What Children Once Read, And A Veteran On Vietnam

The Young Folks Library set of children's books includes Famous Myths and Legends, in which may be found Charles Kingsley's retelling of a Greek myth about Jason and The Golden Fleece, "The Argonauts":

[The young Jason is tutored by a magical being, Cheiron the centaur, whose "eyes were wise and mild." When the day was come, Cheiron said, "Will you promise me two things before you go?" Jason promised, and Cheiron said, "Speak harshly to no soul whom you may meet, and stand by the word which you shall speak."]

As Jason traveled it came to pass that:

On the bank of [the raging flood] Anauros sat a woman, all wrinkled, gray, and old . . . "Who will carry me across the flood?"

And Jason was going to answer her scornfully, when Cheiron's words came to his mind.

[Jason carries the old woman across, she whining and berating him all the while:] He lay panting awhile on the bank . . . but he cast one look at the old woman . . .

And as he looked, she grew fairer than all women, and taller than all men on earth; and her garments shone like the summer sea, and her jewels like the stars of heaven; and over her forehead was a veil, woven of the golden clouds of sunset; and through the veil she looked down on him . . . with great eyes, mild and awful, which filled all the glen with light. . . .

And she spoke–"I am the Queen of Olympus, Hera the wife of Zeus. As thou hast done to me, so will I do to thee. Call on me in the hour of need, and try if the Immortals can forget." [Emphasis added]

I think the grandeur of mythic vision, and the simple but solid ethical principles in, for example, Cheiron's advice to the young Jason, make it worth putting on the lifetime list.

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The best selling novelist Nelson DeMille, who had served in Vietnam, spent some time in the communist regime there before publishing Up Country in 2002:

I avoided looking at Susan and said, “I wiped the blood off my knife on his pants, … and started walking away. I looked up and saw two guys from my company, who’d come to find me, and they’d seen some of this. One guy took my rifle out of my hand and fired three signal shots into the air. He said to me, ‘The rifle works, Brenner.’ These guys looked at me . . . I mean, we were all a little nuts by then, but . . . this was above and beyond nuts, and they knew it.” … “He looked at me and says, ‘How the f--- did you get into hand-to-hand with this guy?’” p. 410

I imagined Captain Tram and his comrades sitting in their bunkers or slit trenches at night, … hoping for a quiet evening. Meanwhile, six miles overhead, too high to be seen or heard, a flight of huge, eight-engine B-52 bombers all released their thousand-pound bombs. … Arc Light Strikes, they were called, and they transformed the earth below into a here-and-now hell, … 

We’d found hundreds of North Vietnamese here, lying down, staring up at the sky, blood running from their ears, nose, mouth, or wandering around like zombies. They weren’t worth taking as prisoners, they were beyond medical help, and we didn’t know if we should shoot them or not waste the time. p. 439

Truly great writing by a Viet War vet. He went back to modern Vietnam and describes the situation of those who fought on the American side–under the current shabby Communist North regime–with the same compassionate honesty; for example, the South Vietnamese fighter pilot reduced to peddling a rickshaw.

And Susan Weber is one of the great descriptions of a modern upscale expatriate woman in popular fiction. The conversations between the POV char. and her are smart and accurate.