These Heroic, Happy Dead: Stories

Luke Mogelson went to Afghanistan on your behalf. In return, he has written you some stories. They are a scattered miscellany of tales, from here and there, now, and then. Flashbacks and afterwords.

More importantly for our selfish purposes, he can write.

"Without waiting to be invited, the woman squeezed into the both across from Jeanne, scooting toward the window with labored, seal-like thrusts of the torso."

"In the den, Leo DeMint sat on the sofa and a big girl Mayeaux didn't recognize sat beside him, one fish-netted hock draped on his knee, little flesh diamonds pushing through the webbing like a string-tied ham."

"Diaz, in his uniform, with his limp, almost always met a woman. The limp was gold. As the woman watched Diaz hobble back show more to us with drinks, sloshing gin and tonic on the floor, I'd say, "Fucking Iraq." She'd seldom ask me to elaborate. If she did, I wouldn't tell her how, as a squad leader, Diaz contracted a bacterial infection while masturbating in a Port-a-John; how the infection spread up his urethra, into his testicles; how that made him lurch, causing a herniated disk, which resulted in sciatica. Instead, I'd say, 'We lost a lot of good men over there.' Which happened to be true." show less

If you tend to glance over the epigraph because it often seems irrelevant or an opportunity for the author to show how educated they are, don’t do it here. The epigraph is a portion of an ee cummings poem from which the title is borrowed. Before even reading the stories, the excerpt immediately reminded me of The Jungle: “In these chutes the stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them, pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious – a very river of death.”

In reading many of these stories about the lives of servicemen and their families, the reader can easily see the characters as “these heroic, happy dead.” Except, the death that we see is not necessarily physical – we see death in the sense of an show more end or the breakdown of something: relationships, opportunities, etc. From the opening story, the veteran narrator – only mentioned once as McPherson – has problems with alcoholism, accepting the end of a relationship, and a prior record. He meets a disabled veteran while in lockup (for a DUI) and the two share a kind of childlike joy in riding around on a homemade sled in the woods. But, the story ends with a gunshot, which may be suicide or an attempt to collect game. The kind of uncertainty and despair that surrounds this ending continues in other stories. There is a borderline delinquent father who struggles to deal with his paternal responsibilities and the average workaday American life; his solution is joining the military after 9/11. There is a kleptomaniac paramedic in NYC whose wife has left him and he is living in a supply closet. There’s an army vet working as a hired hand responsible for preventing poaching, yet once grew marijuana with one of the poachers. Non-military persons are also here: a contractor, a journalist, an Afghani-American translator, a mother.

Returning to the epigraph, most of the characters who appear to be marching off to war oblivious to (or unconcerned by) their death – of whatever kind – are side characters. In “New Guidance” one paragraph explains how a Southern man joined for the dental plan. A former teacher turned enlisted man is understood to have joined because of his lost marriage in “Kids”. These are the kinds of characters who exhibit both the hopelessness and uncertainty that Mogelson is trying to frame in each of these stories.

Interconnected stories make for good collections; stories revolving around a common setting are the best sort of collection. These Heroic, Happy Dead fits the first category (several characters show up in different ways), but only minimally achieves the second. These stories take place in a variety of locales: NYC, San Francisco, Idaho, Vermont, and Afghanistan. Despite lacking a unified setting, several stories do an outstanding job of creating a defined atmosphere (esp. “Total Solar” and “To the Lake”).

In deciding to rate a collection like this, it’s necessary to admit that some readers may feel a sense of “war overload” – especially recent wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. Even some of these stories can feel similar to Redeployment by Phil Klay. While acknowledging this possibility, and even that Klay’s stories may be stronger, I believe that these stories are sufficiently unique to warrant attention. Overall, a solid read.

Thanks to Crown Publishing (imprint of PRH) and Librarything’s Early Reviewers program for this Advance Reader’s Copy. show less

This collection of short stories takes its title from e.e. cumming's anti-war poem "next to god of course america i." This fact is significant: a deep undercurrent of antiwar sentiment drives Mogelson's narrative voice as he surveys (with traumatized detachment) what's left of soldiers & veterans after war. The result is grim. There's no happily ever after for any of Mogelson's survivors. They are careening down icy mountainsides, sitting in jail cells with no loved ones to offer bond, beating their wives (if they still have them), living in remote towns all over the USA. When they do have jobs they are terrible (often unpaying) thankless ones: pigs to slaughter, fishing nets to retie & retie.

Mogelson impressively covers extremely show more varied landscapes (mountains, glades, bays, etc.), and he admirably presents a cast as ethnically varied as you'd find in the army itself. For instance, "New Guidance" is told from the perspective of an Arab-American translator in Afghanistan, and in "Kids" an unnaturalized Latino Corporal leads dangerous night-ops. However, despite all this variation, the characters' voices all sound remarkably uniform. That uniformity could be intentional, i.e. one more way for Mogelson to demonstrate the way the military systematically levels its soldiers. Or it could be that Mogelson, for all his adept physical descriptions, lacks the vocabulary (or will?) to describe his characters' emotional terrains in as much detailed complexity.

Taken in toto, LM's gloss on e.e. cummings "These Happy Heroic Dead" seems to be that only the dead are happy, & only the dead can be heroes. To survive--to be a survivor--is to be neither happy, nor fully alive, nor a hero. show less

I'm a fan of short stories and I find stories that revolve around the effects of war fascinating, so Mogelson's collection really struck all the right chords for me. Mogelson does an excellent job of portraying the depth and span of war through the lens of PTSD as he explores various forms of abuse that veterans and their loved ones suffer.

Each story is told from the perspective of the veteran. This point of view adds strong emotion to each story. I was consistently surprised out how painfully emotional, yet different each story was in this collection.

I can see how the stories might get overwhelming if someone was looking for a diverse selection of topics, but if you're looking for a realistic, abrasive view into the world of veterans show more this is a must read. show less

This is Luke Mogelson's first book, but it's one of those rare "holy-crap-who-is-this-guy-and-how'd-he-learn-to-write-like-this?" kinda books. An Army veteran and a journalist by trade, Mogelson's stories have been appearing piecemeal in various magazines. In this collection, THESE HEROIC, HAPPY DEAD, they are artfully arranged and blended carefully together, connected, often by only gossamer-thin threads. But the overall theme is unmistakable: war and it's devastating consequences.

The first story, "To the Lake," gives us McPherson, a scarred and damaged veteran whose post-war life is in a shambles - alcoholic and angry, driving drunk in a Vermont blizzard, in a county jail he meets a fellow vet, legless and violent, who bails him out. show more With narratives that jump back and forth in time, both these characters reappear later, McPherson in "Kids" and "The Port Is Near" (which also features an embittered Korean War vet); and Boyle in "New Guidance." The latter story also only peripherally mentions another soldier, "a recovering crank addict from Georgia, Alabama, somewhere, and he suffered from such horrific meth mouth ... This soldier - I forget his name - was famous in the unit. He'd enlisted for the dental plan, so that he could get a set of teeth."

That soldier takes center stage and gets a name, Tom Mayeaux, in "A Human Cry," another story of violence pursuing its perpetrators home from the war. And if "A Beautiful Country" leaves you wondering what exactly happened to Healy, the unarmed mercenary being pursued through the desert by Taliban, keep reading. "Total Solar" doesn't name him, but you'll recognize him. And then there's Feldman, a clumsy ex-high-school math teacher, an outsider, older than the norm, who'd enlisted to escape teaching and a failed marriage. In "Visitors" you will meet Jeanne Dupree, a single mother, who drives eight hours every Wednesday to Idaho's Kuna prison, where she visits her veteran son, Rob, who had killed a boyhood friend in a bar fight.

But enough. These stories - ALL of them - are stories that MATTER, dammit! They DESERVE to be read. They NEED to be read, particularly in days like these, when politicians (most of whom have never served in the military) so casually throw out threats of force, and brag of America's military being the strongest, best-trained, and best-equipped in the world. Which may be true, but our forces - that valiant ONE percent - have been used and used and re-used, with little thought given to the horrific long-lasting effects of these repeated redeployments. Mogelson's stories - like those in Phil Klay's REDEPLOYMENT, Siobhan Fallon's YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE, or Katey Schultz's FLASHES OF WAR - will force you to stop and think, to consider the human costs of continuous war. Luke Mogelson. Remember that name. This guy is a MAJOR new talent. I urge you to read these stories. They are so important! My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA show less

These stories--of heroes who'd prefer not to be heroes, of returned heroes who never learned how to be heroic or survive after war, and of men and women and children who don't know quite how their lives turned into what they are--are easy to slip into. Too easy, because they are also so real, and so hard, and so brilliantly depicted in this brief collection. If anything, they are too real.

Mogelson's writing is sometimes abrupt--in one story in particular, it really threw me off--but his style on the whole fits his territories of war and struggle. From piece to piece, the characters fight to remain human, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. In some cases, they watch those around them win or lose this same fight, and in some show more cases, this territory is the hardest to witness as a reader.

I think this is one of those rare short story collections which will be hard to forget, and where the stories both work separately and together to explore particular ideas without becoming repetitive or boring--which, simply, never happens in this book. And yet, it's a difficult one to recommend--it's full of what is so much easier to ignore than is to face, and full of difficulty. And, what's hardest of all, Mogelson's smart writing makes even the hardest of his characters easy to understand, easy to relate to... and that can be a bit terrifying. show less

Mogelson’s description is fantastic—the details are specific and vivid, making the characters and actions easy to imagine, and he uses just enough to keep the stories moving instead of bogging them down. I had to stop and marvel over several ingenious metaphors.

The characters are flawed in interesting and sympathetic ways, and there’s a sense of no one having a “happily-ever-after” life, which is realistic.

I’m a bit torn over how I feel about the stories themselves. Most left me with a feeling of “what was the point?” or “what happened?” I’m not sure if it’s the type of book that needs multiple readings, or possibly deep dissection and mulling, to really understand what the author is trying to say. Or maybe the show more author is saying that war and its effects on people are often random and meaningless.

My favorite chapter was “Kids,” which seemed to be bursting with significance and meaning (how small decisions can have a huge, lasting impact, how you can never know what the best thing to do is since some details will always be unknowable, and how events can affect a group and an individual from that group in different ways). The other chapters didn’t leave much of an impression on me.

Overall, I think this was an okay book read. I wasn’t compelled to stay up late reading “just one more page,” but I don’t regret having read it and wouldn’t mind giving another book by the same author a go.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. show less