Larry Heinemann, a Chicago-born Army veteran "who wrote extensively about the Vietnam War and its effects, both in novel and memoir format," died December 11, the Eagle reported. He was 75. Heinemann, whose novel Paco's Story won the 1987 National Book Award for Fiction, had worked as a writer-in-residence at Texas A&M since 2005.
In the foreword of the 2005 edition of Paco's Story, he wrote that he became a writer "because of our war in Vietnam, not in spite of it.... There are a number of writers who emerged from the war who feel the same. I was a soldier of the most ordinary kind and the war took much away from me, but the war also gave me a story that simply would not be denied, as well as a way of looking at the world."
Kathy Favor, his partner, described Heinemann as "the consummate storyteller.... If we were sitting around the table somewhere, he always had a story to tell. He was, for the most part, a very gentle person and very much a pacifist. Even being that way, he had very definite opinions." His other works include the novels Close Quarters (1977) and Cooler by the Lake (1992), as well as a memoir, Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam (2005).
When Paco's Story won the National Book Award over a shortlist that included Toni Morrison's acclaimed novel Beloved, the decision "stunned many observers and stirred much debate, according to contemporary reporting from numerous media outlets," the Chicago Sun-Times reported. "Toni Morrison, was, I think, shocked--and quite honestly, Larry was shocked, too," Favor said.
Heinemann eventually went back to Vietnam, "where he began to discover the country's beauty," the Sun-Times noted. From 2002 to 2003, he was a Fulbright lecturer at Hue University.
In a series of tweets, author Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote: "I hated Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters. It scarred me for life, the way it depicted the brutalization of Vietnamese people, especially women. Then I re-read the novel as an adult trying to be a writer, and I realized Larry Heinemann was right. War is brutal and literature has no business making us feel better about it and what it does to soldiers and what soldiers do to the enemy and to civilians and the cost of all this for soldiers themselves. To me, Close Quarters, Paco's Story--equally brutal--and Black Virgin Mountain, about his return to peacetime Vietnam, constitute a vital trilogy for anybody who wants to understand the American soldier's experience of the war. I learned a great deal from all of them but especially Close Quarters, which taught me that a writer cannot flinch, cannot editorialize, cannot sentimentalize, in order to make himself and his readers feel better. Too many lauded books about difficult subjects do all of those things, and they will not survive, unlike his work."