This week I was browsing a bookshelf in the MCC  (Mennonite Central Committee) Thrift and Gift shop in Elmira,  in the middle of Western Ontario’s rural country where I now live, when I was stunned to see a 2017 book I was completely unaware of – Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Michael Bowden

What shocked me was the year 1968.

In the foreword to my novel The Birdcatcher, I tell how I sat on a park bench in Mexico City each morning in February 1969 reading newspaper accounts of the increased fighting following the famous Tet offensive launched by North Vietnam and their South-Vietnamese guerrilla allies. In particular, I was fascinated by the intense fighting in the ancient capital of Huế . Unable to use air attacks to soften up the opposition as they did in most locations, the American marines had had to enter the city and fight street by street to retake it.

What disturbed me is this – it was not 1969, it was 1968.

I hope no one, especially Vietnam veterans on either side, read my foreword to The Birdcatcher and decided that I was making this up. In fact, I was in Mexico City in Jan/Feb 1968 too – reading newspapers on the very same park bench. I know that bench so well, I could show it to you today. I’m going to have to make a correction in my book.

But this has got me thinking again about the strange influence Vietnam has had on my life, when I was never there. In The Birdcatcher, my character Chris Stone, who, though a Canadian like myself, is a Vietnam vet (12,000 Canadians served in the American forces in Vietnam) and he’s haunted by many things related to that war.

Beginning with his dream of flying up the Song Cau river in a helicopter, four dreams in The Birdcatcher lead Stone to a revelation about how autistic people have come to exist – to who they really are.

Both of my novels address this question. Because I’ve noticed that my posts about autism get four times as many visits as any of the others, I’ve decided that I need to draw more attention to this. To do this, I’ve taken my other novel Skol off Amazon altogether while I do a rewrite of it to make this more recognizable in its text. But The Birdcatcher needs no changes. It continues to put this new vision of autism forward as well as ever. I can’t improve on it.

But Vietnam is another of those subjects that I can’t let go. In his story, Chris Stone calls the Vietnam war a “hinge on a door of history”, but he doesn’t know whether the door was opening or closing. I still don’t know either. For me that war is like the JFK assassination and the Battle of the Little Big Horn – events that still hide secrets and surprises.

So I bought Huế 1968 – I’ve got a lot of reading ahead of me – a month of struggle in 594 pages – I’ll tell you about it when I’m finished.

PS – March 31/2024 – I haven’t done a post, but to anyone who like me remains deeply interested in the historical phenomenon of the Vietnam war, including the one with France in the 1950s, Huế 1968 by Michael Bowden is a must. Read it and you’ll come away deeply impressed with the courage and resourcefulness shown by both sides. The US marines came in with no training for street fighting – they had to re-write that book themselves. Read about a small group of Viet Cong teenagers and how in their self-dug trenches they held off the Marine Corps and its artillery for a full week, and you’ll wonder about what human beings are capable of. This book is a historical treasure.