Black Virgin Mountain

In 1966, just as the American military buildup in Vietnam was going into overdrive, a working-class 22-year-old from Chicago was drafted into the army. Larry Heinemann served one year of combat duty with the 25th Infantry Division, most of it in the vicinity of Cu Chi. It was the most horrific and consequential year of his life, and it became the raw material for his two classic war novels, Close Quarters and Paco's Story. This memoir chronicles a 1992 railway journey Heinemann took from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City as the guest of the Vietnam Writers' Association. Along the way, he encounters Vietnamese war veterans and views sites that trigger powerful memories. His journey ends with a crawl through the tunnels of Cu Chi and a climb up the sacred mountain that is this book's namesake. A work of mourning and an act of reconciliation, Black Virgin Mountain considers the psychic costs of a war that is still taking its toll. Larry Heinemann is the author of three novels: Close Quarters (1977), one of the earliest novels of the Vietnam War; Paco's Story (1987), winner of the National Book Award and the Carl Sandburg Literary Arts Award; and Cooler by the Lake (1992). He lives in his native city of Chicago, Illinois.