WANDERING SOULS: JOURNEYS WITH THE DEAD AND THE LIVING IN VIET NAM

Publisher’s Description:

“[A] poignant reminder of the war’s sad consequences for both sides.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Wandering Souls is an important, moving, utterly compelling, and wonderfully open-hearted book, one that will become a touchstone in America’s literature about the aftershocks of our terrible misadventure in Vietnam. This is a book that will endure. Decades from now, it will help people see and feel the ongoing consequences of war’s murderous folly.”  —Tim O’ Brien, author of The Things They Carried

In the Vietnamese belief, the spirits of those killed far from home, through violence or accident or war, wander the earth aimlessly, far from the family altar. If a body cannot be recovered, the deceased’s family can still draw the soul back to the family hearth by placing objects that belonged to that person on the family altar. But without the remains, or at least some object that belong to dead, the family will never find peace.

 In his new book, WANDERING SOULS: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books; October 6, 2009), award-winning writer Wayne Karlin tells the poignant story of how an American veteran helped a Vietnamese family find peace by returning to them the documents he had taken from their son and brother’s body, and in turn found peace with himself. The lives – and perhaps the souls – of First Lieutenant Homer Steedly, Jr. and Sergeant-medic Hoang Ngoc Dam became inextricably bound together when they met accidentally on a jungle path in Viet Nam and Homer shot and killed Dam. Nearly forty years later, Homer returned to Viet Nam to ask Dam’s family for forgiveness, and to help them return Dam’s remains to his home village. “The Hoang family today,” writes Karlin, “is certain that there was and is a spiritual connection between Dam and Homer.”

 Drawing on interviews with Homer, his family and other veterans, and members of Dam’s family, Homer’s letters home from the war, and Dam’s journal entries, Karlin explores the parallels in the two men’s lives and the circumstances that led to their fatal meeting. Both Homer and Dam were from small villages on midland plains; both grew up poor and worked the land; both were oldest brothers, willingly taking on the mantle of the responsible sibling; both had parents who taught them codes of courage custom, duty, and industry; and both came from a tradition in which education and military service were sacrosanct.

 By the time of their jungle encounter in Pleiku Province, on March 19, 1969, Homer had been in Viet Nam for six months; Dam had been in the war for more than five years. Homer had seen heavy combat, yet when he met Dam, it was the first – and only – time he came face-to-face with the enemy. As Dam raised his rifle, Homer had no choice: he could either shoot the man in front of him, or be shot himself. “This is the first time, eyeball to eyeball, I saw someone and I pulled the trigger and I knew, beyond any doubt, I killed that person. And – it’s pretty traumatic,” Homer recalls in WANDERING SOULS. He extracted two small notebooks and some loose papers from the dead soldier’s pockets, which he sent to his mother for safekeeping. He didn’t know that for the Hoang family, the documents were literally a piece of Dam’s soul. “Dam had become one of the 300,000 wandering souls – the missing in action from the war – that still haunt Viet Nam,” Karlin writes. “As long as they remained lost, the war would never be over.”

When he returned home from his tour of duty, Homer retreated within himself, tormented by his experiences during the war. He kept a growing store of grief – for lost friends, the horrors he had witnessed, the men he had killed – deep within his heart. Karlin recounts Homer’s years of trauma and his slow movement toward a recovery that could only come about through confrontation with the ghosts of his past – and the parallel need of Dam’s family to bring their child and brother’s “wandering soul” to his own peace. At Homer’s request, Karlin helped him locate Dam’s family and return the documents taken from Dam’s body. Then, in June 2008, accompanied by Karlin, Homer returned to Viet Nam to meet the family of the man he had killed. In seeking their forgiveness, he hoped to find some release from the war that had defined his life.

WANDERING SOULS brings to light the grace and courage of a soldier who brought back the soul of the man he killed to that man’s family, taking onto himself their own rending grief. It is also the story of the mercy of a family – and an entire village – who took that soldier to their hearts and allowed their gratitude at the ending he brought to their story to outweigh their need to hate him for the death that began it. “What stayed in my mind,” Karlin concludes, “is the [Hoang] family’s compassion to Homer, and their need to dig up the past in order to rebury it properly, with wisdom and compassion and proper commemoration.”

A powerful portrait of the terrible price of war on soldiers and families, WANDERING SOULS reveals a way to heal not by forgetting war’s hard lessons, but by remembering its costs.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

WANDERING SOULS: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam

By Wayne Karlin

Published by Nation Books

ISBN: 978-1-56858-405-8  •  $25.95 / Hardcover  •  368 pages

“A surprisingly moving account of a Vietnam War veteran who returned to face the family of the man he killed…. Despite the reconciliation, the book is a poignant reminder of the war’s sad consequences for both sides.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Wandering Souls is an important, moving, utterly compelling, and wonderfully open-hearted book, one that will become a touchstone in America’s literature about the aftershocks of our terrible misadventure in Vietnam. This is a book that will endure. Decades from now, it will help people see and feel the ongoing consequences of war’s murderous folly.”

—Tim O’ Brien, author of The Things They Carried

“Wandering Souls strips away the heroic mythology used to mask the depravity and anguish of war. It exposes the shattered lives and profound grief that alters the contours of those who engage in industrial slaughter. It reminds us that the essence of war is death. It reminds us that once we descend into the stygian world of killing there is never any escape. The book is a plea for redemption and forgiveness. It is a plea for empathy. And it is a plea to look at war not as it is sold to us by the entertainment industry and the war-makers, but as it is experienced by those who fight and die.”

—Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

“Wandering Souls proves again Wayne Karlin’s talent in discovering the beauty of the human soul in the ruins of war and loss.”

—Le Minh Khue, author of The Stars, The Earth, The River 

“In Wandering Souls, Wayne Karlin speaks our common language of sorrow and pain and reconciliation. His book is sure to find its readers in the two countries he loves.”

—Ho Anh Thai, author of Behind the Red Mist

“Wandering Souls is a mesmerizing, beautifully rendered work of non-fiction that, in a large way, is a culmination of Karlin’s life work. I don’t believe anyone else on the planet could have told this moving, sometimes heart-breaking, yet ultimately redemptive story of two men whose lives intersected for a few seconds in a fatal encounter in Vietnam forty years ago, and whose lives were re-united in a monumental fashion nearly four decades later…This is a one-of-a-kind Vietnam war story, peppered with illuminating allusions to Vietnam War literature by Americans and Vietnamese. It is a book not soon forgotten.” 

--Marc Leepson,  (lead) review in the Vietnam Veterans of America magazine The Veteran

  Selected as a “Required Reading” book by the New York Post.

Essay: What War Stories Need to Accomplish: https://www.laprogressive.com/veterans/vietnam-what-war-stories-need-to-accomplish