Hitchhiking Home from Danang: a Memoir of Vietnam, PTSD and Reclamation (McFarland, 240 pp. $29.95, paper; $13.49, Kindle) is a well-written memoir of self-reflection by a poet who spent a year in the Vietnam War. Gerald McCarthy, who enlisted in the Marines at age 17 after graduating high school, spent his 1966-67 tour of duty in Vietnam with the 1st Marine Engineer Battalion on guard duty, loading and unloading supplies and cargo, and as an expert scrounger in Chu Lai and Da Nang.
Although he did not see combat, McCarthy’s year in-country contributed to his PTSD, which seems to be the result of a series of traumas since childhood and during and after his Vietnam War service. After returning home from the war, McCarthy went AWOL and later deserted while assigned to guard duty at the Polaris Missile Facility in Charleston, South Carolina.
He was arrested, imprisoned, and treated for PTSD by VA doctors for years. He eventually went to college and graduate school, married and had a family. However, McCarthy’s PTSD persisted.
His book is not written in chronological order, but nevertheless hangs together well if read in the usual way. McCarthy says it can be read backwards and each chapter can be read independently. When a chapter or paragraph is in italics, it connotes something that disturbs the author. There is some repetition, which is deliberate and, McCarthy says, mimics his issues with the past. These affectations seem to work, and the book is a good read whatever chapter you begin with.
Throughout the book, McCarthy expresses regrets over his “foolish” decision to go to Vietnam and he explains why he later became an antiwar and antiracist activist. He taught creative writing at Attica Prison in New York and considers that the most meaningful experience of his life. He believes he is an example of how PTSD can result from negative experiences throughout one’s life, his wartime experiences being only one element of it. “This is not a war story,” he says, “although there is war in it and many deaths.”
Each short chapter’s title is a popular song of the late 1960s or later. The content of each chapter is loosely related to the chapter’s song title and song contents.
Surprisingly, McCarthy does not include an antiwar song, such as Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” Not surprisingly, he does not use “The Ballard of the Green Berets” by Army Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.
Channeling Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Gerald McCarthy spends an entire chapter enumerating every way in which one could die in the Vietnam War. Another chapter describes a fellow prison inmate who, while being transported on a train, went crazy as he believed all the people in the car were Viet Cong. Another chapter describes the author’s father’s exploits in World War II.
In the final analysis, the diverse 52 chapters mix well together into a tasty jambalaya of a book.
McCarthy’s website is geraldmccarthypoet.com/
— Harvey Weiner
Books in Review II 