Wandering Souls

Wayne Karlin
October 2009     ISBN: 1568584059

On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer Steedly, Jr. turned a bend in a trail in the Pleiku Province and came face to face with a North Vietnamese soldier, his weapon slung over his shoulder. The two stared at each other for an instant: a split-second later, Homer’s bullets smashed into the chest of a young medic named Hoang Ngoc Dam.

In the dead man's pockets, Homer found a notebook filled with beautiful line drawings, which he sent back to his mother. Thirty-five years later, Homer opened the book and discovered the drawings of the man who had wanted to become a healer. He made a vow to return the book to the dead man's family if they could be found, and in seeking their forgiveness perhaps to find some release from the war that had defined his life.

Wandering Souls is the story of his return to Viet Nam. Award-winning author and fellow veteran Wayne Karlin accompanied Homer on this journey, one that awoke, and brought to rest Homer's painful memories of the war. With eloquence and deep understanding, Karlin reveals the startling similarities between the parallel lives of Homer and Dam; recounts Homer’s years of trauma and his slow movement towards a recovery that could only come about through confrontation with the ghosts of his past—and the need of Dam's family to bring their brother's "wandering soul" to peace. Karlin entwines their lives with the stories of Vietnamese and American writers, families, exiles and veterans met along the way, all of whom need to capture, contemplate and decipher meaning from their war.

Wandering Souls reminds us of the terrible price of war on soldiers and their loved ones, and reveals a way to heal not by forgetting war's hard lessons, but by remembering its costs.

"Wandering Souls is an important, moving, utterly compelling, and wonderfully open-hearted book, one that will become a touchstone in America's literature about the aftershocks of our terrible misadventure in Vietnam. This is a book that will endure. Decades from now, it will help people see and feel the ongoing consequences of war's murderous folly."
—Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

"The book is a plea for redemption and forgiveness. It is a plea for empathy. And it is a plea to look at war not as it is sold to us by the entertainment industry and the war-makers, but as it is experienced by those who fight and die."
—Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

"Wandering Souls proves again Wayne Karlin's talent in discovering the beauty of the human soul in the ruins of war and loss."
—Le Minh Khue, author of The Stars, The Earth, The River

"In Wandering Souls, Wayne Karlin speaks our common language of sorrow and pain and reconciliation. His book is sure to find its readers in the two countries he loves."
—Ho Anh Thai, author of Behind the Red Mist

"A surprisingly moving account of a Vietnam War veteran who returned to face the family of the man he killed...the book is a poignant reminder of the war's sad consequences for both sides."
—Kirkus Reviews

"[Wandering Souls] is a mesmerizing, beautifully rendered work of nonfiction that, in a large way, is the culmination of Karlin’s life work... This is a one-of-a-kind Vietnam War story, peppered with illuminating allusions to Vietnam War literature by Americans and Vietnamese. It is a book not soon forgotten."
—VVA Veteran

Wayne Karlin is the author of numerous books including Lost Armies, The Wished-For Country, Rumors and Stones, Prisoners and Marble Mountain. He is also co-editor, with Le Minh Khue and Trong Vu, and contributor to The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers. In 1998 he was awarded the Paterson Prize in Fiction, and in 2005 he received an Excellence in the Arts Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America. Carlin lives in Maryland, where he teaches at the College of Southern Maryland.