THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 26, 1995 TAG: 9504260048
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
``NEVER GIVE up!''
That's the ultimate command in the do-it-yourself creed of salvation that key characters come to in John M. Del Vecchio's third novel, ``Carry Me Home'' (Bantam Books, 720 pp., $22.95), which is rooted, like the other two, in the Vietnam War's impact on its American participants and on those of us at home.
The novel focuses on the war's aftermath and the spirit-crushing experiences of servicemen like Capt. Robert Wapinski, war cast-offs trying to come to terms with the loss of a fight that they themselves did not lose and with a muddle of personal nightmares and civilian frustrations.
The captain, discharged on a disability, is a decorated airborne veteran of Hamburger Hill and other Vietnam bloodlettings. Fired by his wise old grandfather's advice - who counsels him to struggle toward some worthwhile end so absorbing as to heal the wounds of war by reaching beyond one's self - Wapinski begins to find his way out of a maze of career blind alleys and sexual misadventures.
He designs a team program of hard work, self-help and mutual honesty to help bring other emotional casualties of the war out of their various drug- and/or despair-induced doldrums.
What he and they build, on an old patch of Pennsylvania farmland and its syrup-producing maple grove, is a community that takes the name of the location, High Meadows. The group is light on discipline but strong on commitment to people-serving ends. Solar energy installations are the chief economic engine of the enterprise.
Del Vecchio, himself a winner of combat medals in the war, probes both ugliness and beauty with passion. He can lift or shatter us almost at will.
At his most painful best, Del Vecchio lets us inside the mind of ex-Marine Tony Pisano. Tony proves to be the most dramatic of Wapin-ski's rescues.
When the community enterprise almost goes under - racial bitterness and spite are the torpedoes - and disasters batter Wapinski, much as they did Job in the Bible, we share the rage.
Del Vecchio is articulate, too, in framing the debate over the war's high goals and dismal results, over whether the press and particularly television deserve the blame - or the politicians, the war protesters, or the defense industrialists, or simply strategic misjudgments.
We are pummeled with the argument that the men who did the fighting had won a great deal and were still winning when a contrived withdrawal undid everything, leaving the fighters adrift, on their return home, in a sea of indifference-cum-scorn.
As an appraisal of the war and its warriors, this book has an intelligent balance missing in many of the angrier critiques. As a depiction of sensualities gone wrong and right, from debauchery to genuine love affairs, the story is an untinted mirror of real life.
As a portrayal of human hope-turned-into-distress-turned-into-hope, this testament may well leave you drained. But refillable.
Giving up is not an option. MEMO: George Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB