Edgar Tiffany has dragged around a duffle bag with collected notes and scribblings for almost 50 years. In this volume they coalesce into nonfictions and fictions about Vietnam, or influenced by Vietnam. The nonfictions are all about Americans in their war in Vietnam, and especially about the experiences of an infantry and reconnaissance medic with a far-ranging interest in art, literature and history. A section of his Anti-Memoirs is titled with a quotation from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, Between the Idea and the Reality, and reduces his concerns with Vietnam, and his experience of it, to exactly that. His fictions, while dealing in part with his Vietnam inspirations and inventions in Saigon Passional, and Audie Murphy in Saigon, also reflect the ideas and concerns confronted in combat that now convey to other times and other places; an apocalyptic tale set in the snowy hills of Ithaca, New York; a true, but imaginary, story of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, locked in a dungeon outside 18th Century Berlin; and, a long-lost historical document about a first century son who travels to Germania in pursuit of his missing father, and finds himself.
Comments:
Tiffany, a much-decorated Army veteran of Vietnam, pulls the reader into his book with a surreal recollection of an ambush patrol gone wrong near a small Vietnamese village. The weight and horror of that encounter illustrates the psychological wounds war inflicts versus the physical mortgage of battle written so starkly by the World War I poets, foremost Wilfred Owen in his Dulce et Decorum Est. That is not to say that the physical harm of battle is not also elucidated here with a steel gaze. The true mastery of Tiffany’s storytelling lies in his ability to weave between fact and fiction to give the reader no pause. In a book review contained here, a writer said, ‘There’s a lot of crap written about Nam, ’ and, ‘No one has yet put the record straight.’ Tiffany belies the former to do the latter in this mix of commentary on Vietnam film, literature, pulp, ancient manuscripts and his own military experiences telling a story interfused with struggle, and war.
-Robert DuTremble, Retired Master Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps
I was drafted in 1964. Edgar Tiffany enlisted. He went to Vietnam, I stayed home. He was 18, I was 22. We met in 1965 at Ft. Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas. What I remember about the 19-year-old soldier, before he left for Vietnam, was his fascination with Albert Camus’ The Fall, a book he’d picked up under the tutelage of some older drafted literature professor. The Fall, a novel about an exiled French lawyer started in Amsterdam’s red-light district at a bar called Mexico City, a drinking hole for ‘sailors of all nationalities.’ Some strange parallels here, as San Antonio had a bar we frequented called Tiffanys Lounge, a drinking hole for soldiers and airmen of all origins and at least one existentialist. Jean Paul Sartre said that Camus, at the age of 20, had become suddenly afflicted with a malady that upset his whole life. He had discovered the Absurd. And that was Tiffany, a 19-year-old, who, waiting on his distinguished combat service, suddenly discovered the Absurd. I see now, 50 years later, that it marked him for life. To read Audie Murphy in Saigon is to experience the path this discovery has led him down.
-Kenneth Keys, Former Army Medic, friend, author of Elephant Square: An Artist Illustrated
