In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s article in the New York Times called, “My Young Mind he said he was Disturbed by a Book. “It Changed My Life.” That was what said that when he was young, probably 12 or 13, and he read Larry Heinemann’s 1977 novel, Close Quarters. He was horrified when he read that book. He was born in Vietnam but was an immigrant to the US.

He was shocked to learn what some American soldiers thought about Vietnamese people like him and the book depicted horrifying scenes of rape and murder. Hard stuff for a boy so young to read. He said he hated the book. He hated what it said of his adopted country. Should he have been protected from reading a book like that? He said no. Though he hated the book he thought it was ultimately good for him to have read the book. He had been able to read the book because he was in a library where there are no boundaries and he was allowed to go into the adult section and find and read such a book. He was disturbed by the book and even said he hated it at the time. He thought it was a terrible novel.

Nguyen read the book again when he was an adult because he was writing a book about that war too. He realized Heinemann had done exactly what a good writer should do. He made Nguyen realize how terrible war was. “He did not want to give his readers an explanation or editorial. He did not want to humanize the Vietnamese people because from the perspective of the American soldiers he was depicting, the Vietnamese were not human. That was the point. He knew they were human, but they were not depicted that way. Why was that? It made him think. Discomfort can be a good thing. It is not something to be feared, even for a young boy.

“Writers want to entertain their readers, but also confront them”, said Nguyen. That is the writer’s prerogative. That is what writers can do in a free and democratic society. That is what they should do in a free and democratic society. Writers often want to disturb readers out of their slumber. Even children should be disturbed.

 As Nguyen said in his New York Times article:

“The novel was a damning indictment of American warfare and the racist attitudes held by some nice, average Americans that led to slaughter and rape. Mr. Heinemann revealed America’s heart of darkness. He didn’t offer readers the comfort of a way out by editorializing or sentimentalizing or humanizing Vietnamese people, because in the mind of the book’s narrator and his fellow soldiers, the Vietnamese were not human.^”

I remember once when my boys were very young, and Chris’s uncle had died, we discussed whether we should bring our boys to the funeral or not. They had never been to a funeral before. They didn’t know much about death. I remember our youngest son, Stef, asked, as the coffin was lowered into the grave, “Are uncle Joe’s bones in there?” “Yup,” was our answer the bones of their great uncle were in that coffin. Should a young lad not learn that? Would it disturb them? Maybe. So be it.

Many people currently want to protect young people from disturbing truths. They want the children to think their country is always right, even when it isn’t. That happens in both Canada and the United States.

Confronting readers or disturbing them “can make them think twice,” said Nguyen. I think that is a lot better than not thinking at all. As he also said, “That is exactly the function that, books, schools, and curricula should have. It’s not always about making us feel comfortable, it’s about helping us to confront difficult realities and difficult pasts as well.”

Isn’t it better to get disturbed than to slumber?