TSP Talks to Juris Jurjevics

Zinta for The Smoking Poet: Welcome to The Smoking Poet, Juri, and I have to say—I am especially pleased when I can bring other Latvian writers and artists to our magazine's pages. With my own Latvian ethnicity, I can't help but take pride in the rich talents of my people. So, with a little chest thumping here for hurrah, Latvia! let's begin with a little more background from you before we talk about Red Flags.

Tell us a bit more about Tukums, where you were born, and about what it was like to grow up in camps for refugees in Germany. My own parents spent some time in their late teens and early 20s in these same camps, but the stories never cease to fascinate me—and everyone, after all, has their own.

Juris Jurjevics: I left Tukums a babe in arms and don’t remember any of it. It’s a modest town in the western part of Latvia. My grandfather was a blacksmith, my father a school principal. Mother worked for the town clerk. The Russian army was invading a second time in 1944, on their way to Berlin, and my family fled, afraid of being swept up in another wave of deportations to Siberia. My uncle and his two sons and wife didn’t manage to escape. Years later I received a photograph the size of a postage stamp inscribed on the back, “For Juri a last picture of his godfather.” No name, no dates, just a stranger’s face in a salt and pepper beard. It was the first and last news we had of him. My mother’s two sisters had died earlier. He was her last surviving sibling. My father’s only brother, a fastidious flautist with the symphony in Riga, was sent to Siberia and returned in broken health, dying a few years later.

Well, of course, knowing nothing else, it seemed perfectly normal to grow up in refugee camps in postwar Germany. It wasn’t until my own child, in a pre-school discussion volunteered that, yes, she knew someone who had been homeless, that I was finally made to realize this about myself, the truth of it pointed out to me by my four-year-old. I shocked my sister with this story recently because the obvious had never occurred to her either. Denial and repression, I have to explain, are highly developed Latvian attributes.

What was it like in camps in postwar Germany between 1945 and ‘50? Creepy. Tense. Menacing. We were malnourished and constantly hungry and often shared quarters with other families, making dividing walls out of blankets hung on strings. This was at whatever camp we were at before Mannheim. I only remember two families – ten adults – sharing two rooms and the embarrassment of a chamber pot for a toilet. I must have been two and a half. My sister, four years older, remembers a mass of people jumping from windows to their deaths after some announcement over the public address system. My guess is that they may have just been informed of their forced repatriation to the Soviet Union.

The adult world seemed uptight and threatening. I was probably never fully comfortable in it again, truth be told. The Latvian camp leaders seemed elitist and hostile, the defeated Germans population more so. Someone had heard that they killed children. By the thousands. I wasn’t sure exactly how much thousands meant but I knew it was a lot. One needed to be on guard.

German street kids seemed especially hard and some were living rough. One boy, I think in Mannheim, was drowned by some feral thugs in a pond in the overgrown botanical garden. A playmate was run over by an army convoy and cremated. One day I followed drops of blood up a staircase like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs; someone had been beaten. Police caught a thief with a case filled with gold artifacts from a nunnery chapel and nuns’ wedding rings, some still attached to hands. A teenager was thrashed by his parents and thrown out after being falsely accused of stealing a neighbor’s watch. A kind man I liked a lot burned the SS identification tattoo from his arm with a soldering iron. A Latvian pediatrician refused to go to the aid of a sick Latvian child whose parents were in dire straits and had nothing to barter for his help. Leaders pushed themselves to the front of immigration quota queues. Parents were pointedly insulted by the camp leadership who barred them from their childrens’ lunch room session to prevent them from stealing their kids food rations – the same children they struggled and sacrificed to feed, often from their own rations. Smokers retrieved conchicks – cigarette butts – discarded in the street. Everywhere sidewalks were immaculate, even in front of bombed buildings that were nothing but rubble. Everything was sold in open air markets. I recall only a single working shop, a bakery where I bought a meringue, the only baked good left on the bare shelves. My sister bought a banana, having heard such stories about them, and found she didn’t like its sweet, creamy taste. Deprivation was humiliating. It made you hungry and didn’t bring out the best in people.

Mannheim was very close to Heidelberg, where a nearby clinic, I learned years later, participated in the secret T4 network of facilities that, beginning in 1939, euthanized physically and mentally disabled German babies under the age of 3. The age eventually rose to 17 and an adult program was added. Lethal injections of phenol were augmented with starvation and gas chambers. These mercy killings of youngsters were at first performed by qualified doctors and inspired a common sympathetic expression in medical circles of that period: “The hypodermic belongs in the hands of a German physician.” It also explained why their Nazi Party membership numbers were so low: they had joined early to do God’s work. Upwards of a quarter of a million Germans were eventually disposed of under the program. Its techniques, of course, were later adapted for other secret liquidations of even larger proportion.

Ten years ago on a business trip, I went to the villa in Berlin after whose address the secret T4 program was named: Tiergartenstrasse 4. The building was gone, replaced by a bus station. In the macadam outside, a plaque cited the euthanasia campaign devised and administered there by the Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care, as it was called, to mercifully deal with “life unworthy of life.”

Unfortunately, during the long years of waiting for an immigration quota to open somewhere, potential emigrants were required to endure a great many mandatory immunizations. I found myself less than enthused by the huge hypodermics and the German doctors administering them. I fought or ran away whenever possible, and on one occasion spent an entire day perched over the passageway into the camp, holding a rock and metal cup of water, waiting for one of the doctors to pass.

Boys in the community’s Latvian school, I noted, were sometimes threatened with having to sit on a potbellied stove … which put me off higher education somewhat. I was, in fact, expelled from kindergarten my first day for inexplicably throwing logs down onto teachers from atop a large woodpile. I wasn’t invited back and didn’t fare any better at a friend’s first communion service in a church decked out with plaster representations of the Stations of the Cross, Jesus’s perp walk and execution. I slid onto my belly under the pews and into that odd cocoon kids envelop themselves in for safety and solitude. Looking out at the adult world, I didn’t much like the view.

A typical urban camp would be a rectangular block-sized building with an interior quadrangle. One I remember well was in the countryside near Schwabisch Gmund [umlauts on the a and the u] in the abandoned barracks of a German army training site, complete with hulks of broken half-tracks, 12-foot high scaling walls we kids scrambled up and over, and deep trenches along whose eroded razor thin edges we dashed and sometimes fell in. In addition to this exciting playground, I had three toys: a handful of cut glass buttons, a wooden locomotive, a phosphorescent lanyard from an MPs pistol that clipped to the gun butt, looped around your neck and glowing in the dark, and a sand-table artillery piece. A wooden match in the breach would actually light when the gun was fired and fly out smoking. My big sister had her one doll, named Anna.

The rural camp was especially appealing because of the proximity of farms and villages and the opportunity to pillage, food always being scarce. I seemed forever to be trekking behind my mother from village to village, bartering whatever article for potatoes, turnips, the rare egg. Even with that, my sister actually came down with rickets, a softening of the bones due to a vitamin deficiency, and I suffered terribly from tainted meat and tape worm, so that I refused to eat meat for years after, even in the States. And we once had a real absurdist moment when my father actually kited the idea of bartering his dentures for food. When my mother died at 94, I found among her effects (in addition to hoarded stocks of canned foods and jams and reams of cloth) a perfectly preserved gold plated razor, a pair of 1940s nylon stockings still in their box, a military sewing kit, and a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes, sealed.

On the plus side, there were American GIs who shared their gum and comic books, like Captain Marvel and Mighty Mouse. An unforgettable amateur performance of Twelfth Night. My father’s job as a projectionist, showing black and white American movies dubbed in German, like Meine Frau die Hexe (I Married a Witch) and Hopalong Cassidy westerns (“Wie gehts, Hoppy?”). In our fifth year in the camps, life eased up a little and we were a little more mobile. In Esslingen there was an orphanage where the kids all spoke four or five or six languages and switched to a hybrid all their own when they wanted to discuss something without the multi-lingual staff being able to eavesdrop. In Stuttgart in a castle, a small cannon with a magnifying glass attached would announce the noon hour when the midday sun struck the lens. I remember Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s tomb, and on the heights above Heidelberg an armored knight’s footprint smashed into the ground from jumping down from a parapet. Also wading along the stony bank of the Nekar River, plucking apples in a roadside orchard while sitting on my father’s shoulders, and cursing in Plattdeutsche at Germans who got too close in a tram. I was also presented with my first egg to eat and asked for a knife to peel it. Most memorably, having free run of the ship on the Atlantic crossing to America because a storm had made everyone else seasick and unable to enjoy the especially wonderful translucent green blob jiggling in a glass case in the food line of the ship’s galley. No one could even look at it, much less eat.

Zinta: Being a child of war, how did that affect your writing about war?

Juris: Being a displaced person leaves you marginalized to some extent in both cultures: the one into which you were born and the one you’ve emigrated into and have to work at absorbing. It makes you self conscious and very aware of things like language and your knee-high shorts when everyone else is in long pants. I didn’t want an accent in English and don’t have one. Long pants ended the daily schoolyard fights. You are observant by necessity. It makes the world vibrate.

I think my familiarity with the aftermath of war made me a sympathetic and good observer when I got to the highlands of Viet Nam. It really felt like I had made that scene before. A war torn society felt completely familiar, as if it were in my DNA. Despite the cultural differences, I thought I knew what the locals were going through, caught between warring factions. There weren’t any surprises such as there seemed to be for my buddies. Where I had been the kid pestering American GIs for gum and comic books, now I was the American GI being cajoled to “souvenir” waifs with cigarettes and C-ration chocolate. One day I took a picture of a Eurasian seven-year-old at the wheel of a jeep. It was exactly me eighteen years earlier in a gutted jeep in Germany.

As a kid in the U.S., I really worked at assimilating. I wanted to be a cowboy, and devoured movies and TV shows and comics. In the second-grade Dick and Jane reader I especially liked Zeke, the handyman who raked the yard leaves into piles and set them ablaze with potatoes roasting inside. See Zeke eat. I assume you detect the motif here by now.

I played stick ball in the street, American football, not soccer, and tried to figure out baseball. I made the most wanted list at the Kingsbridge library for failing to return books on time, or at all. Nothing in the culture spoke to the DP in me. All of it addressed the new me, except a couple of deeply affecting films, The Bicycle Thief and Graham Greene’s The Third Man, shot in war-torn Vienna. The idea someone made movies that touched on my experiences in that other world came as a great shock and revelation.

The Latvian émigrés criticized everything American – poison ivy, ill-mannered children, roaches, shoddy standards of workmanship, snakes, and divorce chief among them – none of which had existed in Latvia. They also seemed to have brought with them their class attitudes and sense of exceptionalism. Especially egregious, I thought, were the university sororities, which forbade marriage to Jews and blacks and scolded young members for wearing such attire as the ladies considered suggestive. Meanwhile, the fraternities forced their pledges to consume alcohol on command and in the final initiation had them duel with sabers against experienced fencers who administered a formidable battering with the flat of the blade and ended by scarring the young novice on the chest. It amazed me. These people who performed the most menial labor to survive, put on airs and their finest at week’s end, draped narrow bands of their korporacijas’s colors across their chests and went off to their soirees where for a few hours they were deferred to again as social elite.

Zinta: Please do tell us about The Trudeau Vector, a short synopsis, but then I'd like to focus on Red Flags, a novel I just recently read. A synopsis for our readers about this novel, too.

Juris: The Trudeau Vector is a thriller set mostly in the Arctic at a very advanced research station where a bunch of scientists have mysteriously and horribly died of …something. And an American epidemiologist literally gets dropped in to try and solve the mystery of what’s happening before it wipes out everyone. Meanwhile, in Moscow the Russians discover that a submarine of theirs has gone missing on its way back from picking up one of their scientists at Research Station Trudeau. I worked on it in off hours for years and finally labored very seriously to finish it when my daughter’s college fund tanked. It did the trick: it did great.

Red Flags is set in the Viet Nam war though it is not a combat novel about the slaughter of innocents. It’s more about the lifers, the professional soldiers who serve multiple tours overseas because they much prefer the freer, more exciting life in a combat zone, as opposed to the spit and polish of peaceful garrison duty somewhere like Germany. These were guys who had gone off to WWII, then Korea, Vietnam and basically never came back to the continental United States. They live today as expatriates in places all around the Pacific rim. They were like the Roman legionnaires who went out to do battle in distant exotic places on the empire’s far flung borders and lost the desire to return.

The hero and narrator is a reclusive veteran hiding out in northern California, where the daughter of his former commanding officer shows up one day, wanting to know the unadulterated facts about her father’s death. She corners him and makes him tell.

Something like it, that I had witnessed in Viet Nam, had made me realize how perfect a combat zone was for the commission of a capital crime. I mean, murder in a place where killing was essentially legal, even required, and where bodies were mostly given passing notice. The possibility of a killing even being investigated was wildly remote.

The tremendous number of opposing and symbiotic forces converging in Viet Nam made for the most perfect climate of intrigue and betrayal. Foremost of these forces was the systemic corruption that more than flirted with treason. Secondly, the long standing animosities between ethnic groups such as the Kinh – the Vietnamese majority – and the Dega as they called themselves, or Montagnards as the French had labeled these fascinating primitive clans. These were aboriginal Pacific tribes uprooted from Viet Nam’s coastal lowlands centuries earlier and driven into the highlands by the southward expansion of the Kinh. The Vietnamese persecuted and feared the Montagnards from that time forward, treating them as subhuman inferiors, and these mountain tribespeople – their men in loincloths, their women bare-breasted – very much returned the sentiment. Think American Indians and you’ve got it. Adding to the problem, American soldiers much preferred their innocent honesty to the secretiveness of the Vietnamese they were primarily there to defend.

If you were around the Montagnards, you could as easily be shot by your South Vietnamese allies as by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army regulars on whose infiltration route our little outpost sat. Coming in from the field, the Green Berets would collect their “Yards’” grenades lest they lob them into the ranks of any South Vietnamese they passed. Feelings ran that high. Two times in the 60s there had been lethal rebellions against the South Vietnamese by the tribes wanting autonomy and their grievances addressed. The murderous mutinies were followed by executions and government promises of reforms which never came. The tension between these armed groups was always on the verge of turning violent and often enough resulted in unrecorded firefights.

Cooperative corruption between the Vietnamese Communists and their South Vietnamese enemy involved American-supplied equipment, provisions and fuel. One added complication in the novel is the Communists reaping munitions money from harvesting a cash crop of opium to help finance their war effort. This with the complicity of their southern enemy. The local CIA operative teams up with an army cop assigned the job of messing up the illicit cash flow.

Zinta: I understand Red Flags is largely based on your own experiences in the Viet Nam War. As I imagine it must be … too profound an experience to be able to imagine without having lived some part of it. You allowed a great many years to pass before you took it on in writing. Was this because it takes that long to be able to distance yourself, to look at it with any kind of objectivity? Can one ever do that? And writing means reliving, surely.

Juris: Reliving, yes, to be sure, though writers do that anyway. Initially, I took it easy on myself by trying to write it as a black comedy. I thought that hadn’t really been done for this war. But the opening chapters that made vet friends laugh made civilians readers weep, so I gave that up and set out to write it around the intrigue I had witnessed, including the possible perfect murder.

A couple of sections were tough to write but mostly I maintained my distance. Keeping it all accurate and controlling the storyline was much harder than any emotional blowback from revisiting the war. My long forgotten night visitors did show up again, but wound up pitching in to help with the plot, so that was all right. I wasn’t suffering daily as I wrote. I think vets are somewhat inured (sometimes troublesomely so) to what civilians might find appalling or traumatic. Most vets took a professional interest in 9/11, for instance, but were nowhere near as upset as the public at large.

The biggest challenge was to make readers aware of the hidden competing interests and many sides in that war, yet keep the story clear enough to allow them to follow the intertwined collusions and conflicts that American soldiers were asked to cope with. Which were a lot. A firefight is straightforward compared to the rest of what was dealt with there, including suspicious deaths such as those we now see in Afghanistan at the hands of people we are training and advising. The narrator says, there wasn’t just one war, us against them. There were a bunch and you weren’t always sure which side you were on.

I think my hotter feelings had subsided over time and some open questions had found answers. The delay in taking up the story was more due to economics. Lewis Mumford once described art as the toy of the rich. I needed to work for a living or I would have started sooner. Or perhaps not. Because I can’t be sure at what point I might have felt confident enough of my skills to take it on.

Zinta: But Red Flags forced me to think a great deal about all the gray areas in war, all the corruption, all the lies we are told.

Juris: Armed conflict is tricky -- imposing your will by force doesn’t leave much room for error or extrication once triggers are pulled and the conflict goes off. It takes on its own life and is quickly chaotic. Everything and everyone acts on it from all sides at once. The right strategy, the proper course to take is easily overlooked in the melee. More often there is no right decision to make. The situation is so convoluted no decision will do you any good. But you need one, grab one and go with it. I mean, we defeat the Iraqis and wisely disband their army and the ruling party, then forbid its members to hold office in the new government. Seemed like a good idea, I’m sure. Get the corrupt murdering bastards out. And what happens? Civil society collapses. Looters invade the museums. There is no law on the streets. An insurgency grew. Had they decided the opposite, to keep the Bathists operating the bureaucracy and the military, the decision would’ve been condemned as our letting the oppressors stay in power. A lose-lose conundrum. Southeast Asia was similar.

In terms of Viet Nam, in hindsight it seems that the most rationally arrived at choices turned out totally the wrong ones to make. Experience and instinct might have worked better, and the more extreme options might have been the ones to take, and we didn’t. We practiced moderation, doing everything gradually, cautiously, and wound up in the same defensive postures as the French and with the same result: gradual loss. You can’t win a war defending. But maybe they were hoping for a stalemate, as in Korea. A reasonable hope, again wrong.

As for lies told, I wouldn’t have said this years ago, however, I’ve come to the surprising conclusion that most “lies” about Viet Nam weren’t told to mislead so much as to give the appearance of our higher ups knowing what they were doing and being in command of an unmanageable situation. The White House and the Cabinet just had so much blind faith in the ability of the nation to drown the enemy with our manufacturing power and technological superiority, as America had done in WWII. We knew it all and were all powerful. In Vietnam the same strategy proved disastrous.

We put our many boots on their ground and lectured the Vietnamese on how to wage war as we knew to, these people whose military academies had been around since the time of Christ, who repeatedly defeated superior Chinese forces in eons past, had resisted the Japanese, defeated the French and then us.

What I wanted Red Flags to corroborate was what a crazy cauldron they had marched us into. Right into the soup. I also wanted to expose the underlying secretiveness of the Vietnamese society and the totally corrosive corruption that also worked against us. Ironically, not even the puritanical Communists have been able to cope with it. It prevails to this day, eating away the underpinnings of the new red state.

Zinta: Juri, you and I had a conversation shortly after I read your book, and I'd like to revisit some parts of it here. I asked you, as a veteran yourself, how might we honor those who go to war? What has meaning to a veteran? What does he or she need/want/deserve from us upon homecoming and after?

Juris: It’s a moot question for the Viet Nam vets. I think we’re just past it after all this time. It’s too late to thank the Viet Nam vets for their service really, though a lot of them say online they like it. I find it weird hearing that after forty years. What does one say back? It’s also a little late to send us off for advanced degrees.

Fifty, sixty years out, the Veterans Administration has finally acknowledged the unfortunate effects of the dioxins in Agent Orange, and some of those suffering the effects may be helped … soon. That would be nice. But the Iraq-Afghanistan era soldiers could very much use some help right now. For the new troops some kind of decompression interval for returning combatants would be worthwhile. Counselors are rushed to workplaces and schools that suffer a single day’s violent outbreak for fear of the psychological damage suffered by witnesses to a few hours or minutes of violence. And well they should. Soldiers come home after weeks, months, years of living with daily violence and intolerable levels of tension and are offered virtually nothing. Maybe a long drive to some seedy storefront office to sit in front of a monitor and teleconference with a counselor many miles away.

If the psychological help is not forthcoming, a get-out-of-jail card might be a nice alternative soldiers could use, given what’s happeniing. An upstanding non-com cracks up on his fourth tour and kills seventeen civilians in Afghanistan, returns to base and reports his intent to kill more, and his buddies roll over and go back to sleep, thinking he’s gotta be kidding. He goes out and finishes up. A rattled vet is taken to a rifle range by two fellow vets, one of them the military’s top sniper with 150 confirmed kills. The disturbed vet pulls out a handgun and kills them both. Another vet who had long sought help and failed to get any, finally walks into a hospital and puts a .45 pistol to his own head to demonstrate his immediate need. Back in the Vietnam era the same thing was happening. A guy killed his best friend in a bar. The cops arrived and found him sitting there. He had stripped his pal’s body because that’s what you might do in Viet Nam if you couldn’t recover a casualty immediately and didn’t want to come back to find it booby-trapped.

Really, what’s happened is that the politicians and the public make the correct patriotic noises, say the thank yous, but are completely accepting that we won’t actually do much more for the walking wounded. It costs too much, takes too long. There aren’t enough psychiatrists and psychologists willing to do it for government pay. Thank you for your service and good luck is much easier. I mean, employers with job openings aren’t hiring vets because, having heard so much about post traumatic stress, they’re afraid their heroes are all head cases. With eighteen soldiers killing themselves every day, maybe they’re right. In the 60s and 70s, socially we certainly didn’t advertise the fact we were vets partly for that reason. Talk about storylines, back then the easiest plot device was a psycho vet. Every tv drama and cop show had such walk-on throwaway characters. As the attitude changed toward the Vietnam vet, more and more private eyes, for instance, were given Vietnam backgrounds. Matt Houston, Don Johnson on Miami Vice, Magnum, Mike Hammer, even Barney Miller, and there were others. I still remember the shock in the room when I made reference to mine at a sales conference in 1987 while introducing a Viet Nam novel I was publishing. I mean, that’s nineteen years later, about the same time my daughter is outing me as having been homeless.

Sometimes I think, if we’re not going to do anything much for traumatized vets, maybe the government could cut a deal with Ottawa to run a Veterans Protection Program that relocates them to Canada where it’s much calmer and there’s national health to look after them, instead of the Veterans Administration waiting lists here.

If you added the names of all the Vietnam veterans to the Wall who have killed themselves, you’d have to double the length of it. What will Iraq-Afghanistan vets do if they ever put one up? Will they add the names of those soldiers who died by their own hand? Could they not? Three, four, five wars later, how can we still be wondering and studying what’s driving them to do it and what help might be needed?

The thing that would make the biggest difference would be a real GI Bill that provides a free college education. That could have a tremendous impact not only on the lives of returning soldiers but benefit the society as well, as it did so dramatically after WWII.

Zinta: Again, difficult reading—as you bring to life scenes most of us see only in nightmares. Impossible human cruelty. Yet, apparently, possible. To all of us, do you think? In the right circumstances? What did you discover about yourself, and the soldier beside you, under the extreme stress of war?

Juris: Maybe the biggest surprise were the young GIs. I couldn’t have been more impressed or heartened. Knowing them was the best. They were so inspiring, so zany and good spirited, unsung, mostly unrecognized, and they didn’t care. Whatever misgivings I had about the country’s policies and direction, I thought they were splendid. I couldn’t imagine their counterparts in any other army in the world behaving like that, being them. They really lived up to their billing as self-less, brave and a lot of fun. That the country could turn its back on them left me speechless.

If they hadn’t been who they were, we would’ve all died of boredom. Because contrary to the Dick Lit that passes for war fiction and the furious shoot’em up films and video games, a lot of the time war is actually boring beyond belief. Drudgery. The sun shines and cooks your brain, it rains, you walk, you look, you do your job and any additional work assigned. You sleep, you make your one independent decision of the day – to eat or not to eat – and then you sleep again, and do it all over the same way the next morning. The film that most honestly depicts what war is like might well be Bill Murray’s Ground Hog Day. Picture him going nuts repeating the same day of his life over and over. And then, imagine when he is the most tired and least alert, something whistles or clacks past his head, something explodes in the barbed wire or falls into the compound and goes crump and all hell breaks loose. Those moments aside, If there is a banality to evil, there is certainly a banality about war. The real thing doesn’t come with a sound track to distract you and it doesn’t give you any warning or a big build up to a crescendo. Not if they do it right. Then it’s fifteen minutes of utter fear followed by a return to boredom. What we didn’t know going there was how long an undeclared war would hold us prisoners.

Could you do it? Fire a weapon? Absolutely. Fire a weapon at a figure 400 yards away? For sure, and maybe get a real kick out of knocking it down. Fire at the body mass of a man you can see fifteen or thirty feet away? That’s tougher. The land of night visitors. (What’s that horrible line they gave Mel Gibson to say in a speech to his men and their families in We Were Soldiers Once, And Young? “We’re going where the metal meets the meat.”) No, thank you. Luckily we rarely saw who we fired at, thanks to the foliage and their tactics.

You really have to be grizzled or seriously over-trained like special forces not to have close combat stay with you the rest of your life and come chat you up of an evening. Torture? I can’t even bare to think about it. No, you couldn’t, I couldn’t.

Zinta: As I said, you were a child of war. A grown man, you fought in a war. Now, we have Afghanistan. Are all wars essentially the same? The lessons we should have learned from history … are we just not learning them? Do you think we ever will?

Juris: The last couple sure look like Viet Nam revisited. The government run by the headman’s extended family and cronies. Nepotism. Tribal sectionalism. Huge piles of cash disappearing into the ether. Advisers being gunned down by nationals they are training and leading. Betrayal. Corruption. Fixed elections. Opium being the country’s leading cash crop and export. Drug trafficking. Secret police. Political prisoners. Insurgents biding their time. And our troops coming home and killing themselves or cracking and killing friends.

We seem to be refighting Viet Nam a lot lately. The parallels are eerie. Probably because war has changed. Conventional armies lining up against one another hasn’t really happened much since the 1950s. From here on it looks like insurgencies are the poor man’s strategy of choice: small units using bombs and booby-traps, attacking civilian populations and soft targets, blowing themselves up as needed. A regular army isn’t really built to cope with an enemy whose Order of Battle comes printed on playing cards.

Zinta: I wonder sometimes at the danger of romanticizing war because in the United States we live so far removed from it. It's over there, you know? Far away, on the other side of the globe, quick images we see on the evening news. Whereas, when my parents talk about war, having lived through it, bombs literally falling all around them as they ran from the ruins of their homes, there is a greater … shall we say respect for its destruction? Books like yours can bring it closer, perhaps, but even so … I wonder if that doesn't keep us from learning some of the lessons other nations seem to have learned.

Juris: I wonder too. I think the very idea of war touching down in the U.S. is so unreal and infrequent, that we will probably never as a society fully get it. October of 1963 the threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union over the missiles in Cuba was one such rare moment. It was one of the few weeks that I felt in step with everyone else. Everyone’s consciousness matched mine, and mine theirs. Except their parents were evacuating to their country homes or to relatives far removed. Mine were planning a picnic in the park if the war was really on. As my mother once innocently said to Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to the door promising eternal life, “Oh, no. No. Not that.” Once around was enough.

Nine/eleven seems the closest war has come to the American psyche since Pearl Harbor and the reaction to it was huge: mostly shock and outrage that that could happen here. But the official responses seemed out of touch. The color coded alert tiers, the duct tape shower-curtain shelters (reminiscent of our diving under our school desks in case of atomic attack), the president’s suggestion to stop worrying and go shopping, soldiers and cops ready to let loose with their automatic supersonic rifles in the stone and steel passages and platforms of the subways. Also the insane overreaction of sending an army out instead of a police task force to hunt down and pick off the pieces of a relatively small organization. It seemed utterly nuts. I have yet to figure out how that was going to protect us from a passenger boarding a flight in Frankfurt or Vancouver with plastique up his butt and an electric detonator leading into his pocket. Our defensive responses seemed unreal. Again, people at the top pretending that they had the situation in hand. Telling us nonsense.

Maybe we have turned into a militaristic society and don’t know it. Maybe we should take a look at how “our boys” appear to the rest of the world, bodies armored, shouldering fantastic weapons, faces blacked out and hooded with skull masks. Or our surgical strike weapons like the drones we use to pulverize them, along with anyone else in the coffee shop. Is Starship Trooper, the sci fi flick about our fighting off giant invading bugs, trying to tell us something? Is fear of invasion by Asians, al la Red Dawn in its many versions, our new mindset?

Zinta: I'm not calling it a love story, although maybe, I don't know, maybe I should … but Red Flags has powerful scenes between men and women in war, focusing on one storyline in particular of the medical missionary and her lover. All senses heightened. Societal rules set aside.

Juris: Yes, societal rules are set aside, not just about inflicting lethal damage on another human, but loving humans too. Wartime romance is a given. Repeat offenders remove their wedding rings as they get off the plane. Army medical officers regularly inspect the brothels immediately outside big bases. I think it was the Air Cav that actually debated putting them inside their enormous perimeter for the safety of the men so they wouldn’t be caught with their pants down by the enemy. But that might have caused a firestorm back home. The French provided their troops with mobile brothels but we weren’t going to go there. Better the wild young things were left in harm’s way than risk the political wrath of the righteous.

Zinta: You also show that women in war can be as tough or even tougher than men. What are your thoughts on the recent legislation that makes it possible for women to fight on the front lines?

Juris: I think women have wanted combat roles for a long time and I see no reason to deny them other than simple prejudice. The last bodies I saw in Vietnam were women anti-aircraft gunners who had died at their posts. The Russians already had female soldiers fighting in WWII, the Israelis have women combatants, the Vietnamese, the Chinese.

More than a hundred and fifty American women have already died in the recent Mideast wars. We’re already there. What was it the lady vet in Congress – the double amputee – what did she say in an interview answering a similar question? “I didn’t lose my legs in a bar fight.”

Zinta: Your own background is as much, or more, in publishing and editing as writing. Has that helped in your own writing?

Juris: Being in publishing probably made the writing possible. It’s where I stripped down the engines and learned to fix them, and worked out the various approaches to strengthening writing. It’s where I learned my way around a sentence and a plot. It’s been especially useful in structuring a book, and how to think about a long piece – something not really taught in MFA programs where physical and time limitations allow you to teach short fiction writing but not architecting a piece hundreds of pages long.

Zinta: Are you working on a new book now? What might we see soon from your pen?

Juris: Yes, I’m going back to Viet Nam one more time. Saigon in 1963, three years earlier than Red Flags, and narrated by a different character. It takes place in the city in one week ahead of the Diem regime being overthrown. A lady assassin is simply shooting American officers dead in the street. I based her on two actual assassins who operated in Saigon at various times. It’s nearly done.

Zinta: I'd like to circle back to our homeland yet, Juri. Have you returned to Latvia? What was that like for you? Does it feel like Home?

Juris: I finally made it back after my daughter went off to college. I finished up at the Frankfurt Book Fair and flew into Riga. After an intensive search, I found my two first cousins, the sons of both my uncles. It was fascinating, moving … but home? No. Actually, it was slightly painful seeing firsthand what I long sensed and feared – how crushing the Russian occupation had been to their lives and ambitions. Both had been drafted into the Soviet army, we had that in common.

My godfather and his two sons and wife didn’t manage to escape but he had avoided arrest and lived alone in hiding, working as a fireman under an assumed name until he died in 1948. Though he sat for the tests and more than qualified, his son had been denied a university education because of his father’s outlaw partisan status in the eyes of the Party. He had watched his mother burn all her husband’s letters and photographs because the Russian authorities continued to interrogate her regularly as to his whereabouts. She had gone to great lengths to keep the knowledge even of his presence in Latvia from her young sons for fear of their ever being questioned or letting something drop. By coincidence I was carrying back to my cousin the ring I had worn forever which his father forty years ago had left on the washstand at my grandmother’s farm – his wedding ring. After returning to the States, I copied and sent his son all the photographs we had of him and their family. Both cousins I reunited with were exactly my age. I went back twice more. By the third trip both had passed. Life expectancy, I think, is something like 57.

Zinta: What was the Latvian perspective, i.e. the European perspective, on the Viet Nam War back in that time, do you know?

Juris: Washington made all sorts of appeals to the European governments for help in Viet Nam. None were interested. Not Germany, not England. The Soviet Union vied with China in supporting North Viet Nam with supplies, and the Eastern bloc states of course condemned US imperialist aggression. A few, like Czechoslovakia sent North Viet Nam some aid too. Australia, the Philippines, and Korea sent soldiers to aid South Viet Nam and the American expeditionary forces. In the rest of the world there was mostly criticism of our role in Viet Nam, much of it fanned by the very serious student revolutions that swept through France and Italy and Germany, and the U.S., too, of course.

Zinta: Thank you so much for your thoughts, your service, your work, Juri.

Juris: A pleasure. I’m sorry I got so carried away. You ask penetrating questions. My interlocutors usually aren’t as knowledgeable or empathetic. Paldies, Zinta.