RETURN TO ITHACA

The protagonist of Eickhoff's latest novel, an ambitious combination western and war story, is a guilt-ridden, melancholy veteran named Henry Morgan, one of the few survivors of an elite team dropped into the jungles of Vietnam to coordinate hit-and-run raids by montagnard tribesmen on Vietcong troops. Eickhoff explicitly likens Morgan to Odysseus, combining both of Homer's epics to encompass Morgan's time in Vietnam and his troublesome return to a country he no longer understands. From a Kentucky monastery, Morgan recounts his past: beginning four years after his insertion among the mountain tribesmen, he describes the death of his brother, Billy, during an attack after a villager defects to Hanoi. Morgan's CO, a scheming colonel named Black (possibly Agamemnon), manipulates Morgan into using the montagnards as expendable troops, a duty that eventually destroys Morgan's peace of mind. The narrative is punctuated at intervals by the voice of Dog (Tiresias), an old Sioux hand on the Morgan family ranch in the fictional Plains town of Ithaca who plays the role of chorus in Morgan's sad story. Eickhoff (Fallon's Wake) is straightforward about his adaptation of the Greek epic to fit his semi-autobiographical tale (he was one of three survivors of a unit of 27 integrated with the montagnard tribesmen in the Vietnam highlands). While he draws some interesting parallels between North American (including Lakota Sioux) and Southeast Asian tribal worldviews, the wartime element takes up far more room than the journey home, making for a somewhat contrived thematic relationship. Both the landscape and the emotional atmosphere of Vietnam are powerfully portrayed, however, and one must admire Eickhoff's imaginative attempt to compare the haunting fate of Vietnam veterans, returned from brutal combat to a society that largely scorned them, to a classic narrative of a dislocated life. (June)