Observations of a Shakespeare-Obsessed Vietnam War Veteran

REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON

When my wife, Janna, was in college she took a Shakespeare class and read each play while listening to a recording of it on headphones at a desk in the University of Maryland library. I flashed back to Janna listening to and reading the Bard in 1970 when I started Baron Wormser’s poetic, Shakespeare-infused novel Tom O’Vietnam (New Rivers Press, 165 pp., $19, paper.)

The Shakespeare connection in this ambitious, cleverly conceived and executed book is the bombastic tragedy King Lear, a play that the novel’s main character Tom, a 32-year-old Vietnam War veteran, has been obsessed with since high school. How obsessed? For starters, he carried a paperback copy of the play with him during his combat-heavy tour in the war and in all the years afterward. And after the war Tom quotes from it often to family, friends, and strangers.

The emotionally fragile Tom constantly strives to understand nearly everything about the play, especially the lives of Lear’s saintly and tragic daughter, Cordelia, and the doomed Duke of Gloucester and his illegitimate son Edmund. Not to mention trying to fathom what Shakespeare was up to putting his characters through emotional hell. It’s no coincidence that one of the characters in the sorrowful, death-infused play is known as Poor Tom.

Wormser, a prolific poet, creative writer, and essayist and a former poet laureate of Maine, tells an elliptical story in his short but meaty book. He infuses his meandering plot with innumerable flashbacks (to the war primarily, and to a certain tragic, death-causing incident in particular), along with lots of King Lear quotes and allusions. The dialogue (presented without quotes) contains lots of Shakespearian words, all those flashbacks, and more.

The book isn’t always easy to read. However, Wormser more than makes up for that by giving us insightful character studies, clever dialogue, a wee bit of humor, and an ultimately compelling tale that ends at a most suitable place, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C..

Wormser, who is of the Vietnam War generation but did not serve in the military, does an admirable job with a difficult assignment: creating an emotionally troubled Vietnam veteran without resorting to tired, screwed-up Nam vet stereotypes. He has the literary skill to create a fully realized character in Tom, a man who finds it “hard to get rid of the reek of war.”

Worser also gets innumerable details of in-country Vietnam War infantry life right, which helps with the character development. And he has this homeless vet go on a quest that picks up in intensity (and hope) as Tom takes Greyhound buses to his siblings’ far-flung homes. Along the rocky way, Tom encounters strangers, his siblings and other family members, and his sometimes girlfriend.

Best of all, there’s Wormser’s often sparkling prose, as in these words from Tom early in the book: “I’m homeless, a wanderer on the heath, an exclaimer of serious nonsense, a man with no fixed domicile or occupation, though to me it’s the opposite: I’ve got lots of homes. What do they say in the army? I rotate.”

And this: “The play says that if you think you’re going somewhere safe, you’re wrong. You’re born into the trouble that people make and then you die in that trouble. You can turn your head. You can pretend. You can try to become a master of the trouble. You can say you don’t care. None of what you say matters.”

And this, a poem that pops up as Tom comes face to face with The Wall:

A depth of sorrow I’d not believed
Before I came to stand there and watch the sun
Soften these un-lost names
I wish to speak to each one, a memory of the tongue

Having not read King Lear for eons, and not being much of a Shakespeare scholar (that is, I’m nothing close to being one), I had to check to see if that poem—as well as others in the book—was from Shakespeare or from Wormser. It was the latter, as were many of the other verses.

That’s a giant compliment for a poet-novelist who has produced a terrific book about the struggles of a Vietnam War veteran. I strongly recommend Tom O’Vietnam, even if you don’t know King Lear from King Midas.

A War Remembered: The Vietnam War Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library (Tower Books/University of Texas, 242 pp., $29.95), is a coffee table-ish book put together by Mark K. Updegrove, the former director of the Library. The book’s content centers on the events that took place during a three-day academic-like conference the Library held in April 2016 that featured an impressive group of Vietnam War mavens.

The lineup included Peter Arnett, H.W. Brands, Ken Burns, Joe Galloway, Tom Hayden, Adm. Bobby Inman, Bob Kerrey, John Kerry, David Maraniss, Dan Rather, Jan Scruggs, Nick Ut, and Marilyn Young. Those A-Listers and other scholars, war correspondents, government policy makers, antiwar activists, and Vietnam War veterans took part in a series of panels and Q&As to hash out the war’s Big Questions. Or in the words of the organizers, “to shed definitive light on the war, and its lessons and legacy.”

The book does a decent job in that regard, with one gigantic exception. Scruggs, the former GI who was the moving force behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, offers a worthy foreword in which he melds his own war and Wall-building experiences with a look at LBJ and the war. A longer (twenty-five page) essay, “Turning Points of the War,” by Michael McDonald, the Library’s deputy director, concisely sets out the war’s high and low points, including an accurate summary of what happened to its veterans after the war.

There also are transcripts of several panels and talks. The latter includes the speeches of former Navy Lt. and U.S. Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry and of Pham Quang Vinh, Vietnam’s Ambassador to the U.S., along with Updegrove’s conversation with Burns and his creative Vietnam War documentary partner, Lynn Novick.

The one large exception to the book’s worth: Updgrove’s conversation with 92-year-old Henry Kissinger, who has about as much credibility on Vietnam War policy making as Saddam Hussein would have had on weapons of mass destruction.

“Controversy over his involvement in the war had clung to him through the years,” Updegrove notes in his short introduction, which is like saying Caligula has been the subject of “controversy” over the centuries. He warmly welcomed Kissinger (“It is a privilege to have you on this stage.”), and then lobbed softball questions at the Nixon administration’s prime Vietnam War policymaker. And Kissinger self-servingly prattled on, distorting the truth, claiming he couldn’t remember certain crucial facts, and denigrating those who opposed his policies. In other words, Kissinger spent his time on stage doing what he’s done for the last four decades: disingenuously trying to burnish his (and Nixon’s) tarnished reputations.