Finding Peace for War’s Wandering Souls

Wayne KarlinWayne Karlin 

In honor of Veterans Day, I attended a fascinating talk by novelist Wayne Karlin on his new book Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books, 2009). In addition to being a top-flight writer, Wayne, a neighbor and friend, is a Vietnam vet who regularly journeys to Vietnam to work with writers there and to address the wounds of the war. Wandering Souls is an actual account of an American lieutenant (Homer Steedly) who killed a Vietnamese soldier (Hoang Ndoc Dam) in battle and then, years later, asked Wayne to return the man’s papers to his family. Two years later he himself went over.

What happened next was a remarkable story of forgiveness and healing, both for the lieutenant and for Dam’s family. I can’t begin to do justice to the story here—you must buy the book for yourself—but it involves (among other things) entering a world where the dividing line between the living and the dead is far more porous than most Americans believe. Before the return of Dam’s papers, the family had seen him as one forced to wander restlessly in the afterlife because he had not been buried in home ground. The return of Dam’s papers led to the discovery of his bones (in part through the help of a medium) and a final ritual burying.

This digging up and then reburying of the past worked metaphorically as well. Steedly had killed Dam up close (it was a chance encounter where both men reached for their guns) and had seen the light go out of his eyes. The memory haunted him. By revisiting his family, he was able to find peace for his own restless soul.

Steedly was one of Dam’s pall bearers, leading Karlin to vent the following anger against those responsible for America’s senseless involvement in this war:

“I think of the scenario I had fantasized when we first saw Dam’s altar. How each soldier must forever carry one of the dead he made back to the family. How he must bear the weight of the body and the weight of their grief. But looking at my friend now, the earth of Dam’s grave still on his hands, I know that he is not who should be here, helping to bury the remains of the man he killed. I know who should be here, bearing the weight of this grief all around us, and I know that will never happen.”

Wayne opens the book with the Thomas Hardy poem “The Man He Killed,” a work powerful in its simplicity. It captures fully Steedly’s encounter with Dam:

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because–
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although

He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,
Off-hand like–just as I–
Was out of work–had sold his traps–
No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

Steedly, like Hardy’s narrator, had created a narrative about the man he killed. Wayne mentioned that Vietnam vet/author Tim O’Brien does the same in his story “The Man I Killed.” The narrative Steedly imagined for Dam was inaccurate, but that’s not the point. By refusing to dehumanize the man he killed, he held on to his own humanity.  He was burdened but ultimately saved by that decision.

Wayne noted in his talk that veterans are returning these days from Iraq and Afghanistan carrying the same emotional scars as Steedly. Wandering Souls points to the possibility of healing. The process can take a long time and involves a virtual pilgrimage, but inner peace lies at the end of that road. Wayne, Steedly, and (in absentia)  Dam show us the way.

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