291 pp. 8vo. From out of memory, WHERE THE RIVERS RUN BACKWARD captures the days, transcribes the moments of the Vietnam War from the red line that leads through the induction center to the muddy yellow swirl of the river that flows through the jungle, from the green Vietcong tracers that pierce the darkness to the black wall that records the names of the missing and the dead. William Merritt recalls the sights and sounds, the tastes and smells, even the feeling of days in Vietnam. Against a background of rock-and-roll music and a silver-green terrain, WHERE THE RIVERS RAN BACKWARD presents a closely observed, almost molecular portrait of slow-paced days, strung together by patrols and night watches in bunkers where the stench of vomit and old beer burns like tear gas. There is combat, frenzied and terrifying, in Merritt's book, but there are also stories of pet monkeys and centerfolds; observations on the spell cast by exploding white phosphorous grenades and the horror of field latrines; convoluted dialogs with a jeep driver enrolled in a mail-order course on Rosicrucianism and conversations, THUD, interrupted, THUD, by artillery, THUD, around the clock. Describing the war's terror and absurdity, Merritt also writes of its strange, almost intoxicating beauty: of a yellow river, complicated inlays of green and silver shimmering on its banks through the morning fog; of helicopter gunships firing in the night, sending bright neon threads streaming across the sky. Comic then suddenly reflective, lyrical then quickly matter of fact, WHERE THE RIVERS RAN BACKWARD describes a time and place in which effort seemed only to reinforce constancy, in which a river carried all its country's sorrows each day to the sea and then ran backward, bringing them back on the tide, forever.
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