Interview with David Huddle, Emerging Writers Forum 3/20/2002
My experience in Vietnam wasn’t that of the classic infantryman. Because I was in army intelligence—and thus was a peculiar variety of bureaucrat—I got a skewed view of things. I never fired a weapon. None of my friends or acquaintances were wounded or killed. I never saw anyone using marijuana. But I did have access to some Vietnamese people, I did see a variety of landscapes, I did hang out with both officers and enlisted men, I did glimpse some intriguing “big picture” views of the war. For instance, I got a look at how (in 1967) the army was trying to computerize the intelligence it could gather from its various sources. If somebody passed along the word that Nguyen Van Nguyen seemed to have a lot more rice to eat than anyone else in the village, I might be the guy who’d be responsible for typing that information into the army’s computer system. In Vietnam there was a high level of absurdity about such efforts because in any given village there are hundreds of Nguyen Van Nguyens. This is a long way of saying that the material that came to me out of Vietnam was vivid but limited. The first two stories I published—in ‘The Georgia Review’ in the fall of 1969 and in ‘Esquire’ in January 1971—were accepted because they were about Vietnam. So essentially I owe my writing career to having been in Vietnam. At the same time, my experience there was not so soul-shaking—as I believe it was for Tim O’Brien, Bruce Weigl, W.D. Ehrhart and some other Vietnam writers—that I had to go on trying to sort it out in my writing. I wrote my Vietnam poems years after I’d finished writing about Vietnam in my stories. I wrote the poems in some part because I realized the experience was fading from my memory, and if I didn’t set down some of the details that were in my mind, I’d lose them altogether. I think those fourteen-line poems were well-suited to capturing little “slices” of my daily experience in the army—and to the fact that my experience in Vietnam had been short on drama and long on tedium.
