The Heart That Fed and If I Don't Laugh, I'll Cry: A Son and a Daughter's Memorable Memoirs

BY MARC LEEPSON

It’s a rarity these days to find a book that tells the story of a Vietnam War veteran’s tour of duty and its aftermath in a unique way. Much less one that’s creatively crafted and compulsively readable. The writer and illustrator Carl Sciacchitano has accomplished all of the above in his new graphic memoir, The Heart That Fed: A Father, a Son, and the Long Shadow of War (Gallery 13/Simon & Schuster, 288 pages. $29.99, hardcover; $14.99, Kindle).

In it, Sciacchitano tells the story of his father David’s life-changing, 18-month (1966-68) Vietnam War tour of duty as an Air Force aircraft mechanic. David Sciacchitano, who joined the USAF to avoid the vagaries of the draft, served in the rear when he arrived in country. But he later spent a good portion of his time working with the 20th Air Support Group at the airfield at La Vang Combat Base just south of the DMZ near Qu?ng Tr?. Among other things, David Sciacchitano manned an M-60 machinegun when the base came under a furious NVA attack during Tet ’68.

Spinning out his story with drawings, words, excerpts from his father’s letters home, and more, Carl Sciacchitano expertly flashes backward and forward, as he also weaves in anecdotes from his relationship with his father during his days growing up in Northern Virginia, as well as a trip the two took to Vietnam early in 2020.

At its heart, though, The Heart That Fed remains a revealing look at one man’s tour of duty in Vietnam and its far-reaching consequences on him and his family.

Among the many effective set pieces in the book is Carl Sciacchitano’s telling of his father’s second assignment to South Vietnam—this time as a newly minted State Department Foreign Service Officer. Soon after the young junior diplomat arrived in-country early in 1975, he played a supporting role in a Hollywood-worthy escape-by-sea drama. It starred his boss, Terry McNamara, the U.S. Counsel General in the Mekong Delta, who miraculously managed get some 300 South Vietnamese men, women, and children (and all his American crew) out of Can Tho by boat just as the North Vietnamese took over the country.

Another standout section: a 12-page look at what came before, during, and after David Sciacchitano’s appearance before his son’s high school English class in 2004, where he talked about his war experiences after the class had read Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War-heavy novel, In the Lake of the Woods. The look on his face after a student asks him about PTSD speaks volumes about how he handled his ongoing post-war stress.

Call it a graphic novel or a comic book, The Heart That Fed is a worthy, one-of-a-kind contribution to the Vietnam War literary canon.

Molly Stillman, a blogger, writer, and podcast host, has written an engaging new memoir with a cleverly descriptive title and subtitle: If I Don’t Laugh, I’ll Cry: How Death, Debt, and Comedy Led to a Life of Faith, Farming, and Forgetting What I Came into This Room For (Nelson Books, 240 pp. $19.99, paper). The “death” part of the subtitle refers to Molly Stillman losing her mother, Lynda Van Devanter, in 2002 when she was just seventeen.

Stillman devotes most of the first half of her book to her mother, who as many Vietnam War veterans know, served as a 22-year-old U.S. Army operating room nurse in the war and later became a powerful women veterans’ advocate. After joining Vietnam Veterans of America in 1979, the year after the organization was founded, Lynda Van Devanter headed VVA’s Women’s Project, the first-ever national women veterans advocacy group in a U.S. veterans service organization. In 1983, she wrote what would become a classic Vietnam War memoir: Home Before Morning: The Story of An Army Nurse in Vietnam.

Molly Stillman does a great job telling her mother’s life story concisely, including the often-traumatic details of her 1969-70 Vietnam War tour at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, and how she came home with a “severe” case of PTSD. Stillman also fills in an important part of early VVA history, a tale that began in May 1979 when Lynda Van Devanter ran into Bobby Muller and they started swapping war stories. After that, Stillman writes, her mother “didn’t feel so alone for the first time in a long time,” and within a month VVA’s founder asked her to form the Women’s Project.

The book contains illuminating details of Van Devanter’s trip back to Vietnam in 1982 with a VVA delegation on a pioneering mission to work on issues including MIAs, Agent Orange, and Amerasian children. “Returning to Vietnam,” Stillman writes, “had a profound impact on her healing journey. [On] the way home, she knew she had to tell her story, the whole story, to the world.”

That was the genesis of Home Before Morning, the pioneering book that came out the following year. One of the first nonfiction accounts of the Vietnam War written from an American woman’s perspective, that groundbreaking appeared at a time, Stillman notes, “when very few people “were talking about the brutality” of the war, “let alone the circumstances of women veterans.”

Theres a lot more about Lynda Van Devanter in the book, including the Agent Orange-related illness that took her life at 55. Some of it was difficult for her daughter to recount. But as the title indicates, the book is suffused with humor, even sometimes in the darkest of times, from Stillman, as well as from her mother and her father, Tom Buckley.

“Our home was constantly filled with laughter,” she writes. “We were a boisterous, loud-laughing family that could find the humor and joy in almost any situation—even if that situation (or the humor, for that matter) was borderline inappropriate.” She and her family, she says, “believe that laughter, sent straight from God, was the best medicine, and we did whatever we could to overdose on it.”

Molly Stillman spins out the rest of her young life story following her mother’s death well, focusing on her faith, her work, and her family—her husband, John, and their children, Lilly and Amos—and life on their small farm in North Carolina.

In the end, it’s an uplifting tale, and a loving ode from a daughter to her indominable mother.

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