Bob Nylen’s just-released book, “Guts,” has to be one of the most honest war memoirs written about Vietnam. It has none of the usual agendas, either glorifying the pristine heroism of the soldiers or, alternately, showing them to be just imperialist murderers. His agenda, as usual, was candor and storytelling: the comrade who blew up his brothers by horsing around with a grenade, the decisions he made that resulted in the death of his men, the things no war movie has ever captured, and his own heroism.
Bob co-founded Beliefnet in 1999 but until reading his memoir (mostly about his military service and recent bout with cancer), I hadn’t the slightest idea what he’d been through in Vietnam. Normally voluble, he didn’t volunteer much on his experience as a soldier in the late 1960s and I felt bashful about asking. I regret that. Bob died soon after turning in the manuscript. How I wished I could have him back for a few hours to go over this incredible book line by line!
The book’s full name is Guts: Combat, Hell-raising, Cancer, Business Start-ups, and Undying Love: One American Guy’s Reckless, Lucky Life. Bob meant the name to ironic, in part because he didn’t think he was heroic and in part because he died of colon cancer. It’s a very Bob sort of joke. But of course he did have guts, and this book conveys heroism in its truest sense – as a mix of instinct, accident, lizard-brain reaction, genuine valor and sleep walking.
Consider the story of Bob recuperating at a Navy hospital recovering from wounds when another patient erupts:
“In the ward’s far corner, an EM was ranting “motherfuckers!” he said. “Get back, you bastards!” Branding a big black pistol, the kid whose cherubic face, wispy mustache, and pale complexion signified desk jockey, cook, bottle washer, held nurses at bay.
Weapons were banned in hospitals. How’d he smuggle this one in? A mystery. This kid had a mouth, a grudge, and a substance abuse problem. But combat had inured me to danger. This moron was sitting on clean cotton sheets for which he should have been thanking his stars, bars, and stripes. He made no sense. “Get away, bitch! I’ll kill you,” he told a supplicating nurse.
Someone walked up to the young man and calmly requested his pistol. Just like that the kid shut up and handed over the pistol, butt end first, as you’d do on a target practice range. He’s seen bad shit out there. He said. It had fucked him up.
When the ward was quiet, a nurse thanked me for disarming the young man. Me? No. No way. Couldn’t prove it by me. This out-of-body experience was no more connected to my festering sunburned, hard-of-hearing self than it was to Saint Peter, Captain Kangaroo, Senator John Stennis, or George Custer’s moldering corpse. After the kid was taken to the brig, I returned to my bed and fell asleep. When I awoke, I remembered the kids terrible reign, but not how he’d been disarmed, nor by whom.
The nurse retold the story twice, thanking me. In her third telling, the incident came back: bam. I shook. How incredibly foolish! What a crazy jerk I’d become…a wild-eyed would-be martyr, just asking for it, somehow surviving despite myself.
It’s an extraordinary book. Buy it here.
