Memorial Days - (Peace and Conflict) by Wayne Karlin (Paperback)

About the Book

A retrospective collection of one veteran's fifty years of Vietnam short stories

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"For Wayne Karlin, every day is Memorial Day. An
accomplished novelist, Karlin now brings us this extraordinary collection of
short stories, spanning almost fifty years. As a Vietnam veteran writer, he
remembers that war and the wars to follow, especially in Iraq, as a new
generation of veterans returns. Haunted, he haunts us, a witness who transcends
his own experience through the power of imagination. You will not read a more
harrowing story this year than "The War on Terror," dealing not only with the
Iraq War but the war at home, the military mentality and the military hardware
that increasingly dominate policing in this country. He evokes landscapes from
Vietnam to Iraq to Southern Maryland, and the ghosts, living and dead, that
wander those landscapes, with great clarity of voice and vision. Wayne Karlin
has been telling the truth about war and what Wilfred Owen called "the pity of
war" for half a century. The least the rest of us could do is listen."

--Martín Espada, winner of the National Book Award for Floaters

"This is one collection I've found endearing because as a
reader I felt the pains of those in it, their nostalgia, their bubbling
violence as a byproduct of the corrupted memories. I often wonder: if I were a
soldier, could I keep my conscience at bay when I pulled the trigger? When I
came home from the war, would the past keep haunting the present, the trauma of
war never going away? Memorial Days is valuable to those like us who did
not fight in the war(s), and yet it grants a reprieve to those who did and are
plagued by their memories."

--Khanh Ha, author of Her: The Flame Tree

"With aching clarity, Memorial Days lets us see the ways wars have changed Vietnamese and
Americans as well as our two countries. Wayne Karlin, as a firsthand witness of
wars and a peace advocate, makes sure that the lessons we can learn from our
past are never forgotten. This short story collection is a powerful call for
world peace, a torch shining our way toward empathy, compassion, hope, and
healing."

--Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, internationally best-selling
author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child

"Spanning half a century, these stories move backwards
and forwards through time and space from wartime Vietnam to Vietnam and America
today, revealing as they do the ways that old war and the new ones in the
Middle East continue to rip at the soul of this country. . . .
Karlin is the most neglected and overlooked writer of my generation. I dearly
hope this collection will bring him some of the recognition he and his work so
richly deserve."

--W. D. Ehrhart, author of From the Bark of the Daphne Tree