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Dirty Work
By Larry Brown
Chapel Hill, Algonquin Books, 1989. 236 pp. $16.95.

The Acquittal of God:
A Theology for Vietnam Veterans
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
New York, Pilgrim Press, 1990. 107 pp. $7.95.

The novel Dirty Work is by a former Marine who is a self-educated writer of poetry and fiction, without theological pretensions. The Acquittal of God is by a German journalist who covered the Vietnam War and later attended seminary and participated in veterans' support groups at a Veterans Administration hospital. Siemon-Netto uses the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to interpret the experience of the veterans with whom he has worked.

Despite their different forms, these two works have much in common. Each centers on the trauma and ongoing physical-psychologicalspiritual consequences of the war for the soldiers who fought it. Each presents the returned veterans (or, at least some of them) as men who, having confronted radical evil and suffering, possess unusual capacity for spiritual questioning and insight. Each suggests that this spiritual questioning typically involves challenging traditional theology and clergy and anger against God. Each argues that, when they move beyond this anger, Vietnam veterans often identify profoundly with the concept of God as fellow-sufferer, intimately involved with us in the suffering of the world.

Siemon-Netto's book emphasizes the "intense spirituality" manifest in veterans' rap groups: they are "spiritual communities ... unconsciously drawn toward the Christ." The veterans' spiritual insight qualifies them to "lead America from her state of naivete ... to a state of maturity." America needs their leadership badly, for it suffers from a "Tin Drum syndrome," refusing, like the little boy in Günter Grass' novel, to grow up. America is a "self-indulgent society," "a nation unwilling to live with unpleasant memories."

Many Vietnam veterans have expressed such criticisms of the nation with telling spiritual power, in poetry, fiction, and memoirs. (See for example, W. D. Ehrhart's memoirs, Vietnam-Perkasie and Passing Time as well as Carrying the Darkness, his edited collection of veterans' poetry.) Those veterans quoted by Siemon-Netto, however, do not speak with genuine spiritual depth and maturity. Despite the author's claims, the veterans' tape-recorded words reflect that same narrow, chauvinistic, ignoring-of-reality that is characteristic of the American culture they so heartily criticize. These men (and, apparently, Siemon-Netto

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himself), still interpret the war in ways that disregard the preponderance of available historical evidence and analysis. For them America's war aims were unequivocally noble and self-sacrificing: "We were over there risking our lives for the Vietnamese." We Americans could have won the war handily if only our government had "not set such limitations on the fighting that it was impossible to win the combat." Not only the United States government, but also the "ignorant" populace, the young men who avoided serving in the war, the "ignorant" war protesters, and the "God who went AWOL. from the war"-all these are at fault. The question "is not whether God can forgive the soldier ... but whether or not the soldier ... can forgive God."

Opponents of the war who have not repented of their folly cannot be forgiven. Jane Fonda "went over there ignorant and did more damage than she did any good." But there are other veterans, their voices not heard in Siemon-Netto's book, who would apply precisely this criticism, first and foremost, to themselves and to America's war policy: We went over there ignorant, and did more damage than good.

The two veterans who speak in Dirty Work have moved beyond the effort to justify an unjustifiable war and their place in it, their terrible losses from it. Moreover, they have ceased to scapegoat others, especially God, for the unthinking, unalterable human folly-including their own-that has left them physically and spiritually crippled. Braiden Chaney, a black man who lost all four of his limbs to a North Vietnamese machine gunner, has endured twenty-two years in a VA hospital, wholly dependent on others for all his bodily and personal needs. Twenty-two years of spiritual struggle have led him to this outlook: "First thing you got to realize is people can have things happen to them that ain't their fault. Ain't their fault but they got to pay for it anyway ... And everybody want to blame it on God. Or say God done it. Say Oh God made that happen. It's for the best. He got a plan in the scheme of everything. I've heard preachers get up and tell it. Stand up in church and say it. Listen, Walter. God don't cause no shit like that to happen ... But he can't protect everybody. And bad things happen ... thousands of times a day. The thing that happened to me that day was just one thing that happened in the middle of a lot of bad things that happened that day. Shit, Walter. It was over three hundred killed some weeks. He ain't responsible for all that. It ain't no way. Man does all this stuff to himself."

Walter is a white man, also a Marine, whose face is badly distorted by the explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade and who carries bullet fragments in his brain. He has the empathy to recognize that, after twenty-two years of limblessness, Braiden wants to die, having, as the black man says, "paid my price." But Walter is horrified when he realizes that Braiden hopes to convince him to kill Braiden before Walter leaves the hospital the next day. Braiden tries to persuade Walter to put him out of misery-even as Chief Bromden did for McMurphy at the end of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

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Walter refuses, adamantly, despite his compassion for Braiden. "Jesus don't condone that kind of stuff. Hell, Braiden. You know that."

Just before it is time for him to leave the hospital, Walter changes his mind-because he learns of some further "shit" that has fallen on him, in the present, without his fault and without his intent, for which he must pay the price. Perhaps it is recognition of the enormous price-paying he himself now faces that makes him accept Braiden's argument: Braiden has paid enough. These are the last words of the novel: "He opened his eyes and looked at me when I closed my hands around his throat. He said Jesus loves you. I shut my eyes because I knew better than that shit. I know that somewhere Jesus wept."

The spirituality of these Dirty Work vets is mature, self-critical, tempered by continuing struggle, purified by tears of compassion. It evidences that rare gift, the courage to face the full truth about life and love (what James Baldwin called life's "terrible laws") in spite of the ever-present temptations of culture and religion to ignore such truth. It serves far better to illustrate what Bonhoeffer meant by the spirituality of a "world come of age" than does the immature, unreflective, responsibility-avoiding perspective put forward by The Acquittal of God. Comparison of the two books reminds us that, while suffering is often a prerequisite to spiritual awakening and insight, neither suffering by itself nor the application of theological categories to that suffering is sufficient to produce spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity requires spiritual wrestling, grappling with those formidable opponents within as well as the enemies without. Spiritual maturity begins with the courage to face the full truth, however unpalatable and unexpected. The full truth usually leaves us, 'no less than 'our enemies, without excuse, occasions for Jesus' tears.

William H. Becker
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania