Slice-of-Death

By Paul Gray

THE BARKING DEER by JONATHAN RUBIN 335 pages. George Braziller. $7.95.

Can fiction do anything for the war in Viet Nam that ten years of TV film clips and a torrent of journalism did not? After all the surfeits of that war--the distant carnage, the fallout of casualties closer to home, the national agony of consciousness and political dislocation in the U.S.--can the imagination of a storyteller offer anything more than a few slice-of-death memories?

Those who believe in the truths of fiction have always been sure that enough talent could work such magic, and in The Barking Deer Jonathan Rubin shows considerable talent. Even so, the author wisely does not try to capture the war in its dreadful magnitudes of size and duration. He ambushes a piece of it from a Montagnard village in the central Vietnamese highlands, circa 1964, just before the machinery of destruction began to dwarf its human masters.

The inhabitants of Buon Yun supplement their spare diet of present comforts with the rich legends from a past that is never very far behind them. The birth of each child precipitates a search for the proper dewdrop, containing the spirit of the appropriate ancestor, to place on its tongue. Spirits swarm through the village, susceptible to human requests but never recriminations; when disasters occur they only mean that the prayers of the living have been improperly presented. A'de, their creator, is still in his heaven, holding Buon Yun up by means of a sturdy rope.

But A'de dangles the village perilously close to Cambodian supply routes favored by the Viet Cong, and the blades of arriving American helicopters threaten to snip Buon Yun from its mooring. A detachment of twelve U.S. soldiers settles in to protect the village from the

V.C., who are equally eager to guard Buon Yun from the Americans' embrace. Both are strangers to the Montagnards, but characteristically the villagers even have an ancient legend to describe this fearsome confluence of alien protectors: the story of the barking deer, coveted both by Kra the tiger and Bru the eagle. As they fight over who will give the deer the warmer home, their claws and talons turn the prize into "a red splotch on the ground."

Author Rubin, who worked with Montagnards as a Special Forces sergeant from 1962 to 1964, uses this simple parable to stunning effect. Through it, the catastrophe that falls upon Buon Yun assumes the inevitable rhythm of high drama. Like the eagle and the tiger, the Americans and Viet Cong tell themselves--and for the most part are convinced--that all they are trying to do is protect the village. The few who sense disaster waiting behind a tangle of motives are powerless to reverse the story line of the Montagnard legend.

Rubin's vision of the Viet Nam War through the prism of a grim fairy tale may not satisfy rationalists who demand an accounting of the conflict's cause and effect, a ledger of lessons to be learned for future profit. Successful art, however, satisfies another human need: the desire not to calculate but to know in the heart how things are. While The Barking Deer is not the whole story, it is a drop of moisture in a desert of data. Like those birthday dewdrops, it bears spirits that should be passed on.

"I wanted to go for broke," explains Jonathan Rubin. "No short stories, no articles, just a novel." Against remarkable odds, he succeeded. The Barking Deer is not only Rubin's first novel, it is his first publication anywhere. Rubin, 33, came to writing in a roundabout way.

After leaving Viet Nam and the Special Forces in 1964, he put in four years with the Central Intelligence Agency, then squandered two more years of vagabond travel in Europe, Russia and the Middle East with his wife Maura. But the war experience kept nagging him. "I had always planned to write a novel," he says, "and Viet Nam was the compelling subject. I had to get it done while my feelings were still strong."

Once he settled down to it, The Barking Deer took two years to write, and for much of that time going for broke was literally where Rubin seemed headed. He wrote to a dozen publishers, but he had no reputation, no work to show and no agent. Most houses "would write back and say, 'Sorry, fella, no one wants to buy a first novel about Viet Nam.' " Eventually, George Braziller, publisher of the antiwar book 365 Days, and Edward Seaver, his fiction editor, saw half of the final draft and advised Rubin to keep polishing. So did Wife Maura, whose job as a consultant for conservation groups in Washington allowed Rubin to stay home in Alexandria, Va., and write.

Rubin grew up in New York City. In 1961 he graduated from Cornell with a major in wildlife conservation. He enlisted in the Green Berets "because there was a guerrilla war going on in Southeast Asia, and hi those innocent times I wanted to be part of it." He went to Viet Nam in 1962 with one of the early U.S. groups trained in counterinsurgency. He learned the language of the Rhade, a major Montagnard tribe (the one portrayed in The Barking Deer), and some-tunes acted as an interpreter between Montagnards and Vietnamese. The Rhade culture fascinated Rubin, and the villagers' perilous exposure to the more "civilized" Americans and Vietnamese saddened him: "I could see as early as 1962 that the Montagnards' time was running out." That somber perception became the dominant strain in his novel. Says Rubin: "The Barking Deer began as an antiwar satire but developed into an epitaph for the Montagnards, for all such folks everywhere."

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