Word: rubins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...RUBIN'S BUON YUN has had to make some adaptations to modern Vietnam: for instance, it's encircled by rows of fire-hardened bamboo spikes and anti-personnel mines set between two fences of nine-foot wooden stakes. But inside, people live much as they always have--the way the French travelers and the American Army's books said they lived, and the way Rubin knew them as a sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces from 1962 to 1964. There are about 30 longhouses in the village, with wooden piles underneath them to keep out floods and give the pigs...
...children of the village help out at rice planting and harvesting, but they also fly kites, walk on stilts, play with tops. Their parents, Rubin says, treat them as adult reincarnations of adults. (Rhade tribesmen are supposed to love children so much that they used to buy Vietnamese children to raise as their own; but almost 70 per cent of their children die before their first birthday--of malaria, intestinal parasites, and skin diseases caused by poor sanitation...
...lives of Rubin's Rhade are no longer determined just by their own actions, even combined with the weather and the poverty and lack of sanitation that kill their children. Outsiders affect their lives too, now--Buc, the barber who joined the NLF when he learned that the Saigon government was encouraging men to grow their hair long; Sergeant Culpepper, the medic who solemnly affirms that American medicine is as good as scorpion urine; Colonel Quoc, ambitious and rising fast in the Saigon command but terrified of his astrology chart and unwilling to endanger his career by resisting...
...novel. The completeness of the catastrophe seems a little contrived, and so does a lot of the rest of the plot. The whole book is fairly badly written, with uniformly short, monotonous sentences that often lack verbs. Sometimes this seems to be an attempt at ironic distancing--for instance, Rubin sometimes tries without success to tell us what Vietnamese think Americans think Vietnamese are thinking--but most times it seems to be just the way Rubin writes. Partly as a result of his syntax and partly because of the childish-sounding exclamations with which he dots their speech, Rubin...
HADEO'S LEGEND SUGGESTS possible inadequacy in Rubin's idea of Vietnam as a whole, too. He carefully draws parallels between the two sides in the conflict: the legendary barking deer of the title, for instance, was torn apart by an eagle and a tiger; and in two scenes that frame Rubin's main story, a North Vietnamese and an American colonel seek reassurance against overly callous commanding officers from photographs of their countries' faraway presidents. But Rubin's own account undercuts the parallelism--it's hard to imagine anyone saying of Lyndon Johnson, as he says...