Winds of change: Marin author Gerald Nicosia chronicles the battles that Vietnam vets had to fight, on the inside and in the world.

The War at Home

Gerald Nicosia chronicles struggles of Viet vets

By Jonah Raskin

GERALD NICOSIA never set foot in Vietnam and never served a single day in the military. But after spending much of the last 12 years of his life in the company of volatile Vietnam veterans, he often feels that he’s one of them.

“I feel like I fought in the war,” he says, as we talk in the cozy house on a quiet residential street in Corte Madera, where he lives with his wife and two children.

It’s here that Nicosia wrote Home to War (Crown; $30), a big, heartfelt book that chronicles the battles veterans had to fight–for peace, for health care, for their own dignity–when they returned to the states from the jungles of Southeast Asia.

More than 600 pages long and packed with poignant narratives about the veterans themselves, often in their own explosive words, Home to War is a beautifully told work of contemporary history and a lyrical anti-war epic.

Nicosia is the author of four previous books, including Memory Babe, his award-winning biography of Jack Kerouac. But Home to War feels like his masterwork, the book he had to write to be at peace with himself and with the veterans who brought the war, willy-nilly, into his own life as a teacher and biographer.

“I started it in 1988,” Nicosia says as he sits in the cramped study that boasts photos of Jack London and Jack Kerouac, his long-time literary heroes.

“I interviewed hundreds of people, many of whom have since died of drug overdoses, agent-orange cancers, and suicide,” he recalls. “I’ve been through four publishers–Norton, Grove, Holt, and Crown. If I had known it was going to be this difficult, I might not have started it in the first place.”

In fact, Home to War has been a lot longer in the making than just 12 years. You might say that Nicosia began his journey in 1965, when he was a bright high school student in Berwyn, Ill.–“a redneck, racist place” he calls it–where boys were raised to fight and die for their country.

“I went to a Catholic church where the priest told us it was our moral duty to go to Vietnam and kill Communists,” Nicosia says. “In those days and in that place, you weren’t supposed to read the Bible yourself. The priest was supposed to interpret it for you. But I bought my own Bible, and discovered that St. Matthew says we’re supposed to love our enemies, a sermon I never heard in church.”

Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” also inspired him, much as it inspired the civil rights protesters of the 1960s. But it was Walden–and Thoreau’s message to heed a “different drummer”–that made Nicosia a pacifist and impelled him to resist the war in Vietnam.

“Walden blew me away,” he says. “It was a liberating book that taught me to make my own declaration of independence. From Thoreau, I learned the political power of books. I decided I was going to be a writer one day, too.”

In 1967, when he turned 18 and became eligible for the draft, Nicosia followed the dictates of his own conscience and joined the ranks of the anti-war movement at the University of Illinois in Chicago, though he never became a visible leader or a spokesman.

His own father urged him to enlist and find a safe job far from the front, but even that option seemed like collaborating with the war-makers, and Nicosia made plans to go into exile in Canada.

Then, in 1971, the draft ended and, like thousands of other young men ripe for military service, Nicosia was off the hook, and finally able to sleep at night. Following graduation, he taught rhetoric at his alma mater and began to learn about Vietnam by meeting veterans face to face.

“One of my best students was a black GI named Al Nellums,” Nicosia says. “In my English class he wrote an essay titled ‘The First Man I Ever Killed,’ in which he describes how he pulled out a pistol and shot, at point-blank range, a Viet Cong guerrilla who was trying to kill him. ‘How do I live with that?’ he wanted to know.

“It was a question I couldn’t answer,” Nicosia continues. “But I began to see how the war had followed the men home, and how they couldn’t shake it.”

Other veterans, including Bill Troutman–who served in Vietnam during the traumatic Tet offensive of 1968–opened Nicosia’s eyes to a war that continued to rage inside.

“My own youth had been traumatized by Vietnam,” Nicosia says. “I had been angry and then I cooled, but for the vets the anger was still red-hot and that was a revelation.”

In 1984, a year after the publication of his monumental biography of Jack Kerouac, Nicosia met Ron Kovic, and though they had taken very different paths in life, they fast became the closest of friends. The author of Born on the Fourth of July (the memoir that Oliver Stone made into a movie), Kovic was then, and probably is still today, the best-known Vietnam veteran–aside from former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, who made headlines last month with controversial revelations about his military record.

Kovic is also probably the most vocal anti-war soldier of his generation. Wounded in battle in 1968, and a paraplegic ever since, Kovic has spent more than half his life in a wheelchair.

“I hung out with Ron when he lived in a cottage in Sausalito,” Nicosia says. “In public he put up a good front, but in private I got to see his wounds, his withered legs, his gloom and hatred. ‘I wish I could put all of you in chairs so that you’d suffer like I suffer,’ he once said. It was only a moment and it passed, but it was real, too.”

OVER THE YEARS, there were other vets who touched Nicosia, including Bobby Waddell, who became a heroin addict while serving in the Air Force in Vietnam and who later spent four years in prison in California on drug charges.

“I’d visit him in Tehachapi, and he’d say, ‘You’ve got to tell our story. Please write our story,’ ” Nicosia recalls. “After he practically begged me to write the book I couldn’t refuse.”

In Home to War, Nicosia tells heartbreaking stories about Bobby Waddell, Ron Kovic, and a platoon-sized outfit of other soldiers–without either patronizing them or idealizing them.

He also describes the veterans’ fragile organizations, including Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the vets’ ongoing efforts to heal their own wounds and the wounds of the nation itself.

Reading Home to War reminded me how much the veterans had in common with other activists from that era. Like the yippies, the Black Panthers, and radical feminist groups, activist veterans developed a knack for creative guerrilla theater that attracted the attention of the media and aroused the moral conscience of the country. Descending on Washington, D.C., in 1971 and returning their military medals was as dramatic an anti-war gesture as any in the history of the American anti-war movement, and Nicosia describes it in vivid detail.

Moreover, like other radical groups of the 1960s and 1970s, the vets were targets of U.S. government harassment and persecution. FBI agents spied on them, the Department of Justice indicted them on charges of conspiracy–there was a major trial in Gainsville, Fla.–and the White House treated them as pawns in the game of politics.

Still, if there’s a main villain in Nicosia’s book, it’s the Veterans Administration, the bureaucratic agency that ought to have served as a staunch advocate for the veterans, but that often ignored them, neglected them, shipped them off to living deaths in “miserably dirty, understaffed hospitals.” For many of the men who appear in this disturbing book, coming home from Vietnam proved to be a lot more horrible an experience than fighting in the war itself.

At 52, Nicosia is still a pacifist, and still listening to the different drummer that Thoreau describes in Walden.

“I hope that by remembering Vietnam and the vets, we’ll realize that we shouldn’t make war ever again,” he says. “In Vietnam, we never tried to win the hearts and the minds of the people. We weren’t there to save a democracy, but to destroy a country. The vets brought that lesson home from the front. They were inspirational.

“The best of them showed us that you can turn trauma around, cope with pain, and live productive lives.”

Jonah Raskin is a communications professor at Sonoma State University and the author of ‘For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman.’

From the May 17-23, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

‘Lying Awake’ offers simple story of faith tested to the limit

IMAGINE BEING handed a gift–something life-changing, something you’ve hoped for and craved for years. Then imagine being told, not long after what you wanted was finally placed in your hands, that a mistake was made. The gift wasn’t meant for you. You have to give it back.

This, simply put, is the predicament that faces Sister John of the Cross–a long-cloistered modern-day Carmelite nun with a terrible choice to make–in author Mark Salzman’s elegantly stunning short novel Lying Awake (Knopf; $21).

The slim volume, weighing in at a brisk 187 pages, was released last year with little fanfare, but has since become a word-of-mouth phenomenon, hand-sold by independent booksellers around the country. In the Bay Area, the book found itself on The Chronicle’s bestseller list for 20 remarkable weeks.

Knopf representatives say that Salzman (Iron & Silk, Lost in Place, The Laughing Sutra, The Soloist) has become increasingly in demand as the book’s fame spreads, receiving numerous requests each week for personal appearances. That such attention should come to a book so spare and so simple, a book as ambiguous as a Zen koan, is rather remarkable.

But Lying Awake is a remarkable book.

For 28 years, Sister John of the Cross–her nun’s name borrowed from that of a Spanish poet and mystic–has been cloistered within the walls of small Carmelite monastery on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Despite her dedication to God, Sister John has not found them to be happy years. The first quarter of a century was spent in strict religious service, during which Sister John earnestly sought a sense of God’s grace but was only rewarded, in Salzman’s words, with “a heart squeezed dry.”

Just when she feels she can bear it no longer, Sister John’s despair is shattered. She begins experiencing dazzling visions so powerful, so intense, they leave her physically wrecked but spiritually aflame.

Here is how Salzman describes one of Sister John’s visions: “Pure awareness stripped her of everything. She became an ember carried upward by the heat of an invisible flame. Higher and higher she rose, away from all she knew, Powerless to save herself, she drifted upward toward infinity until the vacuum sucked the feeble light out of her. . . . In this radiance, she could see forever, and everywhere she looked, she saw God’s love.”

Radically transformed by these experiences, Sister John is suddenly seen as a spiritual master by the other nuns. She begins writing about her experiences, penning volumes of poetry and essays, one of which becomes a modest bestseller. But the headaches that accompany her visions grow worse, and Sister John is ordered to see a physician, who discovers a small tumor in the nun’s brain. The tumor has been triggering epileptic seizures–the source of her visions, as well as her voluminous writing sprees. And it will kill her if it is not immediately removed.

Will Sister John refuse the surgery, choosing death but retaining the soul-stirring visions? Or will she make an even more devastating choice: to save her life and return to the spiritual desert of those unbearable 25 years?

Lying Awake, at its core, is a story of faith colliding with reason. But this is no cynical exercise in agnosticism. On the contrary, Salzman’s book stands in awe of faith, and in Sister John of the Cross, that’s a faith that is most luminous when it is tested to its limit.

From the May 17-23, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Write Stuff

John Hockenberry is on a roll

THERE SHOULD be a law against multitalented people. If one person weren’t allowed to be so brilliant in so many different things, then maybe there’d be enough talent left over for the rest of us. Take John Hockenberry.

As the original host of NPR’s groundbreaking Talk of the Nation show, Hockenberry inarguably ruled the public radio roost for several years. When he ditched NPR to ply his journalistic trade in new ways–as NBC-TV Dateline correspondent, as reporter on ABC-TV’s Day One news magazine, as the host of MSNBC’s prime-time, self-titled cable news show Hockenberry–he proved himself again and again, racking up a mantle full of awards, including three Emmys and two Peabodys. Then he wrote a bestselling book–Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence–and showed himself to be a damn fine memoirist as well.

So now the guy comes out with a novel–a fast-paced nail-biter about murder, water rights, Indian culture wars, right-wing militias, nuclear terrorists, marine biology, and geological destiny–and damned if it isn’t just as well done and thought-provoking as his previous ventures. Yes, with the release of A River out of Eden (Doubleday; $24.95), we are forced to acknowledge that as a novelist, Hockenberry rocks.

“I deliberately wanted to not do something that was related to my other work,” he says–contacted by phone at his office in New York–admitting that he is no fan of what he calls “these thinly disguised autobiographical journalist-as-central-character books.” Instead, Hockenberry used his reporter’s skills in assembling the details that support his tale of half-Indian marine biologist Francine Smohalla and her investigation of a string of murders along the Columbia River, killings that might precipitate a cataclysmic event foretold in Indian prophecy: the destruction of the vast dam system that buried the once Eden-like Celilo Falls beneath a million gallons of water. Meticulously researched right down to the geological events that created the Columbia Basin 15,000 years ago, the book needs no reporter character but its author.

“If there is a place for me, as journalist, in the book,” Hockenberry says, “it’s in those details.”

FOR HOCKENBERRY, the book began 20 years ago with an eye-opening practical joke, when an elderly Indian man told him about the beauty of the Celilo Falls and then sent him to find it, pinpointing the exact location on a map. When he tried to go there, Hockenberry realized that the dams had obliterated the falls long ago.

“The other important part was the old Indian prophecy called Coyote Frees the Fishes,” he explains, describing the story of how Coyote finds that all the salmon are being kept behind a dam, guarded by a woman. Coyote destroys the dam, freeing the fishes and returning the river to the Indian people. “For me, that prophecy and that ancient geology were just dying to come together in some way,” he says. “God forbid that such a flood would happen, but when I was out in the Pacific Northwest, reporting on some of these water-rights issues, I saw a gleam in the eyes of almost everyone I interviewed along the river, particularly the Indians, who dream of a river like the one before the dams.

“People do root for the apocalypse,” he continues. “People want it. And it’s not because they’re evil people, they don’t all have to be Timothy McVeighs–though I’ve got one of those in my book–but people do have somewhere in their gut, this feeling, this thought. ‘Let’s just throw the marbles in the air and see how they come down.’

“I don’t know where that comes from,” Hockenberry says, “but as a reporter and a novelist, I think it’s an incredibly fascinating thing.”

John Hockenberry reads from his new novel Friday, May 11, at 7:30 p.m., at the First Congregational Church, 252 W. Spain St., Sonoma ($7) and Saturday, May 12, at 5 p.m. at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Plaza, Corte Madera (free).

From the May 10-16, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.