One of the touchstones of war and armies is the tenor of language, which varies from military jargon to acronyms to euphemism to obscenity. I decided to begin my novel about a Vietnam War veteran ...with obscenity. Accordingly, I have selected the opening pages of Tom o’ Vietnam for this symposium about war. I wanted to touch on the sense of “once a soldier always a soldier” and how that plays out in various ways. For my protagonist, Tom, the combat he has seen in the war has deeply affected him. A dozen or so years after the war he is still at very loose ends as he travels around America on buses and reads obsessively his bible of sorts, King Lear by William Shakespeare.
Wars don’t end and I wanted to write a book that dealt with that topic. We live in a world of headlines and today’s news but war is always news and my lifetime has been marked by endless war. I wanted to show how one man was turned inside-out by war but also I wanted to go to the place that Shakespeare went to, the place of human suffering to which we try to turn our backs but doesn’t go away. How could it?
“Ayesha” is part of a short story collection I am putting together, all taking place during or soon after the Iran-Iraq war, 1980–1988. Because many of my friends and relatives live in Iran, I am ...preoccupied with the damage of war to people caught in it. The stories are mainly focused on the inhabitants of Martyr Hassan Alley, their hardships, their losses of sons or husbands drafted and killed or severely injured fighting at the front. I believe literature can express more accurately and deeply than news reports the subtleties of people’s lives, their emotions, how they cope with hardship and loss.
