Tainted War, Vol. 44 Book

[Written for the Philadelphia Inquirer June 1991]

"Just when you thought it safe to come out of hiding," a Midwestern critic wrote recently, "along comes another Vietnam book."

It would be a shame if this kind of attitude were applied to John Balaban's memoir, REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE. In the first place, the reductive term "Vietnam book," is not much more accurate than, say, "love book," or "human book." There are as many ways to write about a place, or a subject, as there are authors, and only a kind of intellectual or emotional indolence would move someone ' a critic, especially ' to dismiss a book simply because of its subject matter.

In the second place, Balaban has written a stirring, thought-provoking, and strikingly original memoir, an adventure of conscience that challenges, educates, entertains and inspires.

Balaban went to Vietnam as a conscientious objector. Here again, however, that label seems grossly inaccurate. He was a CO who packed a .38; who, during the 1968 Tet offensive, guarded a provincial hospital with a machine gun; who used fists and metal chairs on scurrilous street punks; who befriended soldiers and CIA agents, and spent as much time in Viet Cong-controlled areas as some combatants.

His strange odyssey began in 1967. Distressed, like many college students of that time, by America's involvement in Vietnam, Balaban chose a course of action not very popular among his contemporaries: He traded in his student deferment and went to Vietnam as a noncombatant Volunteer. "It occurred to me," he writes, "that the only place to learn anything, to do anything about Vietnam was in Vietnam."

The first hundred pages of REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE tell the story of Balaban's first eight months in Vietnam, teaching linguistics with the International Voluntary Services (IVS) at a university in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho. Smoothly, often poetically, Balaban takes us beyond the war and into the gaiety and turbulence of the country's soul. Here is a scene from a riverside market:

"All about, as we passed through the fish stalls in search of the spice section, our shoes picking up glittery scales, blood-flecked leaves, and scraps of entrails, I could make out ...'Americans' rising from the peasant hubbub above the racket of the amplified radio, the clacking sticks of soup vendors, the fruit sellers' chants, the shine of a knife sharpener's wheel, a lone flute song, and the cries of various monkeys, finches, canaries, lorikeets, and kingfishers caged for sale. We passed buckets of snakes, tubs of turtles; walked through the meat section where pig halves knotted with mushy fat and stringy haunches of beef hung from hooks in on orbit of green flies. I paused as a woman butcher raised her cleaver and brought it down lopping off a piece of pork, then wrapped it up in some military newspaper with a fuzzy front-page photo showing Viet Cong bodies lying, disemboweled, on an empty roadway."

This first, best section of the book ends with Balaban doing guard and orderly duty at the local operating room at the height of the Tet offensive. His account of the fighting, during which Balaban was wounded, is as gripping as any thriller, and the horrifying descriptions of civilian casualties serve as a proper foundation for the rest of the book.

Here and there, Balaban's writing suffers small lapses, usually when he loses faith in his descriptive abilities and thumps the reader with superfluous sentences. "We were stunned," or "I was in a real fix." Once or twice his objectivity is strained by phrases like "inimitable, ignorant, American savagery," and occasionally his philosophical musings seem repetitive.

But these are small specks of dust on a marvelous canvas that captures not only the horror of wartime Vietnam, but also its humor, irony, courage, craziness, corruption, decadence and day-to-day life.

Floating beneath all this, never far from the surface, is Balaban's highly developed sense of moral outrage. After Tet, this outrage drew him away from IVS and into an organization called the Committee of Responsibility, which arranged for severely wounded Vietnamese children to be brought to America for medical treatment.

Balaban's account of these children's suffering, of the bureaucratic obstacles to their temporary emigration, of the swampy moral ground he stumbled into while trying to wrest something unblemished from the war's devastation, is unsparingly honest.

Interspersed with the wrenching case histories of these child victims are sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous accounts of Balaban's personal life. After his alternative service ended, Balaban came back to America, where he endured much the same sense of dislocation suffered by combat veterans.

In August 1971, with his pregnant wife in tow, Balaban returned to Vietnam to research ca dao, Vietnamese folk poetry. "At this point in my experience with the war. I saw collecting these poems and translating them as the only sensible political act I could perform," he writes.

Here, and in the final section when he visits poverty-stricken Hanoi and, farther south, seeks out and finds some of the people saved 15 years earlier by the Committee of Responsibility, we probe deeper and deeper layers of Balaban's affection for Vietnam, his anger at war, and, finally, his sadness at the strictures of Vietnam's postwar communism.

REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE is a superb book. Part internal exploration, part historical treatise, part travelogue, part political statement, it marks the reader with the indelible print of a writer of conscience who dared, in the words of a Vietnamese poem, to "go out and see Heaven's face."