A critic once said of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, whom Dostoyevsky called the founder of Russian Realism, “His work is full of tears, but there is laughter through the tears.”
I know, from first-hand experience, that war is not funny; but there is in war much of the unreal, the mystical, and the bizarre.
In Darn Those Miserable Yangkhis and Other Stories of the Viet Nam War I have woven a blend of the real, the unreal, the mystical, and the bizarre into tales that will, I hope, generate several chuckles, some laughter, and a few tears, whether one was over there or not.
And there is nothing in this story that is more unreal or more bizarre than some of the things that I saw, did, and had done to me.