'The Things We Do to Make It Home' -- Novel Takes Us Back to Soldiers' Horrors of Vietnam

For all the soldiers' memoirs and non-fiction accounts of war's lasting impact, few books capture the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and the lasting toll on soldiers and their loved ones, better than Beverly Gologorsky's novel The Things We Do to Make It Home. Gologorsky's novel depicts the lives of a group of Vietnam veterans and the women they love, tracing the arc of each couple's lives -- a story by turns tragic and inspiring, stoic and heart-wrenching -- as they struggle to live normal lives while grappling with the physical and emotional wounds of combat. Recently republished by Seven Stories Press, The Things We Do to Make It Home reveals much about both the past and the tumultuous present, as our current president decides the fate of two wars abroad and as thousands of soldiers return home scarred, like Gologorsky's characters. Beverly Gologorsky recently discussed her book with me, how she created the world of these veterans, and the parallels she sees between her novel and the present moment.

Andy Kroll: In the context of the two wars abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the stories in this book feel so real, like people you could meet on the street today. Do you see the same things going on today as you saw during the Vietnam War?

Beverly Gologorsky: I think there is one very important similarity for veterans -- and that is that most soldiers during the Vietnam War, and for Iraq and Afghanistan, most soldiers are trained in a belief system. That's the only way they can kill; you have to believe. Once they got over there in Vietnam, and also in Iraq and Afghanistan, that belief system dissolved. Because these [Vietnamese] were just people; they were not monsters. These were people living their lives, and the soldiers have to kill them anyway. And the thing that happens when you do that, when you kill without a belief system, it damages your psyche. And I think all of these wars -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam -- have that in common. Once people go over there they're not sure what they're fighting for. It's completely unclear. And yet they still have to kill.

If you take a look at some of the characters in my book like [veterans] Frankie or Rod, they're not monsters. I like my characters; I like the men. I think they have tremendous potential that was totally messed up by the war. So I had to think this part through. How can some of these men, who've done some horrible things, come home and these women love them? I had to really think through what made these men so damaged. And that's when I came up with that understanding, that they had to kill without believing anymore that they were killing for any cause.

One of the reasons the book fortunately is coming out now is because of those two wars. And the repetition of that misery and damage to humans in the country as well as outside, as well as here.

Kroll:  How did you create and inhabit the world of these characters and their experiences and all of their relationships?

Gologorsky: Flaubert said, "C'est moi," when they asked him about Madame Bovary. In a way, it is somewhat true. Because I was brought up in a working-class area in the south Bronx, and these are the people that I grew up with. Not literally -- I imagined them, I made them up, there's nobody in the book that actually exists. But I knew the beauticians and the nurses, and I knew the guys who worked in the pizza parlors and I knew the guys who were the mechanics, I knew the cops, etc. So their voices, particularly the women's voices, were always in my head.

As I got older and began to write, I didn't really read much literature with their voices. And I wanted to give them a voice. To me they were very important people. I must say, for me, the impetus was the women at first. My background in the movement, too: I was in SDS, part of the anti-war movement, etc. The Vietnam War was the war I grew up with, so that was as always a part of my life, too. It was the merging -- of those people I've known, those voices, the waitresses or what have you, who don't get into many novels, and that war that was there all the time.