Two Vietnam vets get to know one another in a Veteran's hospital over the course of a painful evening. One, a multiple amputee, hopes to convince the other, a severe head wound survivor, to engage in an act of brutal mercy. The narrative cuts between the two as they retell their stories to each other, and to themselves. It's sad and moving, and psychedelic sometimes - the amputee has a frank conversation with a chain smoking Jesus.

3 bones!!! ( )

Book #692 in my old book database. Not rated.

This is the kind of novel that is, on its surface, fairly simple. There are two Vietnam vets, seriously injured during the war, who find themselves in adjacent beds in a VA hospital. One is black, the other white, and through the length of one night, they share their stories with one another. However, what is exposed in the telling of the stories are the hearts of two men, and the heart is never a simple thing, is it?

Larry Brown, with the precision of a surgeon, cuts to all the things that matter the most in life: our concept of who we are, our families and our loves, our longings and disappointments, our ability to handle the things in life that are unfair and unjust, and our desire to hang on or let go of the world we know. He wraps them up in the fabric of war, the senselessness, the fear, the consequences, and then he asks what makes us alike or different.

This book is so powerful, it makes you shake. There is so much to pity, so much courage on display, and so much wisdom, bought at too high a price. But what makes it work completely and irrefutably is its honesty. You could walk into any VA hospital in the country and listen to the men there, and you might find Walter and Braiden, you might overhear any part of this conversation, because the earning of a purple heart is indeed dirty work that scars its recipient for life.
( )

I recently read two other books on the brutal impact of war on the individual soldier, Redeployment by Phil Klay and a reread of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Dirty Work came much closer than Redeployment to leaving me with the frustration and sense of inevitability that All Quiet on the Western Front produced on both reads. Dirty Work is the story of two Vietnam vets, one black and one white, who come together in a Vet medical facility 22 years after the war. Braiden Chaney, left with no arms or legs, and Larry, seriously disabled by shrapnel in his brain and damage to his face, struggle with limited life choices. Over two days, Braiden and Larry share their lives with one another. While I can not place Dirty Work at the same level as Brown’s Father and Son, it left me moved, wanting to look away but knowing that I must pay attention. I think Larry Brown deserves to be more widely read, and I encourage everyone to try him out. ( )

Pretty remarkable and impossible to do justice to in a short review. On the one hand, this book is the most extreme type of melodrama, and the two lead characters are a lot more intelligent and articulate than you would expect, but that lets Brown tell his harrowing story of memories, duty, fate, love, and death in a voice that never falters. And may never leave you. Perhaps not quite as well written as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried--but in its depiction of the toll of war on two men, even more effective. ( )