UNFORGIVEN.(Review)

FOR YEARS after he had served in Vietnam, American lieutenant Nathaniel Tripp would dream he had returned to the war The dream was always the same. He is living on his Vermont farm with his children when he hears a distant noise, beating and throbbing. "I know they are coming for me, and there is not much time." Five helicopters approach. The sound makes him weep, but he knows what he must do. He sets off a smoke grenade to indicate his position, stands tall, signals with his arms. He is overwhelmed with contradictory feelings: awe, sadness, pleasure, fatigue. He feels proud of the spectacle he is providing for his sons. As the helicopters land, he is surrounded by the thick smell of kerosene, "the hot breath of death". He recognises the men from his platoon. He is distressed to learn that the war, which he thought had ended in 1975, is still going on.

Tripp was twenty-four when he went to Vietnam, a young man with little to lose. Now he is middle-aged and a father. But in the dream he knows he must return, to continue in "this utterly awful and meaningless task". In the dream, he always obeys the imperative to go back to Vietnam. Awake, he wonders why he is unable to walk away. Why is it that he finds reassurance in his compass and maps and "the cool hiss of the radio", commanding him to give up everything and return to the war? Perhaps because he, ,like many veterans, has never really left. He calls the Viemam War a poison in his veins, but it is also a strangely benign presence which he likens to a river. Cruel yet comforting, it will never let him go.

Tripp arrived in Vietnam early in 1968, after the Tet Offensive. Stepping off the plane for the first time, he writes (in Father, Soldier, Son: Memoir of a Platoon Leader in Vietnam, Steerforth Press), was like walking into "the biggest, hottest far on earth". A military bus took the troops through Saigon towards Bien Hoa. He was shocked to find part of the city in complete ruins, like Dresden or Hamburg, yet thronging with people. "I was amazed," he says. "It seemed impossible that anyone could survive such devastation." He recalls that he was still naive enough to assume that the damage had been caused by the Viet Cong.

The new recruits were embarrassed by their clean uniforms and youthful faces. Despite their training, they knew it would take weeks before they were any use as soldiers. As they set off by helicopter to Quan Loi, they felt like helpless prisoners facing a death sentence. According to Tripp, many of the American casualties were new arrivals, "killed during their first few weeks, before their instincts had been sharpened, and while they were still blinded by fear". He is critical of the policy which replaced individual men rather than whole units, regarding it as a public relations exercise to disguise the escalation of the United States' involvement, and like many such policies, "it ignored the human truth of the war".

The FNG (" f--ing new guy") could hamper the whole unit while he was learning; this was especially true for officers responsible for the lives of their men. The new arrivals felt acutely anxious as they approached their first real experience of the war What they did not know, says Tripp, is that if they survived they would feel worse later. Going home would be even more painful without the comfort of the men they had come to love. Nor would they be helped to reassimilate into civilian life, and for some veterans home became more unbearable than the war.

On arrival at the base, the new officers were taken to a tent containing eight bunks, seven empty and the last apparently a dumping place for old field equipment. Tripp was shown around the camp and returned to the tent convinced that he would soon be dead. As he started to settle in, the dirty heap of equipment grunted and sat up. It was an officer back from reconnaissance, a "wild man festooned with fragmentation grenades, smoke grenades, flashlight, watch, compass, bandage packs, ammunition pouches, canteens, flares, claymore mines" and-numerous other objects. He laughed maniacally at the sight of the new arrivals, and explained that he had just come in for stitches in his ear after a machine gun bullet had passed through it. Now he was going back to his platoon, and had the contented air of a man returning to his lover.

The new officers were nauseated and appalled by this apparition. It was all a terrible mistake; if this was an officer, then clearly they did not belong in the army or the war. Not long afterwards, the war had transformed Tripp into the same kind of wild man, dirty, happy, disturbed, and deeply committed to his men--the men who would return to him in his dreams long after the war had ended.