Larry Heinemann is a boyish, irreverent man with hawklike features and a compulsion to speak honestly, as if his tongue hung in the balance. He and Edie and their two children, Sarah, 10, and Preston, inhabit a large old house on the city`s Far North Side that Heinemann has largely fixed up himself. He works on a Kaypro computer in an orderly office on the 2d floor, where the Louise Nevelson has been given prominent display alongside the books, the potted plants and the hula-girl desk lamp. He is hoping to redo the attic this spring and move his writing show upstai
He drinks coffee by the yard, warming it up in the microwave which is located, for some reason, in the living room. Kids come and go all day, phones ring, doors slam and there is a general air of commotion and informality.
Sentimental and nostalgic by nature (he and his wife will renew their vows next spring in a ceremony on their 20th anniversary), Heinemann recently was torn between accepting the coveted Carl Sandburg Medal at the annual awards banquet or going to the 25th reunion of his high-school class. He opted for the reunion, risking insulting the awards committee. ”There was no way I could miss it,” he said of the reunion, which was held in the officers` club of the Glenview Naval Air Station. ”These are people I`d known all my life and hadn`t seen in years.” To avoid conflicting with the reunion, Heinemann also talked his British publisher into pushing back the British publication date of ”Paco`s Story.” ”It so happens my editor is also Garrison Keillor`s,” he says. ”I said, `Remember what happened to him? He went to his 25th reunion, met a Danish woman and married her, quit his show and moved to Denmark.` I mean, serious things happen at 25th reunions.”
Heinemann was born 44 years ago near Lawrence and Western Avenues in Chicago`s Germantown neighborhood, ”so close to the Ravenswood `L` that I could hear it squeak,” he says. Very early in his life, his family moved to Northbrook, which in those days had not a single Cuisinart or cellular phone. It was largely rural, and Heinemann remembers waking up to cowbells each morning from the dairy farm across the way on Techny Road.
His father, like the father of Gallagher, the murderous company clown in
”Paco`s Story,” was a bus driver. For the most part, Heinemann Sr. drove for United Motor Coach, now Nortran, but for a time he owned his own bus company, called the Deerfield Bus Company, and Heinemann remembers with a touch of shame his father driving his 40-foot vessel home every night and parking it in front of the house (”I`m sure the neighbors loved it”).
”My dad was a strange, strange man,” Heinemann says. ”He was one of those people who worked all the time, and you never saw him. He`d leave the house at 5 a.m. and come home around 9 at night.” Gallagher`s old man in
”Paco`s Story” possesses echoes of this wraithlike figure from Heinemann`s youth: ”My brothers and my ma and me would be sitting at the dinner table,” Gallagher tells his comrades in the book, ”and we`d hear him and his galoshes coming up the front porch steps, and then he`d burst in the front door. . . . He`d haul off that belt of his, and I tell you, Jack, you could hear that f—— thing snap through every loop. You could sure tell what kind of an evenin` it was going to be by the sound of that f
—— belt.”
Says Heinemann: ”My dad was probably one of the most melancholy men I ever met. He had few pleasures, and he was not at all warm. I don`t think he knew how to be warm. It was real clear he didn`t like his work. But he was a Depression kid. To him, any work was good work. He figured the best thing he could do for his family was to work himself to death. And he did. He died at 62.”
It is one of the major disappointments of Heinemann`s life that his father, stricken with emphysema and cancer, did not live to see ”Close Quarters” published in 1976. ”He died the week before publication. Farrar, Straus rushed the first copy that came off the press to me so I could show it to him in the hospital. His death was lingering, painful and horrible. That made publication of my first book a very strange celebration.”
A wistful look comes into Heinemann`s darkly circled, pale-blue eyes as he reminisces about his father. ”We never talked father-and-son stuff. But I think it would be different now if he was still alive. I really feel the loss. People who have their fathers and have good relationships with them are lucky, indeed. I intend to stick around for my kids for a long, long time.”
The sense of loss Heinemann associates with his family goes well beyond the death of his father. One day in 1970 his older brother, James, just disappeared and hasn`t been seen or heard from since. ”It was the famous go- out-for-a-cigarette-and-never-come-back routine. Said goodbye to his wife and kid, went to work and never came home that night. I guess married life got to be too much. He could be in prison, or dead or in the merchant marine or with a carnival somewhere. He had a thing for carnivals.”
Twelve years later, in 1982, Heinemann`s youngest brother, Philip, who had done two tours in Vietnam as a marine, did the same thing as James, took a powder on his wife and vanished. ”The war had really changed him,” Heinemann acknowledges. ”He just wasn`t in good shape when he came home. Where he is now, no one knows. He liked the horses. Maybe he`s hanging around a racetrack somewhere.”
The only close relative, aside from his mother, that Heinemann still has is his brother, Richard, 41, who lives in Grayslake with his wife and four children.
Heinemann remembers his adolescence as a kind of unfocused period. For a time, following his graduation from Glenbrook North High School in 1962, he nurtured an ambition to become an architect. He had taken the requisite drafting courses, but he lacked the math grades to get immediately into architectural school, so he took a job at the firm of Perkins & Will as an office boy. ”But when I saw all the stoop labor that an architect does, I lost my taste for it.”
Instead, with the Vietnam war heating up and the draft closing in, he sought the shelter of academia, enrolling in Kendall College in Evanston, where he got interested in the theater. Though Kendall is only a two-year school, he stayed three years in a desperate attempt to keep his 2-S deferment. But the time of reckoning was at hand. Graduation in 1966 found him without enough money to continue his education, exposing him like a flushed-out quail to the draft.
”I graduated in January, and that May I got my draft notice. There is no way I wanted to go. By then I was 22 or 23, and I saw it as a big waste of my time. Besides, there was a war on. But in my family, there was no arguing. You just gritted your teeth and went.”
In retrospect, he says, he should have gone to jail rather than allow himself to be inducted. ”If I`d had political convictions then, I`d have done it. That`s one of the things that galls me about the antiwar movement. The minute the draft ended, the protest movement ended, too. I know there were people who opposed the war for moral and political reasons, but I also know there were many people against it because they were chicken and because their mommy and daddy had money to keep them in the streets. Being in the movement was a good way to get it on and get high.”
Heinemann recently gave a reading in Eau Claire, Wis. He mentioned how obscene it was that demonstrators used to spit in the faces of returning GIs at airports. Then some guy in the audience got Heinemann`s goat by saying that spitting in someone`s face does not compare morally with shooting people in the head with a gun. ”I let him have it,” Heinemann says. ”I said that shooting someone and spitting in someone`s face come from the same place in the heart. You really have to hate someone to do either.”
Larry Heinemann arrived in Vietnam on March 17, 1967. He was assigned to armored reconnaissance with the Army`s 25th Infantry Division, and it was his job to ride on the front of an armored personnel carrier behind a big .50-caliber machine gun, acting as a scout. Stationed first at Cu Chi, then at Dau Tieng, almost always he was in the thick of the war. In the first nine months of his tour he was in 15 firefights. In the last three months he saw combat every day. Month by month he turned from a nice, unmotivated suburban kid into a self-preservation machine.
”I was not a pleasant person in those days,” he recalls in the wry, understated, theatrical monotone he slips into when talking about Vietnam.
”Combat does that to you. You have to take what`s good about yourself and put it away. I became a hard son of a bitch; we all did. I mean, you get an interestfix on how mean you can be over there. I wanted to kill. I wanted to keep everyone away from me. I just wanted to get home from that g
——– place at any price.”
He senses the question before it comes. ”I don`t know how many I killed,” he says evenly. ”I don`t know if I ever killed anyone. I never actually saw anybody I hit drop. But then most of the time over there you never saw anything. Too much jungle, too much dark. But it wouldn`t have bothered me to kill because, like I said, whether you miss or not means nothing. It comes from the heart. It comes from the same spirit of hate.”
It was this wellspring of hate that fueled the innumerable cruelties that Heinemann and everyone who served in Vietnam witnessed on a daily basis, absorbed with their rations, took in with their coffee, horrors the like of which could not be imagined in Northbrook and which, once seen, can never be forgotten, scenes that would one day inspire the carnage, rape, and casual atrocities that pepper Heinemann`s books.
Toward the end of his tour, Heinemann was involved in a Brueghelian firefight along the Cambodian border that he calls ”the worst night of my life.” Years later, watching the climactic battle scene of the Academy Award- winning movie ”Platoon,” he would realize that he and filmmaker Oliver Stone had been in the identical firefight. ”There were too many details for it to have been coincidence,” he says.
The battle took place at nightfall at a camp called Firebase Bert. Heinemann`s battalion and Stone`s were attacked by the 272d Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army, which poured out of the woods in wave after suicidal wave. American forces first tried repelling them with howitzers, then ordered in artillery fire from 8-inch guns 22 miles away and finally resorted to calling in air strikes. Still the NVA came. Amid the deafening noise and pervasive slaughter, Heinemann stood behind his machine gun like GI Joe, firing off thousands of rounds of ammo, budda budda budda, the barrel on his gun hot enough to melt, his face blackening with powder and sweat, his hands freezing into insensible minions of hate. ”We killed people all night,” he says with disgust, ”and when the sun came up and the dew burned off, there were 500 dead North Vietnamese. There was meat everywhere.”
As Heinemann continues to speak, a peculiar intensity comes over him. The images and events of Vietnam, instead of fading with time, remain lucidly preserved within him, as if he were the curator of some private and very affecting museum. His eyes still flood readily with tears, and his voice quivers with righteous anger. It is not hard to discern where the strength of his writing comes from.
”I`m still bitter,” he says, as if the matter were in doubt. ”Being drafted, being dragged off the street-that would be irksome to anyone. Two years out of your life for a wasted cause. You don`t learn anything in the Army except how to drink and s—- and fight. It doesn`t expand you at all.
”If you think of the Army as work, it`s some of the most grueling, backbreaking drudgery imaginable. I went in weighing 160 pounds and in great physical and mental shape, and I came out weighing 135 and as tight as a wire, just as hard as hard could be. One reason people work is because they want to do a good job. But in the infantry, nothing you do produces good feelings, unless you are a medic. Nobody but an insane person could get satisfaction from killing people. Daily you watch people dismembered, people bursting open, guys disappearing in spray, guys going up in smoke. Poof.” He makes a terrible small sound with his lips.
