William Pelfrey

I first read The Big V more than 35 years ago when it was newly published as an entry in the Liveright New Writers Series. I was teaching a new course I had designed called The Literature of War. At the time Pelfrey's book was, I believe, the only Vietnam War novel to have been published by a combatant in that war. The Big V was taught in conjuction with other works of fiction about war. Pelfrey was in good company with authors like Hemingway, Mailer, James Jones and Stephen Crane. My students and I found some striking similarities in Pelfrey's book with Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Crane's protagonist was named Henry Fleming. Pelfrey's was a Henry too - Henry Winsted, a Radio Telephone Operator (RTO). My students, one of whom was a Vietnam combat vet himself, speculated that "Winsted" meant "instead". Maybe. Because Pelfrey also included another minor character, a second RTO named only as Fleming, who was killed about halfway through the book. One wonders if the death of Fleming (as well as other GI's) represented the death of innocence for Henry Winsted. In any case, there were other similarities to the classic Crane work - symbolic descriptions of a pitiless sun, the triple canopy of the jungle cast as a kind of church-like atmosphere, in much the same way Crane's sunlit pine forests as cathedral-like. This was all a long time ago, so I can't really remember much more about my early "experiment" with Vietnam as part of the larger genre of war fiction.

Since that time, of course, there has been a literal explosion of books about the Vietnam war. In the past forty years there have been scores of books published about that conflict, both fiction and non-fiction. Only recently a brand-new novel of Vietnam has appeared on bestseller lists: Matterhorn, by Vietnam vet, Karl Marlantes. It's a mammoth tome of nearly 600 pages and much deserving of all the praise and superlatives being lavished upon it. I was very moved by Marlantes' novel, of course. But it also made me remember that long-ago book, The Big V, the one that perhaps opened the floodgates for other books from Vietnam veterans. Pelfrey was only a few years home from the war when his book was first published, which is perhaps why it seemed then so fresh and raw. In rereading the book this past week, I found it to be every bit as powerful and moving, as a look at men at war, as it was in the early 70s. What Marlantes did in Matterhorn with 600 pages of gritty narrative and vivid description, Pelfrey accomplished in less than 200 pages.

Both Marlantes and Pelfrey were unsparing in their depiction of the casual obscenity and dark humor that were an integral part of military life then, and probably still are. There was also a common saying used by the footsoldier "grunts" in Vietnam that has appeared in countless books about that war. "It don't mean nothin'." The soldiers used this phrase to mask the pain and the fear and the loss of friends and longing for home; to try to forget, to harden themselves to the horror they witnessed in those pitiless mountains and jungles. Pelfrey used it too, knowing, of course - like Marlantes and other veterans - just how much it all really did mean, and how their lives would be forever changed. This book, The Big V, meant something, and still does. Long out of print now, it desperately deserves a second look by another generation of readers. I will keep on recommending it to any and all who are interested in history and good writing.… (mais)