Bruce Berger was for years a professor and the chair of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Alabama. Before that, however, he served in the U.S. Army and served in Vietnam in 1970, in the Casualty Branch, 101st Airborne Division, writing letters to the families of fallen soldiers. Occasionally he served in Graves Registration, finding and retrieving soldiers’ bodies from the battlefield. Not hand to hand combat, but nevertheless, very traumatic duty and Berger has, not surprisingly, never forgotten it.
In 2021 he published a prizewinning book of poems, “Fragments: The Long Coming Home from Vietnam,” and has now published a novel, “Brothers Bound.” “Brothers Bound “ has a narrow focus: the story of two American soldiers. One is Jameis Jones, who announces “My family blood is black, brown, white and yellow. I’m every color, every hue.” He has given himself the nickname “Hues.” The other is less exotic: Brian Charles Kinder, who goes by Buck. They become buddies while still in training.
The two are near Phu Bai in northernmost South Vietnam when their helicopter is shot down and they are captured by the Viet Cong and marched to a remote jungle camp. There, they become prisoners of war in a place in which no one has ever heard of Geneva, never mind the Geneva Convention. Their task is to garden and gather food—manioc root, jungle fruits, fish, berries to feed the Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They are given only scraps of the food they gather.
The two are starved, kept in cages, bound, tortured just about every day for 14 months. Periodically, they are publicly beaten, nearly to death. There are no exceptions among their captors—not one good guy. At one point, as Buck and Hues observe a small peaceful village, they consider how much the Vietnamese people have suffered over the years, including their war of liberation from the French. Otherwise, Berger does not zoom out to any geopolitical considerations, recent history, previous international treaties, etc. It is all just right there in the camp.
The Viet Cong are sadistic, one might even say evil, fiercely angry at the Americans who have come such a long way to bomb their country. Hues and Buck develop survival skills, learning to retreat mentally to a “memory room.” Hues was a street preacher in Michigan. A man of profound faith, he creates new psalms relevant to the moment, by rapping. The Viet Cong hate it, but Buck, once a skeptic, is converted. And they bind together, sharing, aiding and trusting one another absolutely, always planning their escape. They become brothers. One might even say, spiritually, they become one.
Not for sensitive readers, this novel of captured soldiers struggling to survive is powerful and intense, painful and unrelenting.
