8 June 2014 DEATH COMING UP THE HILL by Chris Crowe, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2014, 208p., ISBN: 978-0-544-30215-0

 

“But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

-- Walter Cronkite, February 27, 1968

 

“Shout it from the mountain and out to the sea

No two ways about it, people have to be free”

-- The Rascals (1968)

 

“How does a guy deal

with being torn between two

people he loves? I

 

knew I was lucky

that I hadn’t had to choose

between Mom and Dad.

 

They’re opposites thrown

together because of me,

and they had managed

 

to keep a shaky

truce for so many years. But

it was difficult.

 

My dad was a flag-

waving hawk who thought it was

every red-blooded

 

man’s duty to spill

that blood when America

called on him for it.

 

Mom’s an anti-war

dove who gave me a ‘Hell no,

I won’t go!’ tee shirt

 

for Christmas and she’d

convinced Dad and me that I

had to enroll at

 

ASU as soon

as I finished high school.  ‘The

student deferment

 

will keep you out of

the draft, she said, ‘and unless

we’re really stupid,

 

this war will be done

by the time you graduate.’

Dad didn’t mind the

 

deferment. ‘You can

join the ROTC and

graduate as an

 

officer,’ he said.

‘The Army needs smart leaders

who can help put an

 

end to the spread of

Communism over in

Vietnam.’  But when

 

I thought about the

four hundred seventy-one

guys who died last week,

 

I knew I’d go to

college to avoid the war,

not prepare for it.

 

I just hoped the war

ended before I had to

decide, because Dad

 

didn’t need any

more ammunition to use

against my mother.”

 

My generation grew up during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.  Flag-draped coffins were unloaded from cargo planes on the evening news while protesters were beaten by mobs and by cops. The times were also marked by assassinations and riots.  Popular music was being transformed and transformative.  A counterculture challenged young people to see things differently and to break from the status quo.  

 

These powerful events and movements are all part of DEATH COMING UP THE HILL.  Told in haiku-formatted stanzas and set in 1968, this is the story of 17-year-old Ashe Douglas.  Back in the summer of 1950, Ashe’s parents had had sex as college students.  At that time, women did not have safe and available options for terminating pregnancies.  His parents have been incompatibly together since then because their night of frolicking produced Ashe.  This teen is living in a family war zone and is trying to find a code that he can live by.  

 

In 1968, Ashe is just a year away from the draft.  In a year he might be ordered to kill people.  He could become another one of those flag-draped coffins. A potent mix of family events and the events of the wider world present Ashe with terrible dilemmas that nobody should ever have to deal with, much less a 17-year-old boy.  Helping Ashe come to terms with his life are a teacher and the new girl in town.

 

Each of the 976 haiku stanzas that together constitute DEATH COMING UP THE HILL contains the requisite 17 syllables.  Multiplying these two numbers together yields a total of 16,592 syllables.  It would be quite a task to count out these 16,592 syllables one by one.  But there is a specific reason for the length of the book: Author Chris Crowe wrote one syllable for each American soldier who was killed in Vietnam in 1968.  Yup, 16,592. Just in one year.

 

And if you think that is mind blowing feat and a horrific number, just imagine trying to count the three-plus-million syllables in a hypothetical set of books for which each syllable represents one of the people (both civilian and military) who died over the course of the Vietnam War.

 

“and I’ll do unto you what you do to me”

-- The Rascals

 

Richie Partington, MLIS

Richie's Pickshttp://richiespicks.pbworks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com

https://www.facebook.com/richie.partington

Moderatorhttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/

http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/people/faculty/partingtonr/partingtonr.php