From the author of the classic National Book Award–winning novel Paco's Story, an equally classic and haunting memoir of the Vietnam War.

In 1966 Larry Heinemann, a working-class twenty-two-year-old from Chicago, was drafted into the Army just as the American military buildup in Vietnam was going into overdrive.  He served one year of combat duty with the 25th Infantry Division, from March 1967 to March 1968, most of it in the vicinity of Cu Chi (of tunnels fame).  It was the most horrific and consequential year of his life and served as the raw material for his two subsequent classic war novels, Close Quarters and Paco's Story.  The war also devastated his family. Both of his brothers served in the military, and one of them killed himself, while the other has been missing for many years.  Truly, the Vietnam War altered Heinemann's life utterly and forever.

Black Virgin Mountain is structured along a railway journey Larry Heinemann took in 1992 from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City as the guest of the Vietnam Writers Association and ends with a crawl through the Tunnels of Cu Chi and a climb up the sacred mountain that provides the title's namesake.  From there, he can view the entire compass of his combat experience in-country (including the horrific battle in which Oliver Stone also fought and used as the bloody climax of Platoon).  Along the way, the author encounters Vietnamese veterans of the war and views sites that trigger powerful memories. This memoir is an unforgettable threnody and a moving act of reconciliation.


"Part memoir, part travelogue, part personal political treaise, Heinemann's first nonfiction effort is also a winner. His evocative look at his eventful 1967-1968 tour with a 25th Infantry Division mechanized infantry battalion contains a bitterly strong indictment of the politicians and generals who waged the war, and tracks his transformation from a nonpolitical son of the working class into a disillusioned young soldier who became virulently politicized."
—Publishers Weekly

“Black Virgin Mountain is a brilliant, masterful piece of writing. The book is loving, smart, angry, tender, blunt, heartbreaking, tough, edgy, funny, bitter, redemptive, and so incredibly well-written — so passionate, so truly inspired — that I wanted to buy time on the Fox network and read the whole thing aloud. Black Virgin Mountain, I promise, will endure.”
— Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato

“It took bravery for me to read Black Virgin Mountain. The reader faces the reality of modern warfare. Larry Heinemann tells the truth about what we did in Vietnam, and the consequences to the Vietnamese and to ourselves. He exults in describing how things work. In electrifying language, he communicates the exhilaration, unique to the once-combat soldier, of simply being, still, alive. As I read about Vietnam from the perspective of Heinemann’s tour of duty, his ‘war year,’ and from the perspective of his many peace-time journeys, I keep asking myself, How are we ever going to be able to extricate ourselves from the current ‘Vietnam’ — Iraq?”
— Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior and The Fifth Book of Peace

 
Larry Heinemann is the author of three novels: Close Quarters (1977), one of the earliest novels of the Vietnam War; Paco's Story (1987), winner of the National Book Award; and Cooler by the Lake (1992). He lives in his native city of Chicago, Illinois.