I WROTE THE PRECEDING IN MAY OF 1969 WHEN I WAS twenty-one years old, thinking that it might be the start of a book, since the book I was trying to write, a book fictionalizing the year I had spent in Vietnam and which I already imagined would be something akin to Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, that book, my book, seemed to be washing out from under my feet with each passing day. I had managed to complete but a single, unconnected chapter since returning from Southeast Asia and had the luck—bad luck as it turned out to be—to place it in Esquire magazine. The editor there, Harold Hayes, somehow fished my pages from the slush pile that presumably swam across his desk with each afternoon’s tide of mail and included my writing in a magazine that had published the likes of ­Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, Gay Talese, and so on. I felt, with all the naïveté that youth can muster, that I had already made it, that I was a full-fledged member of that exclusive, chrome-plated fraternity of writers.

But in fact the publication of that piece effectively stoppered my inkwell altogether and the big book, “The Vietnam Book,” simply and resolutely refused to answer my feeble summons. Now I wonder if I was just too close to it, but at the time that very proximity felt like the stuff of great fiction, and so, upon my return, I spent many months shuffling through my various note cards, ideas, fragments, and nightmares, with an obsessiveness that sometimes terrified me. The fierce entanglement of my imagination and my memory had become a knot impossible to unravel.

I have written many novels since those days, some of which may well be good enough to be remembered, although to this day I have yet to revisit the war, my war, in any sustained piece of fiction. I have waited so long now that it sometimes feels as if my experiences in Vietnam have already been told and retold dozens of times: the mud and canals and paddies and helicopters and the unseen enemy—faceless, nameless, perhaps not even wholly human—and the booby traps and the air strikes. The basic narrative has repeated itself in films and, most importantly to me, in works of fiction and nonfiction, some penned by friends and colleagues and much of which has helped me understand what happened over there and how the heavy stone of that experience continues to ripple out over a life that has been, at times, troubled by its own hidden currents. Much of the war was simply boredom on a level that is difficult to articulate—but one does not have nightmares about six weeks of boredom but, instead, of those brief flashes of murderous combat when our tracer rounds ripped into the blue-shadowed moonlight and I used my Prick 10 to call down fire from the sky.