Through the Picture Tube [Hardcover]

AFTER THE FALL OF VIETNAM: NEW ADVENTURE NOVEL ABOUT A DRAFT DODGER'S JOURNEY THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Few of us ever get to go back to the road not taken, but middle-aged draft dodger Frank Walsh does in the new novel Through the Picture Tube, by Patrick Grady. Twenty years after the end of the Viet Nam war, the man who still lives in Canada finds himself depressed and haunted - haunted by the loss of his wife, haunted by the death of his high school friend in a faraway jungle, and haunted by his own regrets. Seeking to find out what happened to his black friend, the only American killed in a village massacre, he begins an odyssey that forces him to come to grips with the moral dilemmas of war. At the same time, he finds new love with a beautiful Vietnamese woman as he unravels the mystery of what really happened on that fateful day in a long-forgotten village called Bien Lai. Through the Picture Tube is a revealing study of the war we watched on television and an examination of how our lives are forever changed by the choices we make.

Twenty years after the Vietnam war is over, Frank Walsh, a middle-aged draft dodger from Toronto, who has just lost his wife, finds himself depressed and still haunted by the ghosts of a war he only knew from TV. He impulsively decides to go to Vietnam to try to discover
for himself what really happened to his high school buddy, the only American killed in the Bien Lai massacre. As Frank digs deeper into the past, he must come to grips with the moral dilemmas raised by the horrifying massacre of all of the inhabitants of this small village. At the same time he must come to terms with his own troubled conscience for having taken the easy way out.

In the course of Frank's odyssey he encounters a present-day Vietnam that reveals the utter futility of the war, a war that America lost in its own soul.

This novel of self-discovery is filled with adventure and romance as well as the moral dilemmas of war. It takes the reader on a fascinating tour of Vietnam as it now is, which reveals the richness of Vietnamese culture and shows it to be much more than a former war zone.

Patrick Grady grew up in Danville, a small town in central Illinois. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1968, he fled to Canada to dodge the draft. This novel, Through the Picture Tube, was inspired by an eye-opening business trip he made to Vietnam in the summer of 1995.

Mr. Grady’s experience as a draft dodger was profiled in James Dickerson’s book, North to Canada: Men and Women Against the Vietnam War (Praeger, 1999).

After arriving in Canada, Mr. Grady earned a Ph.D in economics from the University of Toronto and became an economist. Currently, he is the President of Global Economics Ltd., an Ottawa-based economic consulting firm. Before going into consulting, Dr. Grady was a senior official of the Canadian Government Department of Finance and the Bank of Canada. He has also served as a consultant to the United Nations and the World Bank in Latin America, Africa, and the Former Soviet Union. Mr. Grady is the author of many books and articles on economic issues and is frequently called on by the Canadian media to provide economic commentary.

Five miles high on Vietnam Airlines flight 722 from Hong Kong to Hanoi sat Frank Walsh, watching reruns of his life on the TV of his mind. His ruggedly handsome youthful face was set off by his prematurely gray hair, and his hazel eyes were fixed on the back of the seat ahead. The last few days were a blur in his mind, but he was finally on his way to Vietnam, a country he had only seen through the prism of television war coverage. He was going to try to find out what had really happened to his friend, Darrel Johnson. On an apocalyptic day in 1969, American troops had slaughtered all the inhabitants of an ill-fated small village called Bien Lai – mostly women, children, and old men. Darrel was not only there, but was the only American killed. This unescapable reality hung like a dark cloud over his memory.

Frank’s tall, angular body was crammed like a pretzel into the undersized economy class seats on Airbus 320. He tried unsuccessfully to stretch his lanky frame. "Why don’t they have more room in these damn planes?" he muttered under his breath.

Vietnamese flight attendants swished gracefully along the aisles in their áo dàis, dispensing their hospitality with a distinctively oriental charm. Frank was too numb to notice and the last thing he needed was more airline hospitality. He was glutted and felt like a zombie after two days of non-stop flying which had whisked him halfway around the world. The air was stale and stank of smoke. Am I suffering from lack of sleep? Or too much coffee? he asked himself. Maybe it’s the airline food and too many drinks. Ugh! Frank’s stomach turned at the thought.

Staring blankly out the window, which was shaped like a small TV set, Frank saw a huge island passing underneath just as the stewardess breezed by. "What’s that island, Miss?" he queried.

"Sir, that is Hainan," came the reply in a high pitched oriental voice. "We will be landing in Hanoi in two hours."

Frank’s heart raced. He could hardly believe that his feet would soon be on Vietnamese soil.
It was August 22, 1995, the year of the Pig in Vietnam’s lunar calendar, twenty-seven years to the day after he had left the United States to avoid the Vietnam War draft. In the dark of night on that day long ago, he had crossed over the Ambassador Bridge into Canada with all his worldly belongings crammed into a grey 1962 Volkswagen Beetle. Then, he was an idealistic young rebel, burning with a righteous indignation about the war and eager to embark on life’s great adventure. Now he was a middle-aged English professor, who had taken his share of lumps, yet who still longed for something more.

From the time Frank had read Huckleberry Finn in Rosewood Public School, he had wanted to be a writer. And not just any writer. Frank wanted to write powerfully of his generation’s hopes and fears, loves and hates. He wanted to show people the world as it was and challenge them to imagine it as it should be.

Before leaving the United States, Frank had written a short novel about life in his home town of Loganville, Illinois. He didn’t know it at the time, but he loved Loganville and needed it more than he could have ever thought possible. The small manufacturing and agricultural supply town at the crossroads of two railways was Frank’s Yoknapatawpha. Its location in a river valley at the fork of two rivers surrounded by seemingly endless miles of flat cornfields was his stage. Its elm-shaded brick streets, ante bellum mansions, vibrant redbud trees, classic courthouse square, and dominating grain elevators were his backdrops. The unique and colorful characters, both white and black, peopling Loganville were his cast. Some were heros, others were villains. Some were wise, others were fools. But most were in between. The way the town and its people came alive in the pages of his novel made you laugh and cry, but most of all it made you think.

Frank had a unique literary gift. But like a fragile poppy, it could not be transplanted. Once in Canada, and cut off from the fertile and tumultuous roots of his homeland, his muse fell deafeningly silent. Sure Frank could still write. But it was not the same. His writings became academic, detached from any identifiable place. The twilight zone without the unexpected twist.

Nothing had seemed to inspire Frank. The academic community at the University of Toronto where he taught was a far cry from Loganville. The people he encountered every day seemed like caricatures in comparison to the real people that inhabited Loganville. The environment that created Robertson Davies’s Ontario Gothic was alien and barren for Frank.

Finding himself at a dead end, Frank had desperately searched his soul for something he could still do well. One of his colleagues had cynically suggested if he couldn’t write anymore himself, he could always criticize those who could. So for lack of anything better to do, Frank had turned to literary criticism in scholarly journals. He had excelled in his new avocation, cranking out articles with a depressing regularity that impressed even his jaundiced colleagues in the English Department. But the academic acclaim his learned, footnote-riddled writings won had failed to satisfy him. In spite of professional success, he had been left empty and unfulfilled.