First-time author Manny Garcia spoke to a small crowd at the UNM Bookstore Saturday about his autobiography An Accidental Soldier: Memoirs of a Mestizo in Vietnam.
The novel is based on Garica's experience of becoming an Army ranger at age 17. He began his talk by reading the opening passage in which he made his first kill - a middle-aged Vietnamese woman.
Garcia spoke of the absolute shock that came over him when he realized that he had just taken a life. He began his next passage by saying, "now I want to show you what I became."
He began to read a gruesome account of another kill, later on in his year-long tour of Vietnam. The youth and innocence of the novel's voice is haunting as Garcia describes the business card his platoon placed on every victim they killed.
After his reading, Garcia answered questions, explaining everything from his childhood to his current profession as a defense attorney. He said that writing the book was a semi-cathartic experience.
"For 30 years, I suppressed these memories. I never talked about them," he said. "Every once in a while, I would tell little stories to my friends about Vietnam and they'd tell me, 'You should really write a book about it.' So one day I decided to write."
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
The decision was a hard one, he said, because Vietnam left him scarred for life. In the book he writes about his absolute inability to cope with the war.
"I had nightmares for two years after Vietnam," he wrote. "That's twice as long as I was there for."
While doing research for the book he noticed that primarily the only people who wrote about the war were generals.
"I wanted to write about the kids who were there, what we went through," he said.
To write the book, Garcia had to come to terms with who he was and what Vietnam did to him.
"In situations like that it is either kill or be killed," he said. "I knew that if I was going to survive this, I couldn't be me. You have to react without judgment, you just have to do your job."
The audience asked several questions and discussed among themselves long after Garcia's reading.
To close the event, Garcia gave a message of peace, saying that after seeing just how terrible war is, he hopes that America will quickly be able to move past it.
