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August 05, 2005
Award-winning writer ponders past/present
By JIM GRANSBERY
Billings Gazette
When the remains of slain soldiers are returned to their families, they are tagged viewable or nonviewable depending on the violence of their death and the limits of mortuary art.
The author of a new book, centered on the death of a cousin in Vietnam, uses the title "Remains: Non-viewable" as the metaphor for his own life and times and for the current milieu in the United States.
John Sacret Young, co-creator of "China Beach," a dramatic series set in Vietnam, and producer of "The West Wing," which earned an Emmy nomination last week for best TV dramatic series, said the "lying of the '60s is well on its way of replicating itself" in regard to Iraq.
Young, who has a home near Roscoe, will be the one to collect the Emmy if "The West Wing" wins this year. He received a Golden Globe and a People's Choice Award for "China Beach."
At 59, he is among the eldest of the baby boomers. In contrasting his own life and work to that of his father, uncle and his close first cousin, Doug, who died in Vietnam in December 1969, Young's memoir takes a harsh look at his life, viewing the remains that were submerged over the past 35 years.
The dead don't care how they look.
"We think they do somehow; and many funeral directors facilitate our wishes. With their blessing, we seek to make the dead look alive," Young writes. "Aren't our memories the same?"
Memories become stories and through them "They become history; they become prayer; they become our afterlife. We tell them so that we can live. They are what we have to refute death," he writes.
Young puts a sharp lens to his past: His relationship to his alcoholic father, his failed relationships with women, including an affair with "China Beach" star Dana Delaney, and the long unknown facts of his cousin's death. Doug's death was by "friendly fire," a term of Orwellian paradox that finds a home in the current U.S. war.
Memory, Young said, is a mixture of facts and truth. "There is a subtle difference there."
"China Beach" was not one story, but of many of the men and women who served. "Many of those stories were locked up inside themselves," Young said.
"Now we have the 'never served' sending men and women into the conflict in Iraq," he said. The atmosphere today is "If you served in Vietnam, somehow you are suspect," he said referring to the political attacks against Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., during the 2004 presidential campaign. "It seems that even (Sen. John) McCain is marked by that service."
"This is a more hidden war," Young said, and the percentage of men and women serving is low because of the all-volunteer army.
"It exists without us knowing anything," he said. "There is no societal impact because it is not our neighbor, brother sister or cousins" as it was in previous conflicts.
Young said the United States has "entered a place we do not know or understand; without doing our homework about its geography, culture or topography."
"There were no weapons of mass destruction and no (Iraqi) terrorists linked to 9/11," he said. "Iraq is a wound that will play across the next decade."
He emphasized "The West Wing" series "is a parallel universe that does not intersect with reality. It is how we wished government worked, an attempt to deal with our higher selves."
The next season will feature a "presidential campaign we wish we could get," he said. "Based on issues and character. People you can admire who are not craven and melodramatic."
Posted by Jo at August 5, 2005 07:53 PM