Introduction: Finding the Diary

It was that thrill you get when something lost is unexpectedly found. There it was at the bottom of a mildewed old trunk, a victim of years of storage and water damage: my journal and a water stained field jacket with fire station patches sewn on it. It wasn't identified with a fancy title or bound in red leather. It was an old spiral bound note book, the cardboard cover long since destroyed, the wires of the binder rusting a reddish, old blood color onto the pages.

My heart was suddenly in my mouth. My journal. My days in Vietnam. Oh, shit, the memories.

I am not a person who keeps a diary. I have near-perfect recall of events going back to my earliest childhood. I wrote an entire book about my life (Playing the Field, Putnam, 1987) without a single note. I just remembered it all.

But my Vietnam trips were different. Something sparked my sense of history on those occasions. Perhaps it was because I had a young son at home and I wanted to give him some tangible record of what his mother was doing while risking her neck so far away. If I ducked too slowly or took the wrong step and came home in a plastic bag like so many of the young men over there, those pages written in my own hand would at least give him a glimpse into my thoughts.

I have to turn the pages carefully. They have become soft and easily torn like the hearts of those who went to ‘Nam and came back to tell the tale.  The journal is filled with fragments that barely make sense. "...muddy red clay peasants pissing in a roadside ditch..." And "...churning air chopper sounds beating...."

I take the journal into my bedroom and lay it carefully on the bed as you would a sick old person. I will take care of it to get out the memories. Flesh them out of the destroyed paper. Make them live again one last time. Give shape to my fears. And, yes, texture to my passions.

I'll write this stuff here.