At one point in Mike McLaughlin’s captivating novel The War You’ve Always Wanted (Koehler Books, 252 pp. $26.95, hardcover; $18.95, paper; $7.49, e book) the protagonist, the ever-thoughtful young Army Sgt. Pat Dolan finds a piece of a map holding up the wobbly end of a table at the newsroom he’s been assigned to as war correspondent.
After gazing at it, he realizes that the map represents some unidentifiable memory of the war, as “[original] symbols lingered around the edges like bad memories” with an effect he describes as “haunting.” Dolan is forced eventually to conclude that, when it came to the map as a witness to a moment in the Vietnam War, “determining a winner was impossible.”
This ineffable quality is emblematic of the novel as a whole, as we follow Dolan through his enlistment in 1971 as the war is winding down and Americans are being shipped out of Vietnam, to his position as an Army journalist whose mission is to sell the South Vietnamese on Vietnamization, essentially, the war sans American troops.
Dolan initially plunges into the war with fanciful expectations drawn from his father’s medals gained from taking part in the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach in World War II. From there, McLaughlin wisely gives us a first-person account of the elder Dolan’s own experience, a horror he describes as “too much to comprehend,” but which he berates himself for not conveying fully enough for his son to avoid what he went through.
Ultimately, however, Pat Dolan’s path into the Vietnam War reflects less the patriotic triumph or the stygian horror of his father’s experience than a blurred and frustrating stasis. It’s a confounding moral mess that seems to always hurt the ones most vulnerable and, while not quite disillusioning, does a lot to deepen and trouble Dolan’s sense of self, duty, and country.
McLaughlin has written a novel that reflects a lot of the popular culture surrounding the Vietnam War. He writes scenes, for example, that reflect the oppressive calm of “Apocalypse Now,” as well as the grating hurry up and wait quality of Persian Gulf War film, “Jarhead.”
But where McLaughlin shines most is through the voice he gives Dolan. He writes in third person, but in the classic Saul Bellow indirect third person that grants readers insights into the wit, humor, and disappointment of heroes as they go through their tasks. Like Bellow’s fictional Augie March, Pat Dolan’s journey is not a happy one. That said, when asked by a South Vietnamese soup vendor if he, too, is an optimist, the reader would be hard pressed to guess Dolan’s answer.
Mike McLaughlin has created a marvelous work of war and disillusion, of patriotic fervor – capitalist and communist alike – that cools to confusion and a will to simply get to the next day. The novel shines in its evocation of the war because it evokes a set of emotions as well, a series of questions and assurances we continue to ask ourselves today.
Dolan is asked at the beginning and end of the book what he expects now that he’s been given the war he’s always wanted, the danger, death, adventure and risk that childhood fantasy demand. Doing so, McLaughlin forces readers to ask the same questio, and his brilliant touch is that he refuses to give us a clear answer.
–Trevor Strunk
Books in Review II 