Paco's Story by Larry Heinemann

First published: 1986

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: The early 1970’s

Locale: Vietnam and the American Midwest

Principal Characters:

• Paco Sullivan, a seriously wounded Vietnam veteran looking for work and a new life after hospitalization and discharge
• Gallagher, the raconteur company mate of Paco, capable of almost any cruelty
• Ernest Monroe, a World War II veteran and proprietor of the Texas Lunch, where Paco briefly works
• Jesse, a hitchhiking Vietnam veteran with whom Paco is compared and contrasted
• Cathy, a college student and rooming-house neighbor whose sexual teasing torments Paco

The Novel

Based in part on Larry Heinemann’s experience in the Vietnam War, Paco’s Story tells a representative tale of the brutality of war and the subsequent problems of a veteran’s adjustment to life in small-town America. Heinemann presents this material through a narrative that focuses on Paco Sullivan’s arrival in, partial adjustment to, and departure from the typical American crossroads town of Boone, a river town in the American Midwest. This strand of the narrative is punctured by scenes of the massacre of Paco’s company at Fire Base Harriet, Paco’s rescue and recovery, and earlier war incidents in which Paco was involved.

The novel, however, begins not with Paco but with a virtuoso introduction by and to the unnamed narrator, whose hip but elegant manner provides much of the novel’s special flavor. The narrator insists that people do not want to hear another war story, and he is rather specific about just what they do not want to hear and why. Still, stories such as Paco’s must be heard, and the narrator, who has cornered a listener whom he addresses as James, must tell it. Readers soon learn that the narrator is the ghost of a soldier who served with Paco in Alpha Company and who lost his life with all the others at Fire Base Harriet.

Paco arrives at the outskirts of Boone by bus, washes up at the Texaco station, and begins a hobbled walk toward town. Befriended by the garage mechanic, he begins a search for work and a place to stay. The townspeople are curious about Paco, and also suspicious. His faraway gaze (he is heavily medicated) and his cane-aided limp make him something of a freak; his presence brings the unpleasantness of the Vietnam War, about which few seem to know anything, into their midst. Most of the townsfolk—those he meets at Rita’s Tender Trap and Hennig’s Barbershop—respond ungenerously to his requests for information about work. Soon, however, Paco meets Ernest Monroe, who gives him the job of dishwasher at the Texas Lunch and helps him find lodging at the nearby Geronimo Hotel (no doubt an ironic allusion to the serviceman’s labeling Vietnam as “Indian Country”).

The early scenes of Paco’s progress in Boone, along with a detailed description of his wounding and rescue at Fire Base Harriet, underscore the various levels at which the war continues to affect Paco. Crippled and pain-riddled, he carries the physical consequences of the war everywhere he goes. He cannot leave it behind, because it has reshaped him. Although he wishes to get on with his life, to move forward, he carries his memories with him as well. Moreover, the war has shaped how he is to be perceived by others.

He remains a freak to most, not only because of his physical appearance but also because such a vision allows others to remove themselves from any connection with America’s involvement in Vietnam. Ernest, an ex-Marine who survived World War II battles at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, is a fortuitous, benevolent presence through whose own story Heinemann is able to universalize his concerns with the human capacity to make war and survive it. Paco’s earlier encounter with Mr. Elliot, a mildly crazed refugee from World War I Russia who runs the town’s fix-it shop, also serves to establish a context for approaching the meaning of Paco’s experience in and after Vietnam.

As Paco learns and repeats the harsh routine of his work at the Texas Lunch, it becomes clear that this unfriendly work helps him to hold himself together psychologically. The scalding water and irritating chemicals are nothing to what he has already endured, and the long hours of busing tables, soaking, rinsing, and scrubbing help to keep his memories and behavior under control just as much as the depressant drugs do.

The routine of Paco’s short career at the Texas Lunch is disturbed by two encounters. One night, minutes before closing, a drifter named Jesse comes into the restaurant. Jesse has been on the road a long time, and he tells Paco and Ernest of his restless wanderings across the length and breadth of the United States. After Paco tells him (as he must tell everyone) about how he got his wounds and his limp, Jesse says that he, too, served in Vietnam, though at an earlier period of the war. Though he has suffered far less physical trauma than Paco, Jesse cannot settle down. He has spent the intervening years trying to discover America and, as he puts it, “looking for a place to cool out.” As Jesse sounds off about the military-industrial complex and about the kind of memorial that might be appropriate for the Vietnam war, his rage pierces through his good-natured manner. He heads back to the road after giving a lesson on hitchhiking.

Even before Jesse shows up, Paco had noticed that his neighbor at the Geronimo Hotel, a college girl named Cathy, had been spying on him. Over a period of weeks, she pursued a tormenting game of allowing Paco to see her in various provocative stances and daring him to approach her. To his mind (and to the narrator’s), she had even encouraged her boyfriend to a noisy lovemaking that would disturb and entice Paco. This sadistic teasing culminates with a stealthy visit to Paco’s room. When Paco discovers that Cathy has visited his room in his absence, he decides to return the favor. Once there, he discovers a diary in which she has set down her observations and fantasies about him. He reads about her dream in which, after lovemaking, he peels his scars off, laying them on her body, where they tingle and burn.

The diary entry wakes Paco from his own dream of belonging. He knows now that this is not the place to find what he needs. Taking the pay he is owed and leaving Ernest a thank-you note, Paco heads back to the Texaco station and boards a westbound bus.

The events during Paco’s brief sojourn in Boone are accompanied by formal flashbacks (Paco’s memories) and by less formal interjections of antecedent action by the narrator. Key scenes involve Paco’s company-mate, Gallagher. Readers learn how Gallagher selected his tattoo and how he led his comrades in the gang rape and killing of a young woman who was a member of the Viet Cong. In one scene, Gallagher is allowed to tell a story of his own. In another, the medic who discovered Paco is placed in a bar, years later, to tell his version of Paco’s story. In yet another background scene, Paco is shown in action as the company booby-trap man. In this way, Paco’s life in Alpha Company is threaded through the events in Boone, counterpointing them and suggesting relationships between the present and the past.

The Characters

Paco Sullivan is soft-spoken, withdrawn, and polite. He wants peace, but he is unlikely to find it. Though the reader learns that (in war) Paco is capable of violence, the knowledge comes as a paradox about Paco and about humankind in general. While Paco’s suffering, past and present, evokes the reader’s sympathy, especially since many townspeople reject him or belittle him, that sympathy is checked by knowledge of his participation in the gang rape. His present state—in which his every movement brings pain, his dreams torment him, and drugs only make life tolerable—is perhaps overdrawn to the point of sentimentality. Paco’s survivor’s guilt is more successfully, because more subtly, handled. Paco lives just as much among the ghost of Alpha Company as he does among the living.

Ernest Monroe serves as a father figure and as a connection to America’s war-riddled history. His present situation of responsibility and his active compassion suggest that the transformations of war need not be permanent. Ernest cannot forget, but does not live within, the traumas of his World War II experiences. He serves as one possible future for Paco.

Jesse is more obviously a foil for Paco. They have seen the horrors of the same war, and they have returned to the same inhospitable homeland, a country that does not seem to have a place for them. Heinemann employs the loquacious Jesse to articulate those perspectives of the Vietnam veteran that tight-lipped, drug-slowed Paco cannot or will not. A somewhat comic character, Jesse is also the conscious incarnation of a Vietnam veteran cliché. His tall-tale drifter manner has connections with frontier literature and legend.

Gallagher, prominent in the Vietnam flashback scenes, is a streetwise Chicagoan who is defined as the company killer and the company clown. For Gallagher, it seems natural to put on the attitudes and behavior that war demands. He seems made for it.

Cathy, the niece of the couple who run the Geronimo Hotel, is the most prominent female character in the novel. She, like the others, is defined (and defines herself) as a sexual object. Such portrayals of women are a perplexing ingredient in Heinemann’s first two novels. Her diary provides one of the several versions or pieces of a story that Paco himself never fully tells.

Critical Context

Though following his combat novel, Close Quarters (1977), at some length, Paco’s Story fulfilled anxious critics’ expectations that Heinemann was a major literary talent. By winning the National Book Award for fiction, Paco’s Story assured itself a permanent place in the Vietnam War canon and perhaps first place in the important subgenre of the returned veteran. Moreover, with Paco’s Story, Heinemann proved himself a stylist capable of a range of effects. The naturalism of Close Quarters is one ingredient in Paco’s Story, in which fantasy and an intriguing narrational gamble figure importantly, as does a precise rendering of the material aspects of American culture. Heinemann is a master at blending the ordinary and the extraordinary in his evocation of the workingman’s Vietnam and the workingman’s America.

Bibliography

Anisfield, Nancy. “After the Apocalypse: Narrative Movement in Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith. New York: Garland, 1990. Anisfield argues that while the typical war narrative, including that of the returned veteran, depends on a violent, apocalyptic ending, Paco’s Story defies this convention by closing with a largely passive, internal event. The rejection of apocalyptic closure allows thoughtful examination of the war and its consequences.

Bonn, Maria S. “A Different World: The Vietnam Veteran Novel Comes Home.” In Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, edited by Philip K. Jason. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Paco’s Story is the linchpin in Bonn’s analysis of how veterans’ fictions reflect the unusual conditions of return for participants in this unpopular war. Bonn compares Paco’s situation to that of Philip Dossier in Heinemann’s Close Quarters and Chris Starkmann in Philip Caputo’s Indian Country (1987), exploring how these novels treat the limits and terms of reintegration.

Jeffords, Susan. “Tattoos, Scars, Diaries, and Writing Masculinity.” In The Vietnam War and American Culture, edited by John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Jeffords finds a sinister pattern in which masculine suffering seeks retribution and relief in the raping of women. The polarization of women and victims turns women into oppressors. Jeffords makes fascinating connections among the various images of scars, tattoos, and other inscriptions.

Morris, Gregory L. “Telling War Stories: Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story and the Serio-comic Tradition.” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36 (Fall 1994): 58-68. Morris argues that Heinemann’s novel exemplifies a view of the Vietnam War based on the serio-comic tradition. This style utilizes a new relation with the world, in which the atmosphere has a joyful relativity. Morris shows that Vietnam stories can reflect this relativity, in which imagination merges with deadly reality to create an atmosphere of carnival.

Scott, Grant F. “Paco’s Story and the Ethics of Violence.” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36 (Fall, 1994): 69-80. Discusses the ethics of violence in Heinemann’s novel, particularly as it relates to the “selective seeing” characteristic of the gang rape scene at the end of the novel.

Slabey, Robert M. “Heinemann’s Paco’s Story.” The Explicator 52 (Spring, 1994): 187-189. Slabey demonstrates that Heinemann’s work is characteristic of postmodern metafiction, which uses myth in a discontinuous, eclectic, and fragmented manner.