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Wandering Souls
Friday, Nov. 6, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
Wayne Karlin on the Leonardtown campus of the College of Southern Maryland, where he has taught since the 1980s. The author and Vietnam War veteran recently pubished "Wandering Souls: Journeys With the Dead and the Living in Vietnam," his third book of nonfiction. The story begins in 1969, with an accidental encounter by 1st Lt. Homer Steedly and Vietnamese soldier and medic Hoang Ngoc Dam.
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Wayne Karlin publishes ‘Wandering Souls: Journeys With the Dead and the Living in Vietnam'
"It's better than my desk at the college, actually," says Wayne Karlin, referring to the relative tidiness of his home office in St. Mary's County versus his space at the College of Southern Maryland, where he has taught since the 1980s.
The wall bears a painting Karlin bought in Vietnam, where he has traveled several times since 1995, when he returned for the first time since arriving with the U.S. Marines Corps in 1966. When you look at the painting closely and see two dots beside a row of single footprints, you realize the dots are the mark of crutches and that the painting is about land mines.
Among book shelves filled with Hemingway novels, Karlin's own works (which includes seven novels and three books of nonfiction) and books by the likes of Tim O'Brien (author of the novel, "The Things They Carried") and Christopher Hedges (a journalist known for the best-selling book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning"), is a photo of Karlin which hangs above his computer — snapped, he says, by "the guy I shared that hole with" in southern Vietnam.
The sun shining, Karlin is laying back shirtless against a mound of dirt and bags of sand in front of a tent. He is reading a book. His machine gun is within arm's reach. "What I like about the photograph is that I'm choosing the book over the gun there," he says, speaking with a quiet, friendly gruffness.
Fueled by a combination of self-interest and patriotism, Karlin, after dropping out of high school, enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1963 and served in Vietnam in 1966 and '67, mainly as a helicopter gunner.
During the war, Karlin earned a GED. After returning to the United States, he enrolled in college, and in 1976 he earned a master's degree in creative writing from Goddard College. Before that, Karlin had worked as a freelance journalist in the Middle East, and in Jerusalem he happened to meet the daughter of the Burmese ambassador to Israel. He and Ohnmar Thein Karlin have now been married for more than 30 years; they have a son, Adam Karlin, who has reported for the Calvert Recorder, The Enterprise and the Maryland Independent.
O'Brien and Hedges have both praised Karlin's most recent effort, "Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Vietnam," a nonfiction book published this year.
The story goes back to 1969, when 1st Lt. Homer Steedly came face to face with a Vietnamese soldier, Hoang Ngoc Dam, a 25-year-old medic. Dam was armed; when he saw Steedly he reached for a gun slung over his shoulder. Steedly's weapon was down at his waist; he drew it, fired and killed Dam instantly. After the incident, Steedly collected Dam's notebook and other documents, and after asking for them to be returned from intelligence services, he mailed them to his mother in South Carolina, who stored them in an attic for decades.
In 2008, Steedly returned to Vietnam for the first time since the war. Karlin went with him. Not only that, Karlin had made an initial trip, as a surrogate for Steedly, to return the documents to Dam's family. But after Karlin returned and went to see Steedly at his farm in South Carolina, Steedly then decided he was ready to return himself and pay respects to Dam's family.
As Karlin explains in "Wandering Souls," Vietnamese believe that the spirits of people killed away from home, no matter the cause, wander the Earth aimlessly. If a person is buried away from home, the family can at least bring personal mementoes to the site to basically bring the dead closer to home. Without certain documents or artifacts like Dam's journal, his family was never able to recover his remains or locate his grave site. Until Steedly returned the things he had taken, in fact, Dam remained among Vietnam's 300,000 post-war, wandering souls.
Nearly 40 years after his death, his family was able to proceed with a funeral. Meanwhile, Karlin, Steedly and the others who accompanied them, witnessed the pain and mourning manifesting itself as if the incident had occurred just days earlier.
Karlin's sprawling book, a true mish-mash of literary styles, takes the reader back to the encounter. It takes us back to Steedly's early life in North Carolina, to the battles he waged as a platoon leader in Vietnam and to the years after his return — years fraught with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.
Through interviews with Dam's family, friends and comrades, Karlin also transports the reader to Thai Giang, a small village about 60 kilometers southeast of Hanoi. As well, Karlin, who has edited an anthology of Vietnamese authors, occasionally infuses the narrative with the viewpoints of some of these writers "because imaginative literature gives you such an ability to live vicariously in someone else's mind," he says. "You see what the world looks like to someone who is seeing it through a different lens. At the same time, you are realizing all the familiarities with yourself. It becomes the opposite of what war does; it becomes a way of really accepting the humanity of someone else versus dehumanizing them."
In the book, Karlin includes part of an interview he did with O'Brien. He asks him why he "continues to write about it." Why does Karlin?
For O'Brien, Vietnam was the most important part of him growing up, Karlin says. "I feel the same way," he adds. "We were sort of born there. … When you're a writer, you write about the things that are significant in your own life. If that happens to be parallel with the things that are significant to your country's life, then it would be criminal not to write about it."
Even so, Karlin thought he was finished with Vietnam-era reportage that has been the basis and informed so much of his work. From the beginning, the point was to bear witness. The point was to chronicle history and perhaps even to stop it from repeating itself, as he believes it has with our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I definitely felt like we've said all this stuff," he says, "and people listen, but probably not the people who could affect things. It's terribly frustrating."
Toward the end of the book, Karlin brings it all back home. Weeks after returning from Vietnam with Steedly, he attended the funeral for Sgt. Ryan Baumann, who was killed by an IED in Afghanistan. Baumann's fiancee is the daughter of Karlin's neighbors.
After the trip, Steedly wrote to Karlin, "I cannot begin to express how much this trip has changed me … I've opened up to people, actually engaged in conversation," he wrote.
Karlin felt good about that, but he writes that his own "sense of completion" was shattered by the news of Baumann's death. As he sits on a couch in the living room, Karlin can his see his neighbors' property through the front window. "I don't know how to explain it any other way than how I wrote about it in the book," he says.
If you go
Wayne Karlin will talk about "Wandering Souls: Journeys With the Dead and the Living in Vietnam," at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 10 in Daugherty-Palmer Commons at St. Mary's College in St. Mary's City. The event is free. Call 240-895-4215.
