Personal Notes From The Author

I have struggled with completing this novel for over thirty years. I was a Christian missionary for two years in Belize, Central America, served in Vietnam for 14 months with an artillery unit, and was a Jesuit seminarian for one and one half years. The combination of these life-changing experiences was the major turning point of my life. Although these experiences were dramatically different, they uniformly shaped me into the person I am today and how I perceive the world.

After I fulfilled my duty to both God and country, I lost and regained my faith. At times I have been very angry with God because my youth was spent readjusting to "the world"* in America. I am sure that if I had not gone to Vietnam, I would have married, had children and lived the beauty of an ordinary life.

However, I have finally accepted that I was never meant to live an ordinary life. It is my destiny to finish "The Bitch Wall" and tell the story of the men that I served with in Vietnam. Each character in this novel is a composite of more than one person. This was done to incorporate the diversity of experiences and not be confined by what happened to whom, where and when. Through faith and art, I learned that it is possible to transcend the pit of hell. We accomplished this by writing graffiti on a blank wall. I copied this war graffiti word for word the day before I left to return home.

When the wall of psychedelic graffiti was first created, it was a joke. One night some of the men in the Fire Directional Center** had a simple yet brilliant idea. I remember watching their creative fervor as they painted the wall white. It was almost impossible for us to wait for the paint to dry so we could begin writing on the wall with brightly colored felt tip magic markers. Within a couple of weeks, the wall embodied the souls of the men in my unit. We would write on the wall when we were afraid, happy, sad, horny, alone, sober, but most of the time high on drugs, alcohol or both. We referred to the wall as "The Bitch Wall."

Since returning home, I realized that "The Bitch Wall" is very similar to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Both are sacred grounds where pilgrims place their petitions on a wall and hope that God answers their prayers. When we left Vietnam, each one of us wanted to take it home. However, it was impossible to transport an eight-foot high by ten-foot wide wall that was constructed from two sections of plywood.

Although this wall no longer physically exists, I know that it continues to survive in the souls of the men that I served. Together we learned our potential for both good and evil. Yet neither of these paths makes one person more admirable than another. The struggle of these two powerful forces is an unrelenting battle that I am forced to confront daily because my soul continues to be possessed by Vietnam. However, in spite of the pervasiveness of evil in Vietnam, there was love and the love grew the greater because of this evil. The most courageous act is to freely offer the gift of love in a world where evil is the dominant force.

Finally, I hope that you grow to love and accept each one of these men as I do since they were unprepared to face Vietnam. We returned home permanently damaged, never able to fully integrate into "the world" that we had left behind.

-- Dennis Lane, dennis@bitchwall.com

* In Vietnam the American soldiers often referred to life in America as "the world."

** The section within an artillery unit that delivers the commands to the men in the gun sections so they direct the artillery to hit the appropriate target.