“Love Beneath the Napalm,” by James D. Redwood

For some years my wife and I frequented a Chinese-Vietnamese restaurant in Schenectady, New York, the Mandarin Station, now, alas, out of business. The restaurant had a groundskeeper with a face like Mr. Tu’s, clearly a victim of napalm. I had seen many such while I was a teacher and a social worker’s assistant in Saigon between 1972 and 1974, and I began to wonder what the life in America of such an unfortunate man might possibly be like. Thus the story. Another organizing event infusing the narrative, greatly cut down from the original, was the notable patronage of the Saigon movie theatres up to the very last day of what the Vietnamese refer to as the “American War,” April 30, 1975 (a verifiable fact). The need for a mental and emotional escape where a physical one was impossible should have been obvious to me, I suppose, although I was still astonished the day I happened upon this curious fact in the course of my reading. The rest of the story is a product of my imagination.

The Vietnam War played a pivotal role in my formative years, and after I became exempt from the draft in the first lottery and graduated from college, I voluntarily went to Saigon to teach English. I stayed for a total of something like nineteen months, off and on, leaving a week before Saigon “fell.” It was only in 1986 that I picked up the pen for the first time to convey through fiction my memories and impressions of Viet Nam, and at long last I am nearing completion of a series of stories and must soon face the daunting task of searching for an agent. I am pleased that “Love Beneath the Napalm” has been selected for publication by the Notre Dame Review. Other stories in the series have been published by the Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Black Warrior Review. Another piece in the series is forthcoming with North Dakota Quarterly.

My story “The Photograph” may be found at https://www.kenyonreview.org/Magazine/issues/04fall/04fredwood.asp, and my story “Numbers” may be found at http://www.virginia.edu/vqr/viewmedia.php/prmMID/7953.