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.

1 Several Facts I was a soldier once, and did a year's combat tour in Vietnam with the 25th Infantry Division at Cu Chi and Dau Tieng from March 1967 until March 1968. The town of Cu Chi, twenty miles or so northwest of Saigon, straddled Highway #1 (see map) and was profoundly undistinguished. The American base camp was just outside of town. Nowadays it is famous to the world for the Tunnels of Cu Chi, built by the South Vietnamese guerrillas with ordinary garden tools over a decade and more, and which spread out (if you stretched it) beneath us two hundred kilometers' worth. I am told that the local Vietnamese revolutionaries looked on in astonishment as our division engineers laid out and then built the base camp of considerable acreage over a portion of the tunnels. This was not to be the last of the 25th Division's fuckups. Is it any wonder that when asked to describe the Americans during the war, about all that occurs to the Vietnamese is that we were "brave" and "valorous"? That's what armchair historians say about the Federal troops who assaulted the Stone Wall at the foot of Marye's Heights during the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, and who disappeared, said one participant, like snow falling on warm ground. Dau Tieng was the base camp for the division's 3rd Brigade, squat in the middle of the Michelin Rubber plantation--forty miles north (and a touch west) of Saigon as the crow flies--in Cochin China; the classic image of a company town in every sense of the word. The Americans lived in run-down tents with dirt floors and slept on cots (the canvas all but rotting off the wooden frames), and shared the base camp with half a dozen large French colonial manor houses that had galleries all the way around where the plantation management and extremely senior brigade officers lived, tile-roofed plantation outbuildings, and an aboveground Olympic-size swimming pool (of all things); the lanes and gardens were lushly shaded with plane trees--just like in the movies. Outside the perimeter, the village streets were lined with offices, block-long clusters of company-owned housing, and somewhere in there was the ubiquitous company store. Down by the river was a huge latex processing plant that gave off a heavy industrial stink rivaled only by the leaden, acrid smell of foundries and mills in Southside Chicago and Gary, or the bourbon distilleries of Bardstown, Kentucky, on sour-mash day. The thick orchards of working rubber trees came nearly to the base camp perimeter, which was marked off with sloppy coils of concertina wire and spotted with sandbag bunkers, pathetic and well-weathered hovels that collected garbage and rats. The plantation ("the rubber," we called it) was laid out with cornfield-like precision that was seriously scary but somehow pleasing to look at; there was an undeniable parklike atmosphere. It should come as no surprise to hear that during the war the tending of the broad stands of rubber trees and the harvesting of raw latex diminished year by year, but it never ceased. War was war, to be sure, but business was (ever and always), of course, still business. Halfway through my tour we were told that the Army had to pay Michelin an indemnity for every rubber tree we knocked down--an easy thing to do with a thirteen-ton armored personnel carrier; a thousand dollars per tree, more or less. Well, after we heard that, we never missed a chance to take a whack at one. Fuck rubber trees; fuck the Michelin Rubber Company; fuck the Army. In the spring of 1966 my younger brother Richard and I had received our draft notices, and we submitted to conscription with soul-deadening dread; Richard was twenty and I was twenty-two. No one told us we could hightail it to Canada. No one told us we could declare ourselves conscientious objectors and opt for alternative service--a special punishment all by itself during those years (like the preacher

Advance Praise for Black Virgin Mountain "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 writtenso passionate, so truly inspiredthat 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 "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." Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior and The Fifth Book of Peace "No American novelist has written about the profound issues of military combat better than Larry Heinemann. Now he has writtenin that ravishingly dynamic narrative voice that is distinctly his ownthe finest memoir to come from the Vietnam War. But Larry Heinemann is neither a great 'war novelist' nor a great 'Vietnam writer.' He is a great writer and a great artist, period."Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain "Woven throughout Heinemann's blunt war commentary is an intimate and startling portrait of the Vietnam he has come to love. This is a book that I will read again." Bob Kerrey, President, New School University "Black Virgin Mountain is a wonderful bookso serious, so moving, so funny, so informational. It is historywe have been reading it aloud." Grace Paley "The veterans of Vietnam are still coming home, all these decades later, and Larry Heinemann's long journey back to the mountain of his war, Nui Ba Den, is one of the simplest, truest, and most moving trips home that I've ever read." David Maraniss, author of They Marched Into Sunlight

In 1967 Larry Heinemann was sent to Vietnam as an ordinary soldier. It was the most horrific year of his life, truly altering him--and his family--forever. In his powerful memoir, Heinemann returns to Vietnam, riding the train from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh city and confronting the memories of his war year. "Black Virgin Mountain" confirms Heinemann's legendary plain-spoken reputation as one of the essential chroniclers of our war in Vietnam