Gustav Hasford (1947–1993)

Other works of fiction that emerged from the Vietnam War are good and even great. But The Short-Timers is pure genius. Only Christopher Koch's Highways to a War really compares. And even that is an unfair comparison. Highways to a War is an epic novel that stretches all across Southeast Asia. The Short-Timers is an epic prose poem that focuses on the journey from America to Vietnam alone.

What makes it so poetic is its intense imagery, its synthesis of events and actions, and its at times lyrical manipulation of wordplay and Marine jargon. Not only military jargon, by the way, but the jargon of bureaucracy in general. And the interplay of public relations and advertising that leapt from larger American popular culture into a specified meaning within Hasford's "world of shit."

The Short-Timers also portrays a poetic truth. Mind, not the poetic truth. And that is not an oxymoron. For the truth Hasford yields is of a particular experience in the Vietnam War at primarily two particular places. And he universalizes these particulars into a truth about all wars. Especially haunting is his realization that the jungle is a metaphor for Darwinian struggle and civilizational twilight: "Humping in the rain forest is like climbing a stairway of shit in an enormous green room constructed by ogres for the confinement of monster plants. Birth and death are endless processes here, with new life feeding on the decaying remains of the old." When he describes the faint slats of sunlight that make it through the canopy to barely illuminate the jungle floor, it feels as if he has stepped into a tropical netherworld whose exits have closed forever behind him.

I'm not sure what inspired Hasford to write this book. The demons of the war, certainly. But others were pursued by those same demons and never came close to exposing the core of nihilism and poverty of humanity at the roots of the war as Hasford has done.

Hasford's short and trouble-filled life means this novel essentially defines his legacy. Unfortunately, it is a legacy largely eclipsed by Stanley Kubrick's film, Full Metal Jacket. The film, too, is a masterpiece. But Kubrick borrowed most of his dialogue and nearly all his story from The Short-Timers, omitting the third section of the book and Khe Sanh. And while Kubrick sought to construct a film based on the symmetry between Paris Island and the war in Vietnam, Hasford took care to begin his novel with harsh situations but accessible representational descriptions that would alter and explode into different forms as the book progressed. As he moved his story to Hue and then Khe Sanh, it built and built into a crescendo of images and wordplay, a metaphoric shorthand for annihilation. It became a version of Ravel's Boléro written for war.

Why this book remains out of print, while a pile of much inferior work still circulates is a tragedy.… (mehr)