Book Review

Bringing Vincent Home
by Madeleine Mysko
Plain View Press, 2007
http://www.plainviewpress.net.
ISBN: 9781891386787

Bits of an old Army marching song—"If I die...Box me up and send me home"—are one of many refrains played again and again throughout Madeleine Mysko's novel Bringing Vincent Home. This marching song, a training song, taught to recruits by drill sergeants before going to war, is a song of acceptance; it's a song of bravado. It's a chant; it's a prayer.

But one of the questions Mysko asks is: What does the song mean for the loved ones left behind—the mothers, fathers, the wives, the sweethearts? For them, that song is a dirge, a lament. And the song connects everyone touched by war—any war, whether World War II, Vietnam, or the current war with Iraq.

The plot of Bringing Vincent Home travels back and forth through time, touching on each war. In the one-page prologue, we learn that each Friday 84-year-old Kitty Duvall protests the Iraq War by wearing a shirt with a peace sign and carrying a sign listing the number of soldiers killed. But she wants to do more. And so she begins to write about her personal experiences with the war in Vietnam.

In August 1969, Kitty discovers that her youngest son, Vincent, has been wounded in Vietnam and is being sent to the burn ward at Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. The Baltimorean leaves her home immediately to be by her child's side. Vincent has second- and third-degree burns covering 36 percent of his body. So each day Vincent is taken to the tank room where he soaks in a tub and the dead skin from the burns is removed. During his visits to the tank, the doctors and nurses won't even allow Kitty to wait on the ward; they don't want her to hear Vincent’s cries and screams. But she can imagine them, and another refrain is born: "Hail Mary, full of grace...Holy Mary, mother of God."

Kitty's Catholicism helps her to cope with Vincent's physical and emotional injuries, just as it helped her years earlier when her alcoholic husband took all of their money and left her and the children. She takes comfort from her rosary and soothing (if trite and vague) sayings like "everything will be all right" and "things will look better in the morning." She doesn't judge the war in Vietnam. She has a routine that she sticks to, and her goal is "just trying to hold things together."

But what she learns is that "There wasn’t a shred of truth to that...at least on the burn ward there wasn't." The sayings have no meaning; they are just words ringing in her ears while she waits to see if her boy would recover. There is nothing she can do but hope and pray and be there, and in her helplessness she wonders if those things are enough, especially as she looks back over her life, remembering her own youth as well as her children’s childhoods, and her troubled marriage and the effects of World War II on her husband.

As author Tim O'Brien writes in a blurb on the book's back cover, Bringing Vincent Home reads very much like a memoir. The first-person narration, the thematic focus, and the compelling characters all suggest that this is a true story. And Mysko's experience as a lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps at BAMC during the Vietnam War help her to include details and situations that most civilians (the lucky ones) know nothing about. Mysko reveals how war affects not just the wounded soldiers and their families, but also the doctors and nurses that treat their physical wounds and the men of faith that try to ease their spiritual pain.

The novel is at its best when it focuses on Kitty's relationship with her children and makes connections between the past and present and among the different people affected by war. Kitty's crisis of faith and personal responsibility is also compelling and sympathetic. The only slightly false note in the book is the subplot in which Kitty develops romantic feelings for a chaplain at BAMC—this development seems unnecessary, although it nevertheless is rather satisfying to see Kitty find love again.

"Bring them home" is yet another refrain to this book that is so ardently anti-war and also pro-soldier. Mysko uses this refrain as a twist to the marching song, the other side of the coin, the chant and redemptive hope of those that stay behind. It is, it appears, the reason Mysko wrote this, her first novel. She speaks to her readers through these words in a letter from Kitty to then-president Nixon:

I believe it is important that I tell you these things. I wish you would come to the burn ward. I can only tell you that it brings this war home to you, when you see it with your own eyes.—Catherine Harrison