Storytellersunplugged

Forgive me, but for limits of time and imagination, I’m modifying a recent entry from my own blog, but I hope it’s relevant to how we — or at least I — create characters, and defy legal disclaimers. Read on…

At Amazon.com, one reviewer of my novel DEADSTOCK said that the book’s female soldier Thi Gonh could very well be the Vietnamese sniper from the movie FULL METAL JACKET, while another Amazon reviewer griped that my attitudes toward the Vietnam War were Oliver Stonesque (I guess he’d have been more pleased if my sentiments were John Waynesque). Both reviewers are at least right in that the novel’s Ha Jiin people, and the Blue War with the Earth Colonies’ Colonial Forces, are inspired by Vietnam. But their comments not only don’t give me enough credit, but enough credit to the Vietnamese themselves. It is as if the Vietnamese only exist in the reality of Hollywood movies, my impressions of them based solely on these movies. Not taken into account is the fact that I’ve visited Vietnam six times, nor that I’m married to a Vietnamese woman. On my first trip to Vietnam, I was struck by how very little the war intruded upon my mind. These are people affected by past events, naturally, but very much living in the here and now. Of course, there were those specific destinations that brought the war to the forefront of my mind, such as my visits to the somber and chilling War Remnants Museum in Saigon, and the famous Cu Chi tunnels, where I ventured into a restored section of tunnel. Even with these sample tunnels widened a bit to accommodate the bodies of Western tourists, I felt I was going to burst out of my skin during the short time I was down there, and I can’t conceive how people could live in those labyrinths year upon year. On the Cu Chi grounds, I paid extra to fire live rounds from an AK-47 and M-16 (”experience the weapons of the Vietnam War!”) on a range, and our guide showed us various recreations of booby traps, not with a “aren’t these things monstrous?” kind of tone but with a “this is how we beat them” pride.

While she might not be transplanted from a movie, my novel’s blue-skinned warrior Thi Gonh is in fact inspired by other sources. She is largely a composite of an actual Vietnamese guerilla named Vo Thi Mo and my wife Hong Thomas (the former Truong Thi Hong)…with touches of a former lover of mine added to the mix for DEADSTOCK’s sequel, BLUE WAR, in which Thi plays a greater role. (Thi is also briefly alluded to in the short story, IN HIS SIGHTS, in THE SOLARIS BOOK OF NEW SCIENCE FICTION, vol. 1.) I read about Vo Thi Mo a few years ago, and remembered her story when I went to write DEADSTOCK, but using her middle name Thi had more to do with my wife’s middle name Thi. Most Vietnamese women have that as a middle name, just as most men have Van as their middle name. Gonh, of course, is Hong spelled sideways and is meant to sound like “gone,” to represent Thi’s elusiveness to protagonist Jeremy Stake. In the so-called Blue War, ten years before the events of DEADSTOCK, Thi became Stake’s prisoner, during which brief time he fell in love with her — moved by an act of mercy on her part that inspired her own people to change her nickname from the Earth Killer to the Earth Lover.

That act of mercy is pretty much lifted whole from an extraordinary event in the life of Vo Thi Mo. She was just a teenager when she became an officer in the all-women “C3″ outfit and battled US troops, filled with hatred for the Americans after having lost several brothers in the war and seen her family home demolished. But on one occasion, as the seventeen-year-old lay concealed in the brush, she saw three American soldiers enter into a clearing, oblivious to her presence. They began to read letters from home to each other and share photographs of loved ones, and all three soon broke down into tears. The guerilla had never seen US soldiers as human beings before, and she was moved by the naked emotion she witnessed. She was unable to shoot them, though she had them in her sights all the while (if they are still alive, I wonder if even today those men are aware of how close they came to death that day). There was a brief investigation about this formerly ruthless young woman’s inexplicable act of mercy, but it was jokingly said that the American killer had become the American lover and she was not punished for what might have otherwise been seen as an act of treason. She went on to survive the war, and a picture of her from 1985 shows her with eyes that I could very well mistake for my wife’s, staring off toward the distance as if contemplating the mysteries of human nature.

How will this complex woman be portrayed in Uwe Boll’s new film, TUNNEL RATS, due for release in 2008? That’s right – a few days ago I read online and later in FANGORIA magazine that among other films the infamous director will be bringing out soon, such as a sequel to the horrid BLOODRAYNE, is a film about the exploits of the so-called US tunnel rats, on a mission into the aforementioned Cu Chi tunnels to kill North Vietnamese guerilla Vo Thi Mo. Good Lord. If this woman is herself still alive today, I wonder if she is aware of this movie. Well, maybe Boll will recreate her act of mercy – maybe the tunnel rats won’t be able to bring themselves to kill her, in a surprising act of mercy, too. I can’t really denounce a movie I haven’t seen yet, can I? Hey, in FANGORIA Boll said that this film will do what other Vietnam war films haven’t done (shame on you, APOCALYPSE NOW and THE DEER HUNTER!), which is show how the US lost that war. So who knows, this movie could be quite human, quite enlightening. But did I mention that another of Boll’s films in the works is the recut and “hilarious” HOUSE OF THE DEAD: FUNNY VERSION?

Well, it looks like Boll and I have similar muses, eh? Real life inspires art. Do you really believe those disclaimers that the characters, places and events in books and movies are wholly fictitious? How could I or any writer truly keep people we’ve known or read about from insinuating their way into our work? On September 15th, my cousin Bill phoned to tell me that my Uncle Wally Thomas had passed away. Wally was another brave warrior – a veteran of both World War Two and the Korean War. Wally once took me on a week-long trip to Washington DC, one of the greatest experiences of my life, during which we did everything from see how money is made to watching LAST TANGO IN PARIS in the theater. Wally and his brother Robert – my father, and also a sailor in World War Two – are the protagonists of my short story POST #153, which appeared in the anthology OCTOBERLAND and will be reprinted in my collection DOOMSDAYS. In that story, the brothers Wally and Bob “Thompson” defend their veteran’s post on a rainy Halloween night from the ghosts of their wartime adversaries. “Wally and Bobby” also appear as veterans in the first chapter of BLUE WAR, again warming the bar stools of their neighborhood veterans’ post.

So forgive my lack of imagination, in cannibalizing facts for my fiction. But I hope that the manner in which I’ve used these inspirations has been imaginative in itself, and helped shine a little light on the remarkable behavior of human beings. Did Vo Thi Mo go on to kill any more US soldiers after that amazing event, or was it only those particular circumstances that stayed her hand? Whatever the case, this event is one of the most compelling stories I’ve heard about the complexities of the human heart. It encouraged and moved me, and it’s hard for me to relate to others verbally without choking up in the process. I hope it’s understandable why I would want to further immortalize it in my own little way. And why I might want to immortalize my Dad and my Uncle Wally, just a little bit, also. Hey, maybe we’ll get lucky and Uwe Boll will feature them in one of his movies, too!