kipling, The Ballad of Tommy Atkins) |
