Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption.

Albert French. New York: Anchor, 1997. 241 pp. $22.95 cloth/$12.95 paper.

Reviewed by

Jeff Loeb

The Pembroke Hill School, Kansas City

Without question, rapidly disappearing century's most tumultuous era in race relations was the one now collectively referred to as the sixties. Though this decade's strife immediately proceeded from that of the fifties, and certainly spilled over into the seventies, most key events in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements are somehow rooted in its years. Central to the racial unrest of the sixties - seldom discussed in this context, yet impossible to separate from it - was Viet Nam. The war which came to be viewed in succeeding decades by white America as merely ignominious was absolutely disastrous for black America. Casualties for African Americans ran as high as 23 percent early in the war; line companies frequently exceeded 50 percent minority makeup throughout; and supposedly enlightened programs like Operation 100,000, designed to "benefit" all Americans not otherwise able to qualify for military service, actually became a way of collecting more black bodies from what later decades came to call "the hood." Yet despite - or perhaps because of - this calamitous effect on the black community, the war has remained almost totally unexamined by its African American participants, with a deafening literary silence.

For this reason, the publication of Albert French's memoir Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption is a signal event in both the field of African American autobiography and that of Viet Nam War literature. Not since 1975 has there been a memoir by a black participant in that war, and only a handful of novels or works of poetry. Yet during this same period, the white-authored literature by Viet Nam veterans has become a veritable growth industry. The few African American memoirs that did find their way into print were written so closely in time to events described that they tend, unlike the later, whiteauthored ones, to be more polemical and less self-reflective. French's work, however, probably because of its long gestation period, reverses this relationship: The aftermath of trauma - in particular, his being badly wounded and, in general, his total experience in Viet Nam - rather than the politics of race becomes the book's central focus.

Patches of Fire is also significant, however, because it augments French's other literary achievements, the 1995 novels Billy and Holly, in important ways, mainly by serving as the story of their composition. Since the memoir was actually written before the two novels, though published after, French is able to reflect upon its inception as well, and Patches of Fire is thus in a curious way a commentary upon itself, especially as examination of the repressed trauma that precipitated its writing. In addition, it is an important stylistic precursor to the novels, providing insights into French's development as a mature writer.

Events such as French's wounding and the violent deaths of several Marine Corps friends are clearly the major impetuses for its composition. Yet like many veterans of that ignoble war, he would later repress its memory as he pursued a career in journalism and publishing. Only at age 40, when he reached a crisis - he found the magazine he had started on the verge of going under and his personal life in a shambles - did French begin dealing with the long-buried effects of the war.

The title event of Patches of Fire is a hillside burning with napalm that later comes mnemonically to trigger French's imagination. This image imprinted itself upon his psyche as he lay writhing in pain for the several hours it took to medevac him after being wounded, yet it took years for it to return to him. His attempts to come to terms with this image, and the memories for which it provides the leading edge, make up the second half of the book. First in a veterans' outreach group of the type that proliferated in the eighties, then by the writing of several drafts of Patches of Fire, French slowly begins to deal with the traumatic aftermath of twenty years before. Before he is finished, he suffers a total breakdown and the painful reconstruction of his personal life, both romantic and familial, but in the process he also discovers his literary voice, with the result being not only this book but also Billy and Holly.

The style of Patches of Fire is impressionistic, and French employs an early version of the free indirect discourse that marks his novels to render both the innocence of childhood and the growing pain of racial self-awareness. Though this narrational technique matures in Billy and Holly, here it has the quality of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though with the voices of French's earlier, more innocent selves embedded in the narrative, as opposed to being developed in linear fashion, as they are by Joyce. The effect, at least in the book's first half, is symphonic, with a return to common themes, notably the realities of racial difference, at several levels. This technique of multi-vocal narration also underscores the dichotomy between writing and written selves that marks autobiography, and indeed all first-person narration. Thus French smoothly represents the impressions of an innocent eighteen-year-old with no seeming consciousness of the traumatized writing self poised years in the future, yet he accentuates the tension between the two through italicized intrusions by that later self's reflections. In the book's second half, which chronicles French's self-recovery, this dual-voiced quality is, if anything, accentuated, though turned around so that the boy now speaks to the man. The result is an emphasis on the traumatic self-division caused by Viet Nam and his growing up black in white America.

In addition to being an important work of African American autobiography, Patches of Fire also occupies a unique place in the tradition of Viet Nam literature, partly because of the paucity of black-authored works about that war. Counting journalist Philippa Schuyler's posthumous memoir Good Men Die (1969), there have been but seven autobiographies by participants in or observers of the war; French's is the eighth, and the first in over two decades. White-authored memoirs now number more than 500. Similarly, there exist but a handful of African American novelists and poets who were in Viet Nam, and, of these, only Yusef Komunyakaa, Horace Coleman, and A. R. Flowers have had anything resembling careers in writing, and each has had to struggle in his own way to achieve recognition, none being notably prolific. By comparison, imaginative works by white veterans are quite numerous. This disparity reflects more than just racism; rather it is a product of a profound silence from the black community on the subject of Viet Nam. While black novelists as recognized as John A. Williams (Captain Blackman, 1972), Walter Dean Myers (Fallen Angels, 1988), and Barry Beckham (Runner Mack, 1972) have at one time or another taken Viet Nam as their subject, very few serious African American writers have followed suit, especially in recent years. There are no easy answers as to why this should be the case, but the result is a gaping hole in our cultural understanding of this tumultuous period.

In many ways, Patches of Fire helps fill this gap. While prior black-authored memoirs provide a full range of the African American experience in Viet Nam, none was sufficiently distant in time from the events that precipitated it to be fully reflective, personally or culturally, of the effects of these events. Thus, a Terry Whitmore (Memphis-Nam-Sweden, 1971) can provide the perspective of a highly decorated Marine who deserts in the face of a growing sense of the war's racism; a Fenton Williams (Just Before the Dawn, 1971) can offer testimony about how he, even as a doctor and an officer, was discriminated against, as well as providing an informed political analysis of how the U.S. blundered into Viet Nam; and a James A. Daly (A Hero's Welcome, 1975) can show how a strong set of personal ethics can overcome the duplicitous machinations of a racist military command structure. Yet none of these memoirists is able to do what French does, which is to show not just how he was duped by false promises into going into the military, and thus to Viet Nam, but what the long-term effects of that act have been, for both himself and, by implication, the African American community as a whole. One can only hope that French will now turn his novelist's eye to the same subject.