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Charles Nelson's first book skillfully crossbreeds two
contemporary genres, the Vietnam novel and the gay novel. It's
a sort of dishy Dispatches -- Dancer from Da Nang.
Taking the form of letters written from August '66 through
July '67 to four different correspondents (and signed
"Relentlessly, Kurt"), The boy Who Picked the
Bullets Up transcends its potential cliches. A tall,
24-year-old minor-league third baseman tapped for training by
the Detroit Tigers, Kurt Strom joins the Navy and winds up a
medical corpsman for the Marines in Vietnam; the Rimbaud poems
that serve as epigraphs fro the book's four parts (one verse
also provides the novel's title) presumably suggest the
romance of war that inspired Kurt's otherwise unexplained
enlistment. Along with a censored version of his daily
routine, Kurt's letters to his feisty grandmother -- called
"Mom" --offer advice on domestic warfare back in
tropical Bonifay, Louisiana. To cousin Chloe, he confides
hometown gossip as well as all the gory medical details (not
for the squeamish). Ballplaying buddy Ach mostly receives
accounts of Marine Corps machismo, while gay pen pal Paul gets
the lowdown on all Kurt's sexual exploits, carefully concealed
from the others.
The narrator's voice brims with wit, anger, and suppressed
panic (big boys don't cry); it also reveals his remorseless
racism and sexual exploitation. Honest if unsavory
"Doc" Strom describes his favorite pastime --
seducing straight men -- with the same dispassion he uses to
report a nightmare patrol in which two American regiments,
mutually mistaken for VC, ambush one another, killing three
men and wounding seven. What emerges from these letters is a
shell-shocking, side-splitting wartime frolic as outrageous as
M*A*S*H, only more appalling, since it's presented not
as satire but as cold-blooded and, for the most part,
believable fact. (Only the amorous adventures seem sometimes
exaggerated, like picaresque pornography: Queen Kurtie always
gets her man.) At least one letter could stand by itself as a
short story, the tale of a corpsman busy saving lives in an
impromptu ICU who is removed from duty for insulting an
officer. The episode devastatingly portrays military madness
as a dangerously elevated game of
my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours.
Of course, the same elements that make Bullets a
breezy, sometimes harrowing read reduce its ultimate effect.
The novel lacks depth; the accumulation of lifelike incident
could be balanced with contemplation. the four-part structure
is arbitrary, and excerpt for the narrator few people spring
to life -- least of all the correspondents, who are more
constructs than characters. Most damaging, perhaps, the
letters are not believable as letters; no one, not even a
budding novelist, writes letters full of dialogue.
Nonetheless, this is a promising fiction debut most impressive
for its writing style, which is, well, relentlessly curt.
Village Voice, December 2, 1981
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