Wild Thing: A Novel (40 page)

My primary sources on
the Vietnam War
know who they are and that they have my admiration and thanks. Given how few Americans served in so-called riverine combat in Vietnam, there are surprisingly good secondary sources on the service, possibly because of interest brought about by the 2004 presidential candidacy of John Kerry (and its sabotaging), and possibly because the casualty rate was so horrendously high. My favorite and the most useful to me on the subject has been
Brown Water, Black Berets: Coastal and Riverine Warfare in Vietnam
,
by Thomas J. Cutler, 2000. (Cutler is an instructor at the Naval Academy and himself a Vietnam veteran, although the book, which is excellent, is not about his personal experiences.) For a more general look at the experience of Americans serving in the South Vietnamese armed forces, I particularly like
In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War
, by Tobias Wolff, 1995.

Note that for Reggie to be a chief radioman and an
E-4
so soon after arriving in Vietnam would not have been unusual given the hierarchy and level of incident of his posting,
^*
and that at the time he enlisted he would have been unlikely to be drafted, since in 1967 the draft was still based on seniority, with twenty-five-year-olds going first and seventeen-year-olds last. The birthday lottery, which sent over teenagers, wasn’t instituted until 1969. Ultimately 61 percent of American fatalities in Vietnam were under the age of twenty-one.
^*

Robert Mason says he was posted in an area of Vietnam where
thirty-one of thirty-three species of snake were poisonous
in his memoir
Chickenhawk
, 1984. Unfortunate title / great book. Mason was a helicopter pilot who quickly became disillusioned with the war.

Reggie’s CPO uses the French word
“antivenin”
rather than “antivenom” because until 1981 that was standard usage (and World Health Organization policy) on the grounds that snake antivenins were invented, in 1895, by Albert Calmette, a French scientist at the Pasteur Institute. Calmette was trying to cure cobra bites occurring in what is now Vietnam.
^*

For information about
the abilities of various animals to survive very low temperatures
(even including freezing) I am indebted to
Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival
, by Bernd Heinrich, 2003, which is a beautiful book, along the lines of Konrad Lorenz’s best work, that I would recommend to anyone with an interest in nature.

The history of
human cryogenics in the U.S
. runs from the Chatsworth scandal of 1979 to the Alcor scandal of 2003 and beyond, with defrosting and rotting the least of your worries.
^*

The
mammalian diving reflex
occurs when the participating mammal gets hit in the face with water 21 degrees C (70 degrees F) or colder. Even on a leopard seal, it has to be the face. (See: “Cardiovascular effects of face immersion and factors affecting diving reflex,” by Y. Kawakami, B. Natelson, and A. DuBois,
Journal of Applied Physiology
, Vol. 23, No. 6, Dec 1967.)

Incidentally, according to the film version of
Goldfinger
, 1964, humans not only
can
breathe through their skin like reptiles and amphibians, but need to and die if they don’t. Also according to
Goldfinger
, “Drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above 38 degrees Fahrenheit is like listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.”

Note that
turtles
can
buffer their lactic acid
, but only for six months or so of inactivity.

Sherlock Holmes says
“Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth”
in
The Sign of the Four
, 1890. He uses another version of the same phrase later in
The Sign of the Four
, as well as in “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” 1892, “Silver Blaze” (my favorite Holmes short story), 1893, “The Adventure of the Priory School,” 1905, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” 1917, and “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” 1927. So apparently he means it. The other contender for stupidest thing said by Holmes is his report of
having met the “head llama” of Tibet in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” 1903, which people who have difficulty separating Holmes from reality will tell you was just a spelling error by Watson. Like they don’t have llamas in Tibet!
^*

Although
Sarah Palin
is a real person, the events of this book, as I’ve said earlier, are entirely fictional. I have never met Palin, nor have any of my characters, who are themselves fictional. I know of no events involving Palin similar to the ones that transpire in Minnesota in the book, and as far as I know I have entirely fabricated the belief system Palin espouses to Pietro in the book, as well as her relationship with anyone like the (also fictional) Reverend John 3:16 Hawke. The character of Palin’s young relation is fictional, too, and not meant to resemble any actual relation of Palin’s, young or otherwise. Furthermore, although I provide citations below for some references in the book that might be taken to apply to past events from the life of the actual Palin, please note that the actual Palin stands nowhere near the frontline of the anti-rationalist movement in the U.S., even among current and former politicians. For example, as I write this, the Republican frontrunner for the 2012 presidential election is Rick Perry, who as governor of Texas once proclaimed a period of three “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas,”
^*
and who has publicly repudiated both evolution and human involvement in climate change.
^*

Palin’s quotation of
Westbrook Pegler
in her acceptance speech as
Republican candidate for vice president runs, in total, as follows: “And a writer observed, ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’ and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.” The second part is particularly odd, since Pegler once called Truman “a thin-lipped hater,”
^*
but may simply have to do with the fact that both the line in the speech and the “thin-lipped hater” line appear on the same page in Pat Buchanan’s autobiography,
^*
and maybe the speech was concocted in a hurry by someone familiar, but only partly, with that book. Palin describes the writing of the speech as a “team effort” led by Matthew Scully in her memoir,
Going Rogue
, 2009.
^*
For additional details see “The Man Behind Palin’s Speech,” by Massimo Calabresi,
Time
, 4 Sept 2008. Details on the tightness of the schedule leading up to the speech are from “Palin Disclosures Raise Questions on Vetting,” by Elizabeth Bumiller, the
New York Times
, 1 Sept 2008. For more information on Pegler see “Dangerous Minds: William F. Buckley soft-pedals the legacy of journalist Westbrook Pegler in
The New Yorker
,” by Diane McWhorter,
Slate
, 4 Mar 2004, which is my source for the “clearly it is the bounden duty…” quote. My source for the quote about RFK is “Palin and Pegler,” by Marty Peretz, the
New Republic
, 13 Sept 2008.

Video of Palin being prayed over by
Pastor Thomas Muthee
, famous for claiming to have successfully battled a witch named Mama Jane in Kenya, in which Muthee asks Jesus to “bring finances her way”
and protect Palin from “witchcraft” is available on YouTube and elsewhere under the title “Sarah Palin Gets Protection from Witches.”
^*

Palin’s mother is quoted recounting
Palin’s father’s fondness for ambushing seals as they surfaced in
Trailblazer: An Intimate Biography of Sarah Palin
, by Lorenzo Benet, 2009, pg. 9.
^*

Palin
not knowing which three countries were in the North
American Free Trade Agreement
was reported on-air by Fox News Channel reporter Carl Cameron on 5 Nov 2008. Cameron also reported that Palin didn’t know until debate preparations began that Africa was a continent and not a country.
^*
Similarly, Michael Joseph Gross in “Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury,”
Vanity Fair
, Oct 2010 reports that at the time of her nomination Palin didn’t know who Margaret Thatcher was, although this seems to have changed: Palin’s Facebook page of 14 June 2010 called Thatcher “one of my heroines.”

Current discussion of
Israel
, particularly in Europe, resembles in tenor and factuality the conversation that swept Europe in 1348 about whether to burn the Jews for causing the Black Death. For some reason,
^*
and to the detriment of Palestinians as well as Israelis,
^*
large
numbers of people who have never, say, read a book on the subject by someone whose credentials they trust, and who might be surprised by what they’d learn if they did, now hold as their strongest political belief that Israel—not just the right-wing government that it, like most western countries (including the U.S. and U.K.), currently has, but the entire country—should be dismantled, and its civilian population, 20 percent of whom are Arab, subjected to random violence, something that gets wished on no other people in the world. For more on this phenomenon, see
A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel
, by Robin Shepherd, director of international affairs at the Henry Jackson Society, 2009, or, if you can take it, Anthony Julius’s magisterial
Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England
, 2010.
^*
Alternately, perform the following thought experiment: imagine the largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation after the Murdoch family has turned out to be the government of Israel—instead of who it really is, which is the Saudi royal family. Now picture some British people.
^*

For evidence-based information on modern Israel and its history, two books that are particularly short and easy to read but at the same time heavily annotated and (to my mind) convincing are
The Case for Israel
, by Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, 2003, which is organized into chapters like “Did European Jews Displace Palestinians?” and “Is Israel a Racist State?,” and
The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War
, by James L. Gelvin of UCLA, 2005. Longer books I like on the history of the mess include
Palestine Betrayed
, by Efraim Karsh,
professor and head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program of King’s College, London, 2010,
One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate
, by Tom Segev of
Haaretz
, 2000, and
A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time
, by Howard M. Sachar of George Washington University, 1985. Robin Wright’s
Dreams and Shadows
from a couple of footnotes ago is a great interview-based account of the more recent history. For even less of a commitment I recommend the attempt to separately describe the history of Israel from the perspectives of Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs generally in the first chapter of
The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace
, by Dennis Ross, chief Middle East peace talks negotiator for the Clinton administration, 2005, although the whole book is good.
^*
If you don’t have the time or interest to read even that much, but feel compelled to have strong opinions about Israel anyway, that’s your business. By which I mean shut the fuck up about it, at least around me.

There are fewer books in English about
Tiananmen Square
than you might think.
^*
For the crackdown and the origins and legacy of what has come to be called in China the July 4th Movement, the sources that have been most important to me have been
Tell the World: What Happened in China and Why
, by Liu Binyan with Ruan Ming and Xu Gang,
translated by Henry L. Epstein, 1989; and
Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China
, by Philip P. Pan, 2008. Liu was a prominent Chinese intellectual who was investigated by the Central Disciplinary Committee (which doesn’t
sound
fun) after an earlier round of student protests in 1987. Ruan was one of the actual student demonstrators. I don’t really know what Xu’s deal was, but his chapter in the book is good. Their book overall, though showing some of the strains of having been produced so quickly after the events, is invaluable, and its narrative of the massacre happening en route to the Square rather than within it (an element semantically exploited by the Chinese government to argue that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre) was corroborated by leaked U.S. embassy cables published by the U.K.
Telegraph
in June 2011.
^*
Philip Pan is the former Beijing bureau chief for the
Washington Post
. His book is brilliant and will make you newly appreciate your own liberty, then make you wonder whether you would fight for it as hard as some of Pan’s heroes have. Li Gang is
that
guy’s father for sure. Particularly helpful was his profile of Wang Junxiu.

The number of people killed
remains unknown. There were at least a million people involved in the demonstrations in Beijing. Millions more participated in over two hundred other Chinese cities. There were 120,000 arrests afterward. The Chinese Red Cross is said to have initially reported 2,600 dead during the first night of shooting in Beijing alone, but later retracted that number under pressure from the government.
^*

The
idea that closing a coal plant in China could quickly cause
noticeable changes in child development
, likely due to a reduction in exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that can bind to and warp DNA, comes from the research of Dr. Frederica P. Perera of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health. However, its presentation here is exaggerated and not at all meant to accurately reflect Dr. Perera’s actual studies or findings. For more on the dangers of ash from coal plants, see “Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste,” by Mara Hvistendahl,
Scientific American
, 13 Dec 2007.
^*