My Losing Season
by Pat Conroy

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Book Reviews of My Losing Season

Book Review: A "Ruined" Writer
Summary: 2 Stars

On one level, this can be read as an extraordinarily forgiving. On another, it can be seen as yet another effect of the brutality, that even after all these years, Conroy continues to want to be accepted and esteemed by his tormentors. Where it gets particularly twisted, however, is in his conclusions about the Vietnam war. Although he acknowledges that the United States was wrong to be involved there, he considers the American participants as "heroic." He especially esteems a former teammate whose plane crashed and who was marched many miles to a prison camp; the real heroes, whose actions he describes but apparently does not see, are the man's Vietnamese captors, who nurse back to health the man who had been trying to kill them and then protect him against the citizenry that wants to kill him. Is it more heroic to save one's one life or the life of an enemy?

Conroy is rightly horrified by an anti-war speaker's recommendation that American soldiers in Vietnam should kill their officers, but he expresses no similar horror for their killing of the Vietnamese soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians. Despite the fact that he believes the United States had no business there, Conroy writes that "I wish that I had entered into the Marine Corps and led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my Marines well and that the Vietcong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with my men." So Conroy wants to exorcize his personal demons, inflicted upon him by brutal military men and institutions, by killing people who do not deserve it.

Like Conroy, I have stood at the Vietnam Memorial and wept. I have seen in the polished stone of that wall my reflection interrupted by the names carved in the wall and recognized the metaphor; I am incomplete because of these deaths. But I had another reaction as well: I wondered why the wall isn't several times longer so that it can also contain the names of the Vietnamese dead, those men, women, and children who were killed in our names and whose loss also diminishes us.

Conroy has no trouble acknowledging the humanity of his opponents on the basketball court. Why is it so tough for him to honor and respect the Vietnamese?

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