By Vicki Prichard
Backroad and Bookmarks
Each era of war produces storytellers whose writing brings the battle home, presenting us with an indelible, sometimes definitive, narrative of conflict; they’ve left the fields of combat schooled in in the unique vernacular and cadence of war and its toll. Kentucky author Michael Jennings emerges all these years later, long after he served a tour of duty in Vietnam, with Ave Antonina, as one of those definitive voices of war.
Jennings is a natural storyteller; not a wasted word on the page. Dialogue rings true and poignant, characters are authentic. An award-winning journalist, his years of commitment to detail and truth serve him well in crafting a winning first novel that’s based in a war long remembered for its mountain of lies.
Whether or not a military veteran has seen combat, personal stories of service almost always speak to battles, generally the emotional sort. Peter Dandridge, a bright and thoughtful young man from North Carolina, and the protagonist of Jennings’s debut novel, is no exception; he has a few battles of his own before he ever arrives in Vietnam.
As the war continues in Vietnam, and young men are called to serve, Peter is set to graduate from college, then pursue a graduate degree in architecture. A knee injury from high school football seems a likely exemption from the draft, if Peter chooses that route, and that’s a mighty big ‘if,’ as Peter grapples with a strong sense of duty to serve. That sense of obligation becomes inconvenienced when he falls in love with medical student Stephanie Ames and the tug of his moral integrity faces off with honoring the heart. By going to war, like so many men his age, and like his father before him, Peter would abide by an unwritten duty that courses through him. If he goes to war, he risks losing the love he feels he’s at long last found in the future Dr. Ames.
“Blue-ribbon idiocy”
Integrity and love aren’t the only stakes in Peter’s internal battle – there’s also a mother to answer to. As far as far as Mrs. Dandridge is concerned, if her son goes off to war he’s assured himself a plot on “idiot’s row” in the family cemetery. One of the book’s finest scenes is the raw, authentic, heart-aching, and acerbic maternal monologue that Peter’s mother delivers at the family cemetery. A mother’s love and deep fear for her child combust on this family plot, where she points out to him the gravestones beneath a “row of shaggy-barked red cedars.”
“…Could be that whoever planted these paltry little cedars decided this row right here should be reserved for idiots,” declares Mrs. Dandridge, pointing in mock surprise to one fallen kin after the next, those who had stepped forward to serve in battle, noting that burials in that row ended in 1863, “…since nobody was likely to come along again in all the years down to Armageddon who could top those credentials for blue-ribbon idiocy.”
“But lo!” Mrs. Dandridge continues, “It took just a little over a hundred and five years for another such an idiot to sprout from the same soil as grew the last one! Circumstances much the same, and well suited to bring idiocy to full flower.”
Mrs. Dandridge is a wise, sharp-tongued foil to Peter’s gentle, soft-spoken father, a decorated WWII veteran and recipient of the Bronze Star, whose efforts to keep his son at home are no less impassioned as he points out to Peter that the war that he fought was “different.”
“…if you think getting into this war carries as much positive moral weight as getting into that one I did, then that’s a false equivalence. If that means I was luckier than you in the war I grew up into, then so be it. That’s no reason for you to go off and get yourself killed or even just waste your time in a war that never should have happened.”
Even the counsel of his high school pal Teddy McClearon, who returned from heavy combat and river patrol on the Mekong Delta, doesn’t quell Peter’s sense that he should not be given a pass. Teddy encourages Peter to “find a good dodge,” divulging that he’d “give a lot to not have to carry all that I saw and had to do around with me for the rest of my life.”
Instead, the stories and horrors Teddy carries confirm Peter’s sense of fairness about who does and doesn’t serve in the war.
“But if you do have to carry that stuff around, Teddy, why shouldn’t I?”
Ultimately, Peter’s course is set.
A final night with Stephanie Ames before he’s off to Vietnam leaves Peter to surmise, “Maybe the best thing war can bestow is a moment like this, when you and somebody you love look into each other’s eyes and understand what each of you has got to do, and then you turn your eyes aside calmly, knowing you both will carry out that trust.”
Lobbing vowels in Vietnam
And, so it is that Peter Dandridge is stationed in Vietnam as “a sort of schoolmarm in jungle fatigues,” teaching English to new Vietnamese recruits, “Instead of lobbing grenades, we lob vowel sounds” he thought. It’s here that he meets Army reservist Avram “Rabby” Rabinowitz, a young man that Peter saw as a “son of privilege,” “primed for entry to his father’s Manhattan law firm.” Rabby becomes a target for Peter’s pent up frustration.
Michael Jennings
There are layers to peel away to find the truth of Rabby just as there is with so much else in Ave Antonina.
Rabby “unscrolled his story of bravery and loyalty that overleapt centuries-old barriers of caste and hatred and fear,” and Antonina is central to his tale. As the book unfolds, Antonina holds meaning for both Rabby and Peter, and the journey to the truth of that story sets the book on a whole new and intriguing course in unfolding that mystery. It’s a deep read, but stick with it.
Jennings has penned full, believable, and fascinating characters, even when the plot delves into the seemingly unbelievable. It’s an impressive debut novel. The very essence of the story is equal to a quote found printed on the bottom of one of Rabby’s letters: “’In life, as in the Torah, it is assumed that everything has deeper and secondary meanings, which must be probed.’”
Ave Antonina succeeds on a grand scale with its compelling glimpse into war – those real and internal – from Peter’s at once naïve but keen perspective, and equally so in a thickening and engaging plot. As is so often the case, coming home from war can be the hardest part, and Jennings has more in store for young Peter by way of a Viet Cong ground attack, spies, Nazi hunters, the heroic Antonina, and a woman bent to uncover her own mystery involving the U.S. space effort.
In a lesser writer’s hands readers might not stick with layers of plot turns, but Jennings’ skilled storytelling evolves seamlessly, laying out an assured route through to a richly satisfying end.
Vicki Prichard of Ft. Mitchell writes for her blog, Backroads and Bookmarks, where this first appeared.
