In my novel In Country (1985), Samantha Hughes is preoccupied with Vietnam. Her father had been killed in the war just before she was born. Now 17, she is filled with questions about what it was like over there. Her eccentric uncle, Emmett, a Vietnam veteran, wanting to protect her, is reluctant to tell her much.

Sam says to him, “If you don’t tell me about the war, I’ll just imagine it was worse than it was.”

“You can’t,” he says.

She takes her sleeping bag to a swamp and tries to imagine herself “humping the boonies.” When Emmett finds her there, he laughs at her naiveté. A night in a Kentucky swamp is a night at the movies compared to the menace of a jungle in war.

Sam contemplates how women would handle war differently but gets no further than Margaret Thatcher in entertaining the thought that women might be nicer, or more just.

In Country wasn’t autobiographical, but Sam’s questions in the 1980s were my questions—as a woman and as a writer. And they grew out of my own family, where there was little talk about war. My high school class, born circa 1940, was already too old to be among those mid-1960s draftees who were shipped out to Vietnam. Some of us had parents or uncles who served in World War II, but I suspect that many of those revealed little. My father, naturally taciturn, rarely brought up the war. I wore his sailor hat as a beach hat in high school— the brim turned down. His uniform and sea bag were cool. But with a houseful of girls, he had little inclination to instruct us in the ways of war. He was a farmer, and he enlisted late, and he had never traveled out of Kentucky. He trained at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago, then traveled by train across the country to San Francisco, where he boarded his ship. At the end of the war, he sailed to New York City via the Panama Canal.

His journey was an almost paralyzing culture shock, I deduced later. When he finally came home, he never wanted to travel again. I learned eventually that he was not even in the action but only in a practice version of it—training exercises off the coast of California. He had his choice between a destroyer and a secret mission on a heavy cruiser. The destroyer, the USS Shaw, had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, raised, and resurrected. The cruiser was the USS Indianapolis, which carried parts of the atomic bomb Little Boy to the Mariana Islands. My dad declined to go on a mission that sounded so ominous. The cruiser was torpedoed on the way back. Nearly 900 men died, and 316 survived. Men he had trained with were on that ship.

On the destroyer my dad was an ammunitions passer, belowdecks. The sound of the guns above jolted him and damaged his ears. He had “ear trouble” throughout his life. Moreover, for the rest of his life he carried a deep knowledge that there was life out there, a suspicion that it was alien and threatening yet seductive. That glimpse of the larger world made him feel inadequate, but also it drove him to live on his own terms as an independent farmer. He never said any of this. It’s what I’ve figured out and imagined. But of course, it was worse than I could imagine, even if he never went to battle.

He may have been haunted by the fate of the Indianapolis, the men he had trained with. Their role in escorting the atomic bomb to its destination may have sunk in his brain. The sailors lived in shark-infested waters for four days before rescue. Over the years, as the knowledge of the bomb and its deadly potential loomed over the world like the mushroom cloud itself, his mind may have never been free of it.

I’ve always been interested in silences, what people say or can’t say, or should say and won’t say.

For my father, an ammunitions passer, belowdecks, the sounds above stayed in his head. Those sounds jostled the sounds in my own head. I was in graduate school during much of the Vietnam War, but it came to me through music and the counterculture. I began writing In Country much later, after the Wall was built and memoirs and oral histories began emerging. I immersed myself in those accounts. Above all, it was the way the soldiers talked that captivated me. Their jargon enabled them to hold their memories of the war within a protective community. Their voices haunted me with their eloquence.

I didn’t aim to write about the war. The subject sneaked up on me, and I found myself following the story, not researching the war and constructing a story based on it. I didn’t want to write history.

In In Country, Emmett tells Sam, “You can’t learn from history. That’s what history is.”

Still, I hesitated. They say you can’t write authentically about war if you haven’t been there, or you can’t write about a man’s experience if you’re a woman, or about a French person if you’re American, etc. Or black if white, and vice versa. But it is always the challenge for a fiction writer—to invent the unknown. The imagination illuminates a path into the unknown.

In a way it was easier to write from a female perspective. I had no emotional baggage to make me stumble. I would tell the story obliquely. I would tell about a girl’s quest to understand what had happened to her father.

Even Vietnam vets who became fiction writers must have faced barriers to telling the truth of Vietnam. But the literal story can be a mountain, and writers often find that they can reach the truth by telling it another way. Fiction is invention.

Tim O’Brien’s fiction sometimes seems to be tall tales. You may think a particular story couldn’t have happened in Vietnam, but you accept it, realizing it was no crazier than the actual war. You understand that the war was outside the normal.

In The Things They Carried, O’Brien tells a story so confoundingly implausible that your dependable, rational mind tells you that no soldier could send for his girlfriend in Ohio and have her move into his hooch and join recon missions, yet the story is brilliant because it moves from what happened to how you tell what happened. That is the story that will linger into the future—how can you tell this? What happened? How do we talk about it? What really happened? Reality itself is fractured, kaleidoscopic, just plain nuts.

The story may be far-fetched, but it doesn’t begin to explain how truly far out what actually happened was. If you knew, you couldn’t bear it. The reality isn’t sanitized. Rather, it’s diverted down a different path. We are often more moved by a storyteller’s pain in trying to tell the story than by the story itself. It is the struggle to tell it—against the impulse to clam up—that becomes the story.

In Country was published in 1985, and in 1989 it became a movie. In many minds, a novel is not real until it becomes a movie. Director Norman Jewison filmed it in my hometown, and then it became “real.” (Or, to put it another way, Bruce Willis played Emmett.)

It was still my story, and basically true to it, but the public emphasis shifted, and some local Vietnam veterans were breaking their silences. The local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America had only recently been organized—13 years after the end of the war. The president of the chapter, Gordon Williams, a psychologist who had served in Vietnam, had been having trouble getting his vet clients to open up about their painful memories of the war. Many of them had hardly spoken of their war experience, even to their wives, until the movie crew arrived and wanted to know. With Gordon as adviser on the film, local veterans were given roles as actors and advisers. In one moving scene, an African American vet shows Sam his actual Bronze Star.

Gordon reports to this day on those vets and the positive changes in their lives because of the attention and validation they received from a Canadian director and his Hollywood film crew. Gordon gives all his new clients who have been to Vietnam copies of my novel and shows them the film.

I’m proud of the way my story reached them and had such an enormous effect. When your story goes to the movies, the ramifications can travel like circles of water when you throw a pebble into a pond. The movie allowed my story about Sam’s attempt to understand the soldiers coming back into what they called the World with their secret grief, to reach further and touch more people than a lonely paperback might.

Lives changed, including my own. During the filming, my mother was sought after for her advice on country life. The set decorators borrowed all the plants on her porch and got her to make a damson pie for one of the scenes, since they didn’t know what a damson pie was. My parents became friends with Peggy Rea, who played the grandmother. She had been in The Dukes of Hazzard, my parents’ favorite show. My sister worked on the movie in the art department, then married the art director and moved to California, where she worked in film restoration.

Rebecca Reynolds, an actor and writer from Mayfield, had a small role in the movie. Last year she remarked that just about the only place you can see what downtown Mayfield used to be like is in the movie of In Country. The big tornado of 2021 blew downtown to smithereens.

I am honored that the ghosts from the summer the movies came to town still linger, especially in the lives of those Vietnam veterans and their families. In 1995, Gordon Williams and I addressed the National Council on the Arts on Capitol Hill about the cultural and economic impact of In Country on Mayfield. The National Endowment for the Arts had helped to fund my writing, and its program of grants to writers and artists was under threat. Senator Ted Kennedy also spoke to the Council in support of the NEA.

In 2018, the twentieth anniversary of the filming of In Country, a large gathering celebrated the film and its recognition of the local Vietnam vets. In the first reception, in 1988, the night before the filming began, they had been invited to display their memorabilia of the war to the cast and crew. But to this later reunion they brought their scrapbooks and mementoes of the summer of the movie. They watched the movie yet again.

My story of Sam and her uncle seemed to reach across time. In 1986, I traveled to Japan for the United States Information Agency, a cultural exchange program. At a university in Fukuoka, in southernmost Japan, two students, young girls, brought me flowers. They were reading In Country in class. They told me, “It was the same here. Our fathers and grandfathers would not talk to us about the war.” The girls were in tears.

On the bullet train back to Tokyo, I cried all the way to Hiroshima. The mountain landscape that rose behind the city was eerily familiar from documentaries. The silence reached back centuries.

Among her many other award-winning works, novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Bobbie Ann Mason published two novels centering around the ripples of the Vietnam War into American life: Dear Ann (2020) and In Country (1985), which was made into a film by Norman Jewison. Mason’s first book of short stories, Shiloh and Other Stories, was the winner, PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and her memoir Clear Springs was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received the Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Kentucky Book Award for The Girl in the Blue Beret (2012) and Elvis Presley, and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Feather Crowns and Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail.