Laura Kalpakian is the author of the new book Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father's Battle for Justice. Her many other books include Memory into Memoir. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Q: What inspired you to write this new book about your brother’s Vietnam service and your father’s efforts to change his “undesirable” military discharge to “honorable”?
A: I was not inspired to write this book; I was compelled to after I discovered in a safe in my basement the huge cache of letters and documents on which I have based Undesirable. I had no idea they existed.
I came upon them in the fall of 2023 when my mom, age 101, was in the last throes of her life in a nursing home. Not until February 2024 could I unearth them and bring them up and begin to read and reread, to ponder and organize what all this meant. The pain, the pathos, the sheer monumental effort that my father invested meant it had to be a book.
Q: How much of this history did you know before writing the book, and how did you research it? What did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I knew very little of this history. I was not living in Southern California at the time; I was a grad student on the East Coast. I did not know my brother had been given an Undesirable discharge until I brought these documents up from the basement. I thought he had been given a General and that my father had got it changed to Honorable. This was not so.
Undesirable is based upon the letters and documents exhumed from the basement. It is not a history of the Vietnam War or my brother’s role in that war. Over the course of two years, I asked questions of the past as revealed in these documents. As I returned again and again to the material, what came to light was a cover-up on the part of the Army and a grave injustice done to a vulnerable serviceman
Q: The author Paula Becker said of the book, “Undesirable is a poignant examination of duty: the author’s father’s to his son, her brother’s to his country, society’s to those who serve, and her own obligation to her father’s memory.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I think Ms. Becker’s reading is correct. My brother was a physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual wreck when the Army spit him out.
Doug Johnson served his country in Vietnam for 14 months and in return—had my father not worked so hard to overturn the Undesirable—Doug would have had nada, no veteran’s benefits whatever. My father felt it his duty to fight this injustice, but that sense of duty was grounded in his love for his son.
Q: What do you think your family’s experience says about the legacy of the Vietnam War?
A: The legacy of that war is unremitting tragedy. The war, as we now know from history and memoirs, never had a chance of conventional victory and Americans at the time (myself included) were passionately against it.
When these soldiers came home, they were met with scorn. They carried their burdens, burdens of all sorts, into the rest of their lives and into the lives of their families. Certainly, that was true of my brother, who both endured pain personally and inflicted pain on others for decades.
Those young men who fought that war are old now. Many are still suffering, afflicted with ills from Agent Orange they all breathed in 50 years ago. The bitter legacy of that war is felt to this day, not just for Americans but for the Vietnamese as well. Sadly, the Vietnam War defined a whole generation.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: In the next few months, I will be getting my novel American Cookery ready for re-release by Paint Creek Press. And I will be finalizing a collection of stories and novellas and beginning early drafts of a new novel.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: When I first looked at the actual document of the Undesirable Discharge (reproduced in the book) no great leaps of imagination were required to fathom what such a statement would do to one’s sense of self. Doug Johnson was a 20-year-old kid who had enlisted at 19 and returned home 14 months later as a drug addict with a prison record.
Many small stories arose in the writing of Undesirable that simply did not fit into the arc of the book itself. These can be found in the blogposts on my website, laurakalpakian.com.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment