I Can't Do It

I have been trying to read The Village for a while.  It doesn't help that it is paper.  We all know that I am a slow reader of paper things.  But this one is too hard.  For some reason I have been stuck in reading Viet Nam War memoirs.  When Tobias Wolff wrote about his experiences in Nam, he was more than a little self-deprecating.  His time in his village was an attempt to stay out of the line of fire.  That sounds like a great idea to me.  

Bing West's platoon got into the middle of everything.  His village was on top of a Viet Cong ant hill. I've just finished a chapter where many of the men were killed in a very daring VC attack.  No one can be trusted.  Nothing is light-hearted.  This is dirty, deadly war.  OK, I got it.  It is well written.  If it were not, I'd have stopped long ago.  

You have to understand that I have never seen a movie about Viet Nam.  I didn't want to see Platoon or Full Metal Jacket or The Killing Fields.  I didn't have to see it to know; I had friends who were killed and a husband who could not sleep at night without the radio on, he had to have noise to sleep.  Today I was loading my Ipod with music.  That's something new for me, but I have an 8 gb Ipod now, so there is room for music.  I always put Adagio for Strings on every computer I own, so I was looking for it for this download.  In the search, I found a spot on YouTube called Platoon Music Video.  It plays the full Adagio with scenes from Platoon.  That did it.  I'll keep the music, but I've had enough of that war.  Sorry, Bing, your book is good, but 2.5 books about Viet Nam is enough.