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Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery
“We tend to write about what will not go away,” Doug Anderson says in this candid, darkly humorous journey of self-discovery. Beginning in 1943, in the pre–civil rights South filled with tobacco and war stories, he recalls the difficult childhood that propels him into service in Vietnam. In 1967, having returned home deeply shaken by his experience as a combat medical corpsman, Anderson plunges into the heady freedoms and excesses of the sixties. His downward spiral—through booze, substance abuse, and sex—brings him dangerously close to a total breakdown. Finally, in a return group visit to Vietnam in 2000, he meets with former enemies now become writers and poets. Moved by the realization that “the last time I saw these people they were trying to kill me,” Anderson confronts the past and calls upon a story—this powerful story—to rebuild a life.
- GenresMemoir
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 24, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 27, 2024
Doug Anderson’s Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, The Sixties, and A Journey of Self-Discovery is a fascinating and powerful memoir by someone who has been both a combat medic and a poet. It belongs on the shelves with others of the important soldier-poet memoirs, a small and often overlooked subgenre of war literature that includes books like The Enormous Room by e.e cummings and the several volumes of semi-autobiographical memoirs (something these days often called “autofiction”) by Siegfried Sassoon, whom Anderson talks about in one chapter.
Anderson was a combat medic in Vietnam before becoming a poet. The often terrifying and sad events that take him from becoming one to becoming the other are riveting and hard to forget.
The narrative begins with his difficult childhood and family life and his pre-war experiences in education and as a musician. It continues through his war experiences to his post-war life and struggles with post-traumatic stress and alcoholism. It discusses his long history as an artist: he worked as a musician, an actor, and a playwright before finding his way to poetry. It’s a book that shares the author’s nightmares (real and imagined) vividly with readers, and you can expect to take some of them with you.
It’s also a book about discovering awareness of multiple kinds, political, personal and psychological, and philosophical too, an examination of being as much as of war and of literature. It’s a story of the casualties that pile up during the attempt over many years to survive his and his country’s troubles. It’s the story of his desire to learn wisdom.
Like many important books involving war, Keep Your Head Down shows that violence is not born in war but comes from the people and cultures and values that create each specific war. It is often the behavior and beliefs of those who don’t have to experience war directly which shape the terms on which a given war takes place. The United States is a violent place, daily, and so it’s not surprising that it has often imported its violence across the world.
Memoirs of people who have been both soldiers and poets seems like a fairly small subgenre, although of course many people have become writers significantly because of their war experiences. I can’t claim to know the full breadth of books fitting this subgenre. But Keep Your Head Down is not trying to fit itself to any preconceived genre of writing, small or otherwise, even though the author knows a great deal about literature.
Instead it’s a book that consistently presents and explores the experiences of a man which don’t fit neatly into a book just about war or just about poetry or just about the life of the author or just about any of the particular versions of himself that Anderson has tried to be. It brings all those facets of his life together uniquely, and with startling honesty and believability.
At first I thought that maybe the writing style was going to be of the standard kind found in too many of today’s overly-processed major-publishing-house literary productions. I soon realized that the tautness and understatement of the sentences allowed the details to be the story, that the writing was not going to try to call attention to itself.
Keep Your Head Down is a book about how people are changed by experience, and how experience itself always replaces what we might have hoped life would be. A sense of hauntedness hangs over the book, as the author presents himself both as proud of what he achieved after The Vietnam War nearly destroyed him and saddened by the possibilities that his experiences cut him off from exploring. Certain moments of this story are going to live in my head a long time.
Alienation is the condition of feeling that the behaviors and beliefs and values of the people around you are harmful and could be different but won’t be, soon enough anyway to make any difference to you. It’s not about wanting to be accepted. It’s about not wanting to accept a life that you can’t really escape. It’s possible to “come to terms” with alienation by learning how to live with what you don’t want to accept, but it’s impossible to escape the alienation entirely without deciding to accept what you used to not want to accept. The idea that there’s a place to go where the values of others will be different and acceptable is one of the fantasies of the alienated, but many people who go somewhere different only find themselves in different kinds of alienation. The alienated person is not likely to ever feel fully at home among others.
Anderson was a combat medic in Vietnam before becoming a poet. The often terrifying and sad events that take him from becoming one to becoming the other are riveting and hard to forget.
The narrative begins with his difficult childhood and family life and his pre-war experiences in education and as a musician. It continues through his war experiences to his post-war life and struggles with post-traumatic stress and alcoholism. It discusses his long history as an artist: he worked as a musician, an actor, and a playwright before finding his way to poetry. It’s a book that shares the author’s nightmares (real and imagined) vividly with readers, and you can expect to take some of them with you.
It’s also a book about discovering awareness of multiple kinds, political, personal and psychological, and philosophical too, an examination of being as much as of war and of literature. It’s a story of the casualties that pile up during the attempt over many years to survive his and his country’s troubles. It’s the story of his desire to learn wisdom.
Like many important books involving war, Keep Your Head Down shows that violence is not born in war but comes from the people and cultures and values that create each specific war. It is often the behavior and beliefs of those who don’t have to experience war directly which shape the terms on which a given war takes place. The United States is a violent place, daily, and so it’s not surprising that it has often imported its violence across the world.
Memoirs of people who have been both soldiers and poets seems like a fairly small subgenre, although of course many people have become writers significantly because of their war experiences. I can’t claim to know the full breadth of books fitting this subgenre. But Keep Your Head Down is not trying to fit itself to any preconceived genre of writing, small or otherwise, even though the author knows a great deal about literature.
Instead it’s a book that consistently presents and explores the experiences of a man which don’t fit neatly into a book just about war or just about poetry or just about the life of the author or just about any of the particular versions of himself that Anderson has tried to be. It brings all those facets of his life together uniquely, and with startling honesty and believability.
At first I thought that maybe the writing style was going to be of the standard kind found in too many of today’s overly-processed major-publishing-house literary productions. I soon realized that the tautness and understatement of the sentences allowed the details to be the story, that the writing was not going to try to call attention to itself.
Keep Your Head Down is a book about how people are changed by experience, and how experience itself always replaces what we might have hoped life would be. A sense of hauntedness hangs over the book, as the author presents himself both as proud of what he achieved after The Vietnam War nearly destroyed him and saddened by the possibilities that his experiences cut him off from exploring. Certain moments of this story are going to live in my head a long time.
Alienation is the condition of feeling that the behaviors and beliefs and values of the people around you are harmful and could be different but won’t be, soon enough anyway to make any difference to you. It’s not about wanting to be accepted. It’s about not wanting to accept a life that you can’t really escape. It’s possible to “come to terms” with alienation by learning how to live with what you don’t want to accept, but it’s impossible to escape the alienation entirely without deciding to accept what you used to not want to accept. The idea that there’s a place to go where the values of others will be different and acceptable is one of the fantasies of the alienated, but many people who go somewhere different only find themselves in different kinds of alienation. The alienated person is not likely to ever feel fully at home among others.
December 15, 2023
Anderson not own presents his journey as a Marine Corpsman in Vietnam but the depths he had to climb out due to his PTSD post-Vietnam.
February 7, 2016
Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery by Doug Anderson (WW Norton & Co. 2009) (Biography). This book features excellent Vietnam segments from the author's time as a battlefield medic. This is probably the best Vietnam memoir I've ever read. My rating: 7.5/10, finished 9/1/2010.
October 12, 2012
Deeply traumatized by his experiences as a young marine in Vietnam, alcoholic, and generally dysfunctional. Anderson nevertheless managed to get his shit together. "Keep Your Head Down" is an honest chronicle of his journey to an understanding of himself and the way in which his generation had been scammed. Powerful stuff.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews