Laughing War
by
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On the nights when the wind was right and the fighter planes were not taking off, the waves of laughter rolled all the way to the outer perimeter. At the perimeter, sentries peered from their tiny sandbag fortresses and listened to the distant noise. They had learned to tell who was performing at the Club simply by the type of laughter that surged across the flatness and washed over them from behind. If it was the comedy act with the ex-stripper and the short man, there was lewd whistling and hooting. If it was Sheldon the fat comedian from Brooklyn the laughter came at predictable intervals and was never loud enough to compete with even a single F-100 taking off. The fat comedian from Brooklyn was a master of pacing. He had studied Bob Hope on television for years. If it was the young comedian named Barney there were murmuring silences and then vast roars of laughter that broke and pounded against the darkness, regathering to break again and again. The sentries could tell who was performing just by the kind of laughter. The laughter was like a comic fingerprint. On the night that Barney slipped in his first joke about the colonel, the sentries could hear the hooting until the afterburners kicked in on the F-100s. The planes were taking off for a bombing run somewhere near Cambodia. Someone was in desperate trouble up there. The sentries could see the needles of light shooting down the runway. When the flame blossomed from the afterburners they knew it would take the count of three for the noise to reach them across the distance. Goddam! It s like stereo, thought one of the sentries, a nineteen-year-old from the hill country of Georgia. The Air Force coming from one side and the comedians from the other. Sometimes he was grateful for the noise. It made the terrible silence of the night go away. There were nights when he had spent hours being alone and afraid in the obsidian blackness that grew more evil by its quietness. They were out there. He knew it. They had killed other sentries. The occasional bursts of gunfire from distant outposts were the only sounds he would hear until the first wedge of light appeared in the eastern sky. But in this night, the nineteen-year-old from Georgia, did not care if there was any noise. He was providing his own. From his transistor radio jangled the sounds of another world. He eased back in his flak jacket, grinning for no reason as the Rolling Stones shouted I Can t Get No Satisfaction and then the Supremes urged him not to throw his love away while the Beatles told him of Eleanor Rigby. He was not supposed to have the radio. Nor was he supposed to be smoking this strange kind of cigarette that he had never smoked at home in the hill country. He kept grinning through his stoned stereophonic vision of the world. Blackness all around. And jet fighters from the right speaker, comedians from the left speaker and Eleanor Rigby keeping something in a jar that was opened and shot colors like mad butterflies across his mind. Let the bastards come now, he giggled to himself. From inside the Club came another wave of laughter.
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About the Book
Bien Hoa airbase, outside Saigon, wasn't a very funny place, but Barney's job had one advantage: he always played to a packed house. The soldiers flocked to his shows, and the war-zone comedian coaxed his battle-weary audiences first into chuckles and then into guffaws of healing laughter with material drawn from the lunacy around them: the little old VC with the single-shot rifle taking potshots at the jets, the international "peace-keeping" mission, the Vietnamese "car wash" racket, the numbering routine of army life, the officers One officer in particular: Colonel Isaacs, the blood-and-guts commander of the base, a driven man whose soldiers pay the price of his obsessions. Barney often ridiculed his authority from in front of the footlights, and after hours he wooed the colonel's woman, Donna, a beautiful singer with a secret. So far, he had gone unpunished But the colonel had included Barney in his plan for a jungle showdown with the enemy, a battle that would turn an abandoned firebase into a bloody killing ground and the scene of Barney's greatest performance. LAUGHING WAR does for Vietnam what Catch-22 did for World War II, laying bare the absurdity of war with a taut, fast-moving, darkly humorous tale of romance and suspense in a combat zone.
About the Author
Martyn Burke is a novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker. His books are often drawn from places and situations in which he has been involved. They include Laughing War, The Commissar's Report, Ivory Joe, and his latest novel, the sequel to Ivory Joe, The Shelling of Beverly Hills. His credits as a documentary filmmaker include Connections, powerful expose of the North American and Italian mafia; and Witnesses the award winning behind-the-lines film on the last day of the soviet war in Afghanistan. Other documentaries have ranged in subject matter from street gangs in Los Angeles to the feuds among the Mohawk Indians. He has written screenplays for such comedies as Paramount's Top Secret and The Second Civil War for HBO. He wrote and directed the hit TNT movie Pirates of Silicon Valley which was nominated for five Emmies including Best Screenplay, the Producers Guild award for best film, and the Directors Guild award for best directing. Martyn Burke divides his time between Toronto, Canada and Santa Monica, California.