What do you think?
Rate this book
Remembering Heaven's Face: A Story of Rescue in Wartime Vietnam
I volunteered to go to Vietnam, but as a conscientious objector to war. . . . While most of these events took place in the midst of the war, this is not exactly a story about the war, but a story of rescue. Most of the children I helped save―scalped, burned, blasted, or shot when I found them―are now adults, parents or even grandparents themselves. . . . And while many of my funny, wise, reckless, young American friends of those days are dead, what they did and what they learned is not. It is as if all of us were being watched, all of us journeying under a brilliant blue sky that is the face of heaven.―from the preface
- GenresNonfiction
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
68 people want to read
About the author
John Balaban
28 books6 followersJohn Balaban (b. 1943) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. He has won several awards, including the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a National Poetry Series Selection, and, forLocusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems, the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He was named the 2001–2004 National Artist for the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also been nominated twice for the National Book Award. In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, Balaban translates Vietnamese poetry; he is also a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Balaban is a poet-in-residence and English professor in the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 8, 2011
This book beggars description. It is haunting, lyrical, utterly personal, as Balaban takes us through an often hidden side of the war. A Conscientious Objector who goes to Vietnam to understand the conflict that is tearing his country apart, Balaban meets CIA agents, doomed heroin rock-and-rollers, dedicated doctors and nurses, paper-blooded bureaucrats, and mystical monks. He fights in the Tet Offensive, spends months helping get wounded children to America for reconstructive surgery, and then returns with his wife to record Vietnamese oral poetry. The small details, story, and quiet introspection of this book are a picture into a forgotten world.
Everybody should read this book.
Everybody should read this book.
Read
November 27, 2019[Written for the Philadelphia Inquirer June 1991]
"Just when you thought it safe to come out of hiding," a Midwestern critic wrote recently, "along comes another Vietnam book."
It would be a shame if this kind of attitude were applied to John Balaban's memoir, REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE. In the first place, the reductive term "Vietnam book," is not much more accurate than, say, "love book," or "human book." There are as many ways to write about a place, or a subject, as there are authors, and only a kind of intellectual or emotional indolence would move someone — a critic, especially — to dismiss a book simply because of its subject matter.
In the second place, Balaban has written a stirring, thought-provoking, and strikingly original memoir, an adventure of conscience that challenges, educates, entertains and inspires.
Balaban went to Vietnam as a conscientious objector. Here again, however, that label seems grossly inaccurate. He was a CO who packed a .38; who, during the 1968 Tet offensive, guarded a provincial hospital with a machine gun; who used fists and metal chairs on scurrilous street punks; who befriended soldiers and CIA agents, and spent as much time in Viet Cong-controlled areas as some combatants.
His strange odyssey began in 1967. Distressed, like many college students of that time, by America's involvement in Vietnam, Balaban chose a course of action not very popular among his contemporaries: He traded in his student deferment and went to Vietnam as a noncombatant Volunteer. "It occurred to me," he writes, "that the only place to learn anything, to do anything about Vietnam was in Vietnam."
The first hundred pages of REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE tell the story of Balaban's first eight months in Vietnam, teaching linguistics with the International Voluntary Services (IVS) at a university in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho. Smoothly, often poetically, Balaban takes us beyond the war and into the gaiety and turbulence of the country's soul. Here is a scene from a riverside market:
"All about, as we passed through the fish stalls in search of the spice section, our shoes picking up glittery scales, blood-flecked leaves, and scraps of entrails, I could make out ...'Americans' rising from the peasant hubbub above the racket of the amplified radio, the clacking sticks of soup vendors, the fruit sellers' chants, the shine of a knife sharpener's wheel, a lone flute song, and the cries of various monkeys, finches, canaries, lorikeets, and kingfishers caged for sale. We passed buckets of snakes, tubs of turtles; walked through the meat section where pig halves knotted with mushy fat and stringy haunches of beef hung from hooks in on orbit of green flies. I paused as a woman butcher raised her cleaver and brought it down lopping off a piece of pork, then wrapped it up in some military newspaper with a fuzzy front-page photo showing Viet Cong bodies lying, disemboweled, on an empty roadway."
This first, best section of the book ends with Balaban doing guard and orderly duty at the local operating room at the height of the Tet offensive. His account of the fighting, during which Balaban was wounded, is as gripping as any thriller, and the horrifying descriptions of civilian casualties serve as a proper foundation for the rest of the book.
Here and there, Balaban's writing suffers small lapses, usually when he loses faith in his descriptive abilities and thumps the reader with superfluous sentences. "We were stunned," or "I was in a real fix." Once or twice his objectivity is strained by phrases like "inimitable, ignorant, American savagery," and occasionally his philosophical musings seem repetitive.
But these are small specks of dust on a marvelous canvas that captures not only the horror of wartime Vietnam, but also its humor, irony, courage, craziness, corruption, decadence and day-to-day life.
Floating beneath all this, never far from the surface, is Balaban's highly developed sense of moral outrage. After Tet, this outrage drew him away from IVS and into an organization called the Committee of Responsibility, which arranged for severely wounded Vietnamese children to be brought to America for medical treatment.
Balaban's account of these children's suffering, of the bureaucratic obstacles to their temporary emigration, of the swampy moral ground he stumbled into while trying to wrest something unblemished from the war's devastation, is unsparingly honest.
Interspersed with the wrenching case histories of these child victims are sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous accounts of Balaban's personal life. After his alternative service ended, Balaban came back to America, where he endured much the same sense of dislocation suffered by combat veterans.
In August 1971, with his pregnant wife in tow, Balaban returned to Vietnam to research ca dao, Vietnamese folk poetry. "At this point in my experience with the war. I saw collecting these poems and translating them as the only sensible political act I could perform," he writes.
Here, and in the final section when he visits poverty-stricken Hanoi and, farther south, seeks out and finds some of the people saved 15 years earlier by the Committee of Responsibility, we probe deeper and deeper layers of Balaban's affection for Vietnam, his anger at war, and, finally, his sadness at the strictures of Vietnam's postwar communism.
REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE is a superb book. Part internal exploration, part historical treatise, part travelogue, part political statement, it marks the reader with the indelible print of a writer of conscience who dared, in the words of a Vietnamese poem, to "go out and see Heaven's face."
"Just when you thought it safe to come out of hiding," a Midwestern critic wrote recently, "along comes another Vietnam book."
It would be a shame if this kind of attitude were applied to John Balaban's memoir, REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE. In the first place, the reductive term "Vietnam book," is not much more accurate than, say, "love book," or "human book." There are as many ways to write about a place, or a subject, as there are authors, and only a kind of intellectual or emotional indolence would move someone — a critic, especially — to dismiss a book simply because of its subject matter.
In the second place, Balaban has written a stirring, thought-provoking, and strikingly original memoir, an adventure of conscience that challenges, educates, entertains and inspires.
Balaban went to Vietnam as a conscientious objector. Here again, however, that label seems grossly inaccurate. He was a CO who packed a .38; who, during the 1968 Tet offensive, guarded a provincial hospital with a machine gun; who used fists and metal chairs on scurrilous street punks; who befriended soldiers and CIA agents, and spent as much time in Viet Cong-controlled areas as some combatants.
His strange odyssey began in 1967. Distressed, like many college students of that time, by America's involvement in Vietnam, Balaban chose a course of action not very popular among his contemporaries: He traded in his student deferment and went to Vietnam as a noncombatant Volunteer. "It occurred to me," he writes, "that the only place to learn anything, to do anything about Vietnam was in Vietnam."
The first hundred pages of REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE tell the story of Balaban's first eight months in Vietnam, teaching linguistics with the International Voluntary Services (IVS) at a university in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho. Smoothly, often poetically, Balaban takes us beyond the war and into the gaiety and turbulence of the country's soul. Here is a scene from a riverside market:
"All about, as we passed through the fish stalls in search of the spice section, our shoes picking up glittery scales, blood-flecked leaves, and scraps of entrails, I could make out ...'Americans' rising from the peasant hubbub above the racket of the amplified radio, the clacking sticks of soup vendors, the fruit sellers' chants, the shine of a knife sharpener's wheel, a lone flute song, and the cries of various monkeys, finches, canaries, lorikeets, and kingfishers caged for sale. We passed buckets of snakes, tubs of turtles; walked through the meat section where pig halves knotted with mushy fat and stringy haunches of beef hung from hooks in on orbit of green flies. I paused as a woman butcher raised her cleaver and brought it down lopping off a piece of pork, then wrapped it up in some military newspaper with a fuzzy front-page photo showing Viet Cong bodies lying, disemboweled, on an empty roadway."
This first, best section of the book ends with Balaban doing guard and orderly duty at the local operating room at the height of the Tet offensive. His account of the fighting, during which Balaban was wounded, is as gripping as any thriller, and the horrifying descriptions of civilian casualties serve as a proper foundation for the rest of the book.
Here and there, Balaban's writing suffers small lapses, usually when he loses faith in his descriptive abilities and thumps the reader with superfluous sentences. "We were stunned," or "I was in a real fix." Once or twice his objectivity is strained by phrases like "inimitable, ignorant, American savagery," and occasionally his philosophical musings seem repetitive.
But these are small specks of dust on a marvelous canvas that captures not only the horror of wartime Vietnam, but also its humor, irony, courage, craziness, corruption, decadence and day-to-day life.
Floating beneath all this, never far from the surface, is Balaban's highly developed sense of moral outrage. After Tet, this outrage drew him away from IVS and into an organization called the Committee of Responsibility, which arranged for severely wounded Vietnamese children to be brought to America for medical treatment.
Balaban's account of these children's suffering, of the bureaucratic obstacles to their temporary emigration, of the swampy moral ground he stumbled into while trying to wrest something unblemished from the war's devastation, is unsparingly honest.
Interspersed with the wrenching case histories of these child victims are sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous accounts of Balaban's personal life. After his alternative service ended, Balaban came back to America, where he endured much the same sense of dislocation suffered by combat veterans.
In August 1971, with his pregnant wife in tow, Balaban returned to Vietnam to research ca dao, Vietnamese folk poetry. "At this point in my experience with the war. I saw collecting these poems and translating them as the only sensible political act I could perform," he writes.
Here, and in the final section when he visits poverty-stricken Hanoi and, farther south, seeks out and finds some of the people saved 15 years earlier by the Committee of Responsibility, we probe deeper and deeper layers of Balaban's affection for Vietnam, his anger at war, and, finally, his sadness at the strictures of Vietnam's postwar communism.
REMEMBERING HEAVEN'S FACE is a superb book. Part internal exploration, part historical treatise, part travelogue, part political statement, it marks the reader with the indelible print of a writer of conscience who dared, in the words of a Vietnamese poem, to "go out and see Heaven's face."
January 8, 2015
(Homework response, October 29th, 2011)
In this book Balaban plays the role of the intermediary between the reader, who has likely never experienced the politics of war first hand, and the military system. An early example of this disparity of civilian versus military view is during the Tet Offensive when the solider tells Balaban that there is a VC on the roof. When Balaban asks how he knows it is a VC, he says the solider “looked at me as if I was stupid” and then said, “What would anybody be doing up on the roof during this?” (119). Though Balaban offers alternative explanations, the solider turns away, still convinced he is right.
When we get into the chapters regarding the COR program, we see how politics is responsible for taking lives that could have been saved. When Tien has his approval revoked because “he doesn't need to go the the U.S. He needs to go to jail,” we can share Balaban's shock and frustration. He includes the scene where the Colonel considers change the approval, which ultimately never happens, because the Colonel thinks “if he is Viet Cong, we can only look good by letting him go” showing that political reasoning plays on both sides. The biggest shock in that chapter is when Dr. Carter says “no left-wing organization is going to get propaganda out of this hospital,” based off his believe that Balaban is a communist. Whether Tien or any other patient goes to the US or stays in Vietnam, it is not a matter of saving the life of a human being, but how it can be spun politically. Balaban has to use press to put political pressure on those in charge in order to save Chau Quynh.
Many people have pointed out that his writing is not very lyrical, but I still find it impressive. Each of Balban's paragraphs manage to cover a lot of ground while still keeping the reader engaged in the story. Even his summaries are interesting. Balaban has a skill in presenting a lot of information in a few words. During the chapter on the first six children the COR gets out of the country, Balaban comments that Gitelson has been “dead only a few months” which in that one phrase, tells us that Balaban is still thinking about him, and gives us a good sense of time. Before that sentence, I thought much more time had passed.
The only problem I had with the book was that there were so many names mentioned that I had a hard time keeping track of them all. When it was first mentioned that Gitelson was missing and presumed dead, I wasn't sure if he was the “poor American” or not. It had been a few chapters since he had last appeared. Since Balaban didn't seem to immediately react as though the person was his friend, I assumed that it wasn't until I kept reading.
In this book Balaban plays the role of the intermediary between the reader, who has likely never experienced the politics of war first hand, and the military system. An early example of this disparity of civilian versus military view is during the Tet Offensive when the solider tells Balaban that there is a VC on the roof. When Balaban asks how he knows it is a VC, he says the solider “looked at me as if I was stupid” and then said, “What would anybody be doing up on the roof during this?” (119). Though Balaban offers alternative explanations, the solider turns away, still convinced he is right.
When we get into the chapters regarding the COR program, we see how politics is responsible for taking lives that could have been saved. When Tien has his approval revoked because “he doesn't need to go the the U.S. He needs to go to jail,” we can share Balaban's shock and frustration. He includes the scene where the Colonel considers change the approval, which ultimately never happens, because the Colonel thinks “if he is Viet Cong, we can only look good by letting him go” showing that political reasoning plays on both sides. The biggest shock in that chapter is when Dr. Carter says “no left-wing organization is going to get propaganda out of this hospital,” based off his believe that Balaban is a communist. Whether Tien or any other patient goes to the US or stays in Vietnam, it is not a matter of saving the life of a human being, but how it can be spun politically. Balaban has to use press to put political pressure on those in charge in order to save Chau Quynh.
Many people have pointed out that his writing is not very lyrical, but I still find it impressive. Each of Balban's paragraphs manage to cover a lot of ground while still keeping the reader engaged in the story. Even his summaries are interesting. Balaban has a skill in presenting a lot of information in a few words. During the chapter on the first six children the COR gets out of the country, Balaban comments that Gitelson has been “dead only a few months” which in that one phrase, tells us that Balaban is still thinking about him, and gives us a good sense of time. Before that sentence, I thought much more time had passed.
The only problem I had with the book was that there were so many names mentioned that I had a hard time keeping track of them all. When it was first mentioned that Gitelson was missing and presumed dead, I wasn't sure if he was the “poor American” or not. It had been a few chapters since he had last appeared. Since Balaban didn't seem to immediately react as though the person was his friend, I assumed that it wasn't until I kept reading.
August 8, 2015
Reading for my Vietnam Travel Seminar. This book is broken into four sections, based on the author's four distinct trips to Vietnam. Each trip had a slightly different purpose, but each story builds on the last. Of course it's full of heartbreaking details, but Balaban doesn't rub any of the injuries of the children he's helped in our faces, and his earnest desire to simply help them shines through clearly. Nor does his later trip to gather Vietnamese oral folk poetry (which results in another book) come off as apologist or "look at me, I'm better than you." Instead, it's clear that his desire to save this quickly disappearing oral form of culture comes from a true respect and admiration of the Vietnamese, and a desire to see some bridges built between the United States and Vietnam.
I had the pleasure of discussing Vietnam and his books with Mr. Balaban a few months ago at Chatham University. He still makes trips back there and works to foster understanding, especially through literature, between our two cultures. He told us that while we might be thinking of the war, Vietnam no longer is. I'm going to Vietnam at the end of April, so I'm very excited to see the Vietnam Mr. Balaban described.
I had the pleasure of discussing Vietnam and his books with Mr. Balaban a few months ago at Chatham University. He still makes trips back there and works to foster understanding, especially through literature, between our two cultures. He told us that while we might be thinking of the war, Vietnam no longer is. I'm going to Vietnam at the end of April, so I'm very excited to see the Vietnam Mr. Balaban described.
April 17, 2013
A war memoir from one who wouldn't fight. Unbelievable courage and compassion. Intensely moving
November 26, 2022
This. Book. Powerful. It stays with you. From his first-hand account of being unwillingly immersed in the Tet Offensive to his vivid and succinct descriptions of the war-torn Vietnamese countryside; profiles of local peasants, soldiers, children, and fellow NGO conscientious objector-status colleagues, author John Balaban reveals a rare side of the Vietnam war that I dare say few of us know of or have ever read about. Refusing to fight in Vietnam, John Balaban was able to serve in the International Volunteer Services (IVS) in a “CO” (conscientious objector) status early on in the war, avoiding the other drastic options at the time of fleeing to another country or serving prison time to avoid fighting in Vietnam. However, this didn’t exclude him from getting caught in some extremely precarious situations. The experience changed his life: he learned to speak Vietnamese, became involved with an organization to save maimed and severely injured children, returned to Vietnam several times, and eventually devoted much of his writing and teaching career focused on Vietnamese literature, poetry and culture. Balaban writes with vibrant clarity, a journalist’s talent of observation, sprinkled with just the right amount of his poetic take on certain images that makes you recoil in horror or appreciate the wonderment of a unique scene. Balaban’s personal account is an amazing memoir while simultaneously a valuable historical record. Read it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews