Would you consider Bone Pagoda a “ghost book” of Gallowglass?

Your phrase is evocative — but I think, rather, the two books are close companions, almost one book in two parts.

Both Bone Pagoda and Gallowglass contain overlapping themes of war with cross references from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Why (and how) is this overlap in the two books important and meaningful to you? How do you relate this overlapping to your personal memory of similar events?

This is hard to answer without a sense of diminishment — by which I mean the two books, especially Gallowglass, would be my reply — but I’ll do my best.

I had just begun Bone Pagoda when the 9-11 attacks took place, so, though its subject is Vietnam, it was, from the start, overshadowed by the current wars. There’s a long history of writing about current events in the guise of historical subject matter, from “Flowers of the Forest” — an 18th century Scottish Jacobite lament, ostensibly about a 16th century war — to Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant — a film dissecting the ethics of guerilla tactics employed by the British during the Boer War, released in the aftermath of American (and Australian) involvement in Vietnam. I wasn’t exactly doing that — my book really is about Vietnam and I had been preparing to write it for some time before September 2001 — but I could hardly avoid the parallel. Later, there was a period when I was finishing Bone Pagoda but had also begun Gallowglass, so of course there were questions of boundary and inclusion. I think the difference between the two books is one of foreground versus background: Bone Pagoda is a book about Vietnam, written in the presence of our current wars. Gallowglass is not quite the opposite, because its other unifying subject is my husband’s death, but it is a book about the present, into which the past is inextricably woven.

Politically, and even militarily, the parallels between the Vietnam years and now are too obvious to enumerate. America’s hubris is tragic in the classical sense — a blinding flaw in an otherwise useful and admirable character…

Politically, and even militarily, the parallels between the Vietnam years and now are too obvious to enumerate. America’s hubris is tragic in the classical sense — a blinding flaw in an otherwise useful and admirable character, which demands catastrophe and suffering as its wages. Too bad we always excise the last act, in which the protagonist learns from his mistakes. For myself, Vietnam was the war that shaped me, and then haunted the quarter century I spent with my husband, a combat veteran. Because I had been an anti-war activist, and he a reluctant but deeply embedded participant, there was never a single version of the war in our household. However, through abiding anger at the war’s proprietors, sorrow for its victims, and gradual self-forgiveness, we did, over time, evolve a shared and reasonably stable analysis of its political and ethical meanings.