In 1968, a pivotal year in The Names of the Dead, the protagonist, Larry Markham, and I were both 19 years old. Most of my male friends had unaccountably felt a call to the ministry, thus meriting a 4-d classification (today none of them are pastors). My only friend who went to Vietnam, a brilliant musician, came home early with a body full of shrapnel and a mind sequestered in an inaccessible world.
In 1982, the other important year in this novel, Larry Markham’s body is functioning well, though minus a foot; but his mind, like my friend’s, inhabits a horror chamber where a falling leaf may presage a guerrilla attack, any door may be booby-trapped, and nightly the dry bones of the dead reassemble in order to be freshly killed, ever more grotesquely.
The post-traumatic stress syndrome has been amply chronicled by a profusion of grisly novels: my medium-sized public library, under the rubric “Vietnam Conflict, Fiction,” lists 105 titles. It would be a mistake, however, to toss The Names of the Dead on the genre heap. O’Nan, a sparsely elegant stylist, blends elements of suburban realism, war story, thriller, and mystery in this exploration of one man’s mind under siege.
For 14 years Larry Markham has taken cover in his personal fortress, but now the external world assaults his defenses. His wife and son have left him, taking the family car. His attractive but psychotic neighbor offers rides, and more. His father, a widowed physician, is behaving erratically. The one bright spot in Larry’s week is the rap group he facilitates at the va hospital. And then Creeley, a mysterious newcomer to the group, escapes and begins stalking him.
Larry, then, is doubly stalked, for war memories ambush him night and day. A soldier in Okinawa had predicted it: “It don’t matter if they’re dead, they come get you anyway.” Salazar [see excerpt] is the first in his squad to be hit; one by one 12 others fall. Larry grows numb: carrying one end of yet another body bag, he thinks, “They weren’t that heavy once you got used to them.” He learns to kill: first a dying enemy soldier; then, at close range and in a mad fury, the nva who has just killed a buddy; finally, discreetly, a dying friend.
But when he flies home for his mother’s funeral and his girlfriend, Vicki, asks if he has killed anyone, he recoils. “He thought that no one had earned the right to ask him this-not her, not even his father. He waited for her to withdraw the question.” Though Vicki does not realize it, Larry is already huddling for safety behind a self-constructed wall where, sadly, relationships will become impossible. He will ref use to tell his story to Vicki, to his father, to Julian at work, even to the rap group at the va hospital.
According to William P. Mahedy, an army chaplain who did a tour in Vietnam and continues to work with troubled veterans, Larry’s response is typical. Descriptions in Mahedy’s 1986 book, Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets, confirm Larry’s experience: the moral guilt (Larry at a school party: “They seemed good people to him, while he was a monster”), the survivor guilt (Larry on receiving word of his mother’s death: “She was supposed to read the telegram. He was supposed to be dead”), the murderous rage, the numbness of spirit, the inability to talk of what you have seen or done, the upset of the whole moral order (summed up in the oft-repeated dictum: “It don’t mean nothin’ “), and the overwhelming aloneness: always you are solo, on the flight to Vietnam, joining your platoon, taking R & R, and again on the flight home.
Ten years ago Mahedy asserted that confession and forgiveness are necessary elements in recovery; recently he noted that mental health professionals are finally “beginning to see that you can’t deal with post-traumatic stress unless you deal with religious and moral questions.” By contrast, O’Nan, like his character Larry, steers clear of religion. A priest holds a memorial service when one of the men is killed-“a magic show, they called it”-and Larry wishes he could believe the priest’s sermon about sacrifice. He returns home briefly to attend another buddy’s funeral-“it was a gyp, Larry thought, just another magic show.” At his own mother’s funeral, he thinks of “how he’d wanted to believe, how he didn’t now.” And Sundays, when his wife and son go to church, he climbs up to the attic and sits silently next to a locked trunk full of Vietnam mementoes. Larry has no larger story in which to insert his increasingly private pain.
Enter Creeley, an unholy ghost from Larry’s past, who begins pursuing him like a hound from hell, digging up stories Larry wants to keep underground, exposing his adultery and Vicki’s, revealing Larry’s father’s secrets, and ultimately accusing Larry of hell’s unforgivable sin: not killing.
Creeley saves the novel: without him, it could be yet another self-pitying Vietnam narrative. He also saves Larry. With his private places ripped open and his secrets exposed, Larry is freed to tell his story, to offer his hoarded treasures to the dead, and to seek deliverance from the past as he-and his kidnapped son-race out of town in a borrowed delivery truck.
The Names of the Dead is not an overtly religious book. Belief is coveted but unattained. Redemption is hoped for but uncertain. In its laying bare of Larry, however, it has a profoundly religious theme: “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer” (Ps. 32:3-4). If Larry still awaits absolution, at least he has made his confession.
An Excerpt
He didn’t have a chance to fire because someone ahead to his left hit a booby trap and flew through the air. They’d told him all along not to think, but he was surprised when he didn’t hesitate, that he ran to where he thought the man would land. He was there an instant after Salazar hit. Larry knew it would be him, they all did. . . . He was still bleeding and there was nothing Larry could do, but he started a heart massage the way they’d shown him at Fort Sam. He tilted Salazar’s head back and stuck two fingers in his mouth to clear the airway and pinched his nose and put his lips to his.
He was on the second group of five breaths when a hot gout of blood filled his mouth like a gulp of wine. It hit him so fast it came out his nose. He gagged and, when he turned his head to spit, saw it pumping out of Salazar, flowing over his neck and into the leaves and moss of the jungle. He felt it hot on his chin and in his mouth and all over his hands.
There was nothing he could do, but they were still firing, still waiting for him to save their friend. He felt for a pulse and got nothing and started the massage again, leaned down and closed his eyes and put his mouth to Salazar’s. He’d heard of this before, at Fort Sam; they had a name for it. It was a joke among the instructors, how sometimes new recruits didn’t know when to quit. Kissing the dead, they called it. Don’t do it, they said. You’ll end up married to them.
-From The Names of the Dead
By Stewart O’Nan
Doubleday
399 pp.; $23.95
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine
September/October 1996, Page 9
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