AUDIE MURPHY IN SAIGON

A debut collection of fiction and nonfiction ruminates on the Vietnam War and other calamities.

The fog of war fills every page of this volume, preventing clarity and necessitating an uncertain, grasping speculation on the part of everyone involved: characters, readers, and author. The nonfiction section is dominated by Tiffany’s “Vietnam Anti-Memoirs,” a novella-length series of essays accounting for different periods in the life of an Army combat medic who served in the war: witnessing an unintentional massacre of civilians in 1966; searching for accurate representations of the conflict in the books and movies made in the following decades; returning to the country in the ’90s in search of closure. The fiction section features two stories set during the war. “Saigon Passional” tells the tale of a member of the Women’s Army Corps working in the Army Mortuary, where she must see to the body of a Green Beret who bears strange wounds reminiscent of a crucifixion. The title story follows a Special Forces sergeant assigned to guard the wife of an American dignitary in the early days of the war. Other fictional tales are set in Frederick the Great’s Berlin and ancient Rome, but the shadow of Vietnam hangs over even these unrelated stories. Tiffany has a fine eye for the surreal, locating and highlighting the most startling aspects of a given scenario. The author is at his best when he offers direct descriptions and stark images, as here, where a medic tends to the wounds of the civilians his countrymen have just shot: “They cowered in their pain, seeming to await further brutality. They were even sheepish in their agony. As he toiled over the wounds he repeated again and again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ They shrunk from his words.” The nonfiction pieces generally work better than the fiction ones, as Tiffany’s essayistic tendencies sometimes clutter the stories’ pages and weigh down the narrative momentum. Even so, there is an odd cohesion to the book. Fiction and nonfiction seem to blur even within individual pieces, and an aesthetic of fragmentation hovers above all. The author may not have solved the problem of how to write about the Vietnam War, but this volume seems a step in the right direction.

An engrossing collection about the brutality and confusion of the Vietnam War.