Paco's Story
by Larry Heinemann
Summary
Alpha Company died at Fire Base Harriette: ninety some men, annihilated in a single night's attack, and the novel is narrated by their ghosts, a collective voice from beyond the grave that addresses an unnamed listener, James, in a register mixing barracks profanity, biblical cadence and carnival barker patter. The ghosts have one survivor to follow, and they follow him with the jealous attention of the dead for the living.
Paco Sullivan lay two days among the bodies, burned and shattered, before a medic found him, and comes home the way the war sent men home: legs full of pins, a cane, a bag, a bottle of Valium, and a bus ticket to anywhere. Anywhere is Boone, Texas, where a sympathetic World War Two veteran gives him the sink at the Texas Lunch, and the middle of the novel is simply work, rendered with a dignity almost no fiction gives it: the dishes, the steam, the ache of standing, the townspeople constructing their versions of the quiet man with the limp.
The ghosts keep interrupting with what the townspeople cannot know, the massacre, the medic, and one atrocity in which Paco participated, told without mercy for him or the reader, and the book's ending, sprung by a neighbour's diary, measures exactly the distance between the town's romance of the veteran and what the war actually left of him.
Around two hundred and ten pages, savage and formally daring.
Best for readers who want the Vietnam aftermath novel at its most unsparing, narrated by the dead who did not get Paco's luck.
Historical Context & Significance
Paco's Story won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1987 in the prize's most argued upset: Toni Morrison's Beloved was the overwhelming favourite, an editor telling the press that everybody and their brother had expected it, and the choice of Larry Heinemann's second novel produced public protest, including a statement signed by dozens of Black writers lamenting Morrison's treatment. Beloved took the Pulitzer months later, and the episode has shadowed both books since, unfairly to each: Heinemann, a working class Chicagoan who had served a combat tour with the 25th Infantry Division, had written a genuinely major novel, and never asked to be the instrument of anyone's neglect.
His first book, Close Quarters, and his memoir Black Virgin Mountain complete a shelf entirely about the war and its long tail; he taught for years and died in 2019.
Time has done the sorting prizes cannot: both novels are canonical, and the 1987 award now reads as the night American letters argued, loudly, about whose ghosts got heard.