Saigon ... shit. Western Kentucky ... also a bit shit, as it happens, though in different ways. Having been in Saigon, or Vietnam in general, during the war and then ending up in Western Kentucky is probably doubly shit - Sam Hughes hasn't done that as she was born during the war but her uncle Emmett and some of his buddies have. Her father Dwayne did the Vietnam bit but sadly not the coming home bit as he was killed out there at the age of twenty-one.
There's not a great deal to do in the small town where Emmett and Sam live - Sam does a bit of work at the local burger bar and a bit of desultory casual boning with her boyfriend Lonnie. Sam's mother, Irene, has long since headed off elsewhere in Kentucky with her new boyfriend and has recently provided Sam with a half-sister. Emmett, meanwhile, shows no particular inclination to get a job, living off what remains of his military pension and some handouts from the local veterans' association and seemingly suffering from some physical symptoms which might or might not be after-effects of exposure to Agent Orange and similar noxious stuff (or might just be acne and wind) and some non-physical symptoms which are almost certainly some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sam is in her late teens now and is getting a bit more interested in what happened in Vietnam, both to Emmett and his buddies (who are a bit tight-lipped on the subject) and to Dwayne. Obviously Dwayne isn't around to tell her anything, but Irene has a small stock of letters from Dwayne, sent from Vietnam, and Dwayne's mother has an old diary, delivered back in his personal effects after his death, which she doesn't think contains anything interesting but which she admits she hasn't really read. Sam, however, devours it and finds a harrowing story of young American men dropped into the jungle, crippled by the constant raging shits, terrified at the prospect of being confronted by a mysterious enemy emerging from the jungle at any moment, long periods of boredom interspersed with occasional furious panicked activity, occasionally coming across a decomposed corpse, either friend or foe, and the gradual deadening of affect at witnessing and occasionally perpetrating all the killing.
Sam now has access to a car, albeit a fairly knackered Volkswagen Beetle, purchased from one of Emmett's old war buddies, and decides that she wants to go to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington DC and find her Dad's name among the tens of thousands. Emmett and Dwayne's mother agree to tag along on the road trip (no small commitment as it's about 800 miles) - maybe performing this little ritual can bring Sam and maybe even Emmett some closure? Well, maybe.
I recall seeing the film of In Country as part of a late-night drunken movie marathon in what would probably have been the early- to mid-1990s; it was made in 1989 (the novel was published in 1985) during the brief period when Emily Lloyd (who plays Sam, with a pretty convincing accent, not that I could tell a Kentucky accent from a Texas one) was the next big thing acting-wise. It also stars Bruce Willis as Emmett, trying to break out from the early comedy roles and John McClane into something a bit more serious. I mean, it's OK, but I couldn't absolutely swear I stayed awake for the whole thing, and the book is much better. The film is, to be fair, better than the only other film I remember watching on the same night, which was Sleepwalkers, a film (written by Stephen King) about a small town infiltrated by a family of bizarre incestuous werecats. Not a high bar to clear, to be fair.
Anyway, it's an engaging read without doing anything very startling. The Vietnam war is of course a rich source of inspiration for artistic works (films probably more than books); books on this list that feature it (generally a bit more tangentially than In Country does) include The Human Stain, The Overstory, Fiskadoro, Bluesman, Sweet Caress and Watchmen. There's also The Quiet American, although while it's set in Vietnam strictly speaking the action there happens before the American involvement in the war kicks off.
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