April 29, 2004

Plains Folk: Uncommon Birth

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Will there come a time, say 20 years from now, when the veterans of the Vietnam War will command public respect comparable to what the veterans of the Second World War enjoy today? That will depend on more than the passage of time. It will depend on the humanization of the people who served in that unfortunate conflict.

Images of the Vietnam War in cinema (equally so The Deer Hunter or The Green Berets), in literature, and I dare say, in histories have been fashioned more to make political points than to enlighten human experience. This may not be disrespect, but it’s not respect, either, and it gets in the way of understanding the lived event.

Now here is this book by Mark St. Pierre, “Of Uncommon Birth: Dakota Sons in Vietnam,” published by University of Oklahoma Press. This is the sort of book that moves us toward that future place of respect I asked about at the outset. It’s a book that repairs the sense of common humanity.

It’s not a perfect book. It’s one of those nonfiction novels, which makes me edgy at the outset. There are loose ends in the plot, characters that just sort of fade out, and not in the way of modern fiction that is intentionally fashioned of loose ends. Dialog in the early part of the book is clunky, especially where it involves female characters. When the book gets into combat, on the other hand, the dialogue is deadly accurate.

The whole tour-of-duty section of “Uncommon Birth” is disturbingly real. It is by turns clinical, chaotic, and confused, like the war it treats. Vietnam vets tell St. John he has nailed their experience, and I (who had one of those lucky birthdays at the time) believe them. St. John (like me, not a veteran) has done a masterful job of reconstructing experiences through oral interviewing and documentary research.

St. John is a teacher of writing and a chamber of commerce manager in Martin, South Dakota. He’s of mixed-blood ancestry (not Lakota) and is married to a Lakota woman. I met him during a reading at the Zandbroz store in Fargo. He sounds and looks like a bulked-up Kevin Costner without a makeup artist.

His two main characters are Dale Nielsen (pseudonym), a Caucasian from western South Dakota attending South Dakota State University, and Frank (called Billy on the reservation) Jealous of Him, a Lakota from Pine Ridge fronting an Indian cover band. Each volunteers for the army for his own reasons, in both cases involving women and personal confusion. One returns from Vietnam alive, the other in a coffin.

Now I have to give away the plot, because I need to say something about the funeral. The description of the funeral is the most compelling piece in the book.

From the arrival of the coffin in Porcupine, to the uncles taking turns with a shovel, the story careens from grief to pomp to jealousy to dignity to grim hilarity, all sequenced to disrupt any contrived thread of narrative. This must be how it all happened. It could not have been made up that way. I’d like to attend a funeral where the soloist covered Merle Haggard. (Kind of reminds me of my niece’s wedding, but that’s another subject.)

Mark says Dale was one of those guys who kept things bottled up for decades. He consented to tell his story only as a vehicle for telling that of his buddy, Frank. “I have found it is often those who have seen and endured most,” writes Mark, “who are least likely to talk about their experiences.”

I realize at the end that as a reader, I feel I have been inside the head of Dale, the main informant for the book, but I know Frank by triangulation, by the ways others viewed him. I say this not as criticism, but as praise. It’s as if Frank is placed on a turning wheel, well lit, to be examined from all angles. The lines and proportions that take shape are fully human.

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