Word of Honor Read online

  HIGHEST PRAISE FROM THE PRESS FOR

  WORD OF HONOR

  “THE MILITARY SCENES HAVE THE GUNMETAL RING OF AUTHENTICITY . . . a long, over-the-shoulder look at a time that grows larger as it recedes from sight.”

  —TIME

  “ENTERTAINS.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “COMPELLING. . . . We pace ourselves, enjoying the developments, appreciating the specifications of the work, not wanting to find out too much too soon. The special pleasure of this kind of reading derives from the conviction that the writer will take care of business. He does.”

  —Newsday

  “ONE OF THE MAJOR PAGE-TURNERS OF THE YEAR . . . INTELLIGENT AND HIGHLY CHARGED COURTROOM MELODRAMA . . . AN UNCOMPROMISING AND UNFORGETTABLE PICTURE OF MEN AT WAR.”

  —Pittsburgh Press

  “PACKED WITH DRAMA.”

  —Associated Press

  “TENSE . . . TIGHTLY TOLD . . . FASCINATING . . . if you liked Anatomy of a Murder and The Caine Mutiny, you’ll like WORD OF HONOR.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “MOVING . . . THOUGHT-PROVOKING . . . IT WILL HOLD YOU SPELLBOUND. . . . This novel will make every reader stop and think about personal values, the moral issues of guilt or innocence, and culpability in wartime.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “INTRIGUING.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  “ENTERTAINING.”

  Christian Science Monitor

  “IRRESISTIBLE . . . ONCE IT HOOKS YOU, WHICH IT DOES EARLY ON, IT NEVER LETS GO.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “A TENSE, WITTY, FAST-PACED DRAMA . . . DeMille brings it all together with a spare style of writing. The defense attorney says there’s no such thing as a true war story. But there are some good ones, and one of them is WORD OF HONOR.”

  —Fort Lauderdale News

  “DEMILLE HAS DONE A SUPERB JOB . . . a gripping tale that ranks among the best in modern popular fiction . . . the stuff of a major work.”

  —Virginia-Pilot

  “A HYPNOTIC STORY . . . Nelson DeMille personalizes the issues boldly and dissects them with brutal honesty in a suspenseful court-martial that pulls no punches. Yet this novel is more than merely an expertly spun out court-martial drama . . . [it is] a powerful remembrance of things past.”

  —John Barkham Reviews

  “MARVELOUS VIVIDNESS . . . a story as riveting as The Caine Mutiny but with wider implications . . . probes the conflicting concepts of honor, duty, and loyalty as they relate to an event of the My Lai variety.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “DEMILLE HAS HIT A HOME RUN . . . one is completely gripped by the question of what will happen to this haunted, guilt-resistant, essentially honorable man as his life and loved ones are massacred. . . . Bears favorable comparison with Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny . . . [with its] deep-running themes.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Books by Nelson DeMille

  By the Rivers of Babylon

  Cathedral

  The Talbot Odyssey

  Word of Honor

  The Charm School

  The Gold Coast

  The General’s Daughter

  Spencerville

  Plum Island

  With Thomas Block

  Mayday

  WORD OF HONOR. Copyright © 1985 by Nelson DeMille. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  A Time Warner Company

  The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2256-5

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1985 by Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: April 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Contents

  Author’s Foreword

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  PART TWO

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  PART THREE

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  I would like to thank Tony Gleason for his insights into military law, Reid Boates for his editorial suggestions and Nick Ellison for his consistent support. And many thanks to Kathleen Haley for her dedicated assistance. Thanks also to Sergeant First Class Susan Rueger at Fort Hamilton and Dr. Russell Gilmore, Director of the Harbor Defense Museum. Further thanks to Daniel Barbiero, still a Marine. And to my men of Delta Company, First Battalion of the Eighth Cavalry, warmest regards.

  To Ginny, with love.

  Author’s Foreword

  Many people have asked me if Word of Honor is autobiographical. Considering that the protagonist, Ben Tyson, is accused of instigating a massacre of civilians while serving in Vietnam, the correct answer is “No.”

  There are, however, some similarities between Ben Tyson and the author, mostly in regard to the short military careers of the fictional Tyson and me. Tyson and I were both infantry lieutenants with the famed First Air Cavalry Division, our tours of duty in Vietnam both encompassed the Tet Offensive in that memorable year of 1968, and we both shared many of the same experiences, thoughts, and beliefs. But unlike Lt. Tyson, I was not wounded in action, and my men did not participate in any atrocities.

  On the home front, Tyson and I both live in a pleasant suburban village on Long Island, but beyond that, our domestic and professional lives have no similarities.

  Ben Tyson is, in a way, the universal American citizen-soldier; he reached military age at a time when his country was at war, at a time when young men were still drafted into the Armed Forces, and he found himself taken from his comfortable American life and thrust into an unspeakable horror for which he was totally unprepared. This is, then, a story that millions of men and women can relate to.

  Word of Honor was first published in 1985 by Warner
Books, and though the Vietnam War had ended some ten years before, the aftermath of that war and those times was still coloring how we thought and how we acted as a nation. Vietnam was a war that grew larger in the national psyche even as it receded further into time.

  Word of Honor was published to wide critical acclaim; was a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club; was sold to Hollywood, where it passed through a series of producers and screenwriters who couldn’t seem to get it right; was translated into two dozen foreign languages in Europe and Asia; was put into audiobook form; and has been in continuous print since its debut. This last fact is what most pleases an author: the knowledge that new generations are reading and hopefully appreciating and learning something from his novel. Interestingly, Word of Honor, though fiction, is assigned reading in some college courses about the Vietnam War. I recall that in a college class I took in the 1960s dealing with the Second World War, I was required to read two novels: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions. I still have more vivid memories of these two fictional accounts of the Second World War than I have of the textbook readings or the military memoirs that I struggled through. The same, I think, can be said for other classic war novels, such as The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, or War and Peace. This might suggest that fiction can sometimes be more educational than fact. Certainly this is true of all good war novels because war novels by their nature are parables, and parables are instructive and, hopefully, memorable.

  In any case, Word of Honor is not precisely a war novel, but it is a novel about war’s aftermath. It is a story of love, survival, loyalty, betrayal, and, ultimately, redemption. It is not literal truth in the sense that these things happened to specific people in just the way I described, but it is still the truth in the sense that the characters in the novel represent a generation of men and women who all had experiences such as those described in the book. The Vietnam War that I describe is real, and my description of the major events at the Battle of Hue is real. What I hope is most real are my characters, who act and react from the highest and most noble principles on some occasions and at other points display all their human weaknesses, fears, and prejudices.

  The Vietnam War still has the ability to divide us as a people, and I was aware of that when I set out to write this novel. I purposely took no sides, made no judgments about the war (I hope), and tried to put the politics into perspective. I had the advantage of hindsight in this regard, the luxury of a cooling-off period, so to speak.

  Partly for this reason, the book was well received by reviewers and readers across the political spectrum. Friends and acquaintances from both the political left and right thought it validated their opinions and beliefs. Finally, readers’ letters confirmed that I had struck the right balance. An author would like people to read his novel and think about the issues raised; books that are thrown down in disgust are obviously not read and do not instruct, illuminate, or invite debate.

  An honest and fair appraisal of Vietnam was almost impossible in 1968 and in 1985 when my novel was published, and it may well be almost impossible today. With that in mind I concentrated on the human tragedy of that war and focused on the moral and legal questions of a specific act—a massacre—and in doing so left open the larger questions of Vietnam. One could say this same story could have been written about nearly any war in which this country was involved or will be involved.

  But to be completely honest, as a soldier who saw combat in that specific war, I was well aware then, and am more aware now, that all wars are not created equal. As Thomas Mann wrote in The Magic Mountain: “A man lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.” For me to be totally uninvolved or majestically above prejudice or judgment is not only unrealistic but would also be somewhat dishonest. So to avoid dishonesty, whenever I consciously let my own judgments or prejudices creep into the narrative or dialogue, I was careful to create dialogue or narrative that gave the other side of the same issues. Since this is a book without villains, the good guys and the good women often surprise themselves by seeing and speaking both sides of the debate. In fact, this is not so surprising or difficult for anyone who has ever taken a formal debating course and been asked to defend the indefensible.

  I’m often asked if writing this book was a catharsis for me. It certainly was not while I was writing it. In fact, not unsurprisingly, it brought back too many bad memories. I had left Vietnam in November of 1968—although the war was brought back to me every day on television until the North Vietnamese entered Saigon in April 1975. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that I began to put the experience behind me. By that time I was married, had two children, and had achieved some success as a writer. I had thought about writing the Great Vietnam War Novel, but I knew that most publishers weren’t interested in Vietnam novels in those days. Even though the natural impulse of a man who has been to war is to talk about it, at least among friends and ex-vets, or to write about it, privately or publicly, this was one war that no one wanted to hear about.

  Ironically, it was Hollywood that opened up the issue with some striking and successful war movies, such as Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket. The publishing industry, while not exactly soliciting manuscripts on Vietnam, was at least willing to talk about war novels after these movies.

  But had I written a Vietnam novel in the 1970s—and a few were written by others and published—it would have suffered a fate worse than the characters in the novel. Not only was the country not ready for an important and balanced look at this national tragedy, but neither was I. My notes taken during the war and afterward seemed to point toward two kinds of stories: One was a traditional blood-and-guts, action-oriented novel; the other was a too political, bitter, and alienated book. Quite possibly I would have experienced some catharsis and some spleen-venting by writing either of those books, but the public does not pay to read an author’s attempts at self-psychotherapy.

  By 1985 the country and the author had calmed down a bit. My ex-hippie, war-protesting friends were making money in the Reagan boom; my conservative, pro-war friends were doing a little coke and saying things like “No son of mine will ever go to war.”

  The men and women of my generation didn’t completely give up their beliefs, but they certainly modified them to match new realities. More important, as we aged physically and grew, I hope, intellectually, we realized that the younger generation was somewhat clueless concerning who we were, what we had believed in, what we had fought for or against, and what had happened to us as a generation and as a nation.

  By 1984 I knew without a doubt that the time had come for me to write about Vietnam. The decade of relative silence was coming to an end; the anger, the shame, the divisiveness and the hatreds were fading. This was good and this was bad. To sublimate a national trauma is one thing—to have national amnesia is another.

  In any case, I, like many other authors—veterans and nonveterans alike—was ready to deal with the issues in fictional form. In other words, the long-delayed war novels were starting to be written.

  But as I sat down to write, I realized to my complete surprise that I didn’t want to write a war novel. It simply wasn’t working. It took me a few months to comprehend that what I wanted to write was a novel of the war, not about the war; a novel that sprang out of the postwar American experience, a story that everyone—soldiers, civilians, and the generations then unborn—could understand and relate to.

  And so I created Ben Tyson, combat veteran, suburbanite, husband, son, father, employee, neighbor, friend, and citizen. His war, like my war, was nearly two decades behind him. When we meet him, he has gotten on with his life and is relatively happy and prosperous. His wife, Marcy, is a former college radical and war protester, and their marriage typifies the uneasy truce between the two halves of a once polarized nation. His teenage son, David, is blissfully ignorant of the fier
y cauldron that formed his parents’ lives. The lives of Ben, Marcy, and David, as well as of their contemporaries, are a picture of the calm after the storm.

  But there are skeletons in Ben Tyson’s closet. The closet is figurative, but the skeletons are real; they lay in the ruins of a hospital in Vietnam—over one hundred men, women, children, and babies, massacred by troops under the command of Lt. Benjamin Tyson. But there are only a handful of people still alive who know of this.

  And this is part of the universal appeal of Word of Honor—the skeletons in the closet that we can all relate to: the things we’ve done that we got away with at the time but that haunt us and threaten to reveal themselves at the worst possible moment.

  Which is exactly what happens in this story. An author named Andrew Picard publishes a book called Hue: Death of a City, about the Battle of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive. In that book is a description of Lt. Benjamin Tyson whose platoon massacred the above-mentioned hospital full of men, women, children, and babies—nuns, wounded enemy soldiers, civilians, and foreign medical personnel.

  What Tyson thought was the calm after the storm turns out to be the eye of a hurricane.

  But what exactly did happen at that hospital? We think we know from the testimony of witnesses and from Andrew Picard’s book. However, what looks like an open-and-shut case starts looking different as other witnesses give conflicting accounts. In other words, like the Japanese play Roshomon, the same crime is described from different points of view, and we begin to wonder if any crime at all was committed. Are witnesses lying, or are they blocking out the trauma, or does position determine perspective? Or all three?

  As the story progresses, Tyson’s ghosts come back to haunt him, but we know that this is just what he needs. We understand that catharsis sits at the end of a bumpy road. But for some people, catharsis is not enough, or not the goal after all. Ben Tyson needs redemption in both the secular and spiritual sense of the word. And redemption is harder to come by than catharsis or forgiveness or a not-guilty verdict.

  So, was the writing of this book a catharsis for me? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that it was good to get a lot of this pent-up war stuff off my chest; and no in the sense that by concentrating on the writing of this story for a full year, a lot of the forgotten memories came back. I didn’t experience anything that could be described as Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, but certainly there were many days when I was out of sorts after a particularly intense writing episode. Also, I had the occasional war dream, which I hadn’t had in years prior to beginning this book.