"I'm sorry the necklace broke and I'm afraid a couple of the beads are broken. I think I stepped on them."
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The Broken Beads by Harry Kline Trafford Publishing
book review by Wendy Strain
Kline eases his readers into a story about the Vietnam War told from a different perspective than the one normally encountered. Rather than being a strictly historical account of events or a glossed over account of personal American experience, this book tells the story of the war by the people who survived it and wanted nothing more than to simply recover their lives as they were before the war began.
Written in a relatively sparse style, the book delivers the beauty of the simple lifestyle enjoyed by the Vietnamese people prior to their being labeled as Vietnamese. Beginning in a time before Western history chooses to discuss, the story skips through the founding of a specific family line that brought two very different peoples to a shared region, weaving a spell on the reader that compels them to complete the book. As these people struggle against one and then another occupying force, Kline shows their resilience, their independent spirit, and the love of their community as they work for and support each other.
Bringing the story up into more modern times, he allows his reader to settle on a single group as a means of demonstrating both the peace and resistance of the people under "normal" occupation and how that differed from the destructive elements of the American occupation in the 1960s and 70s. Not only was this force permanently destructive to the Vietnamese regions, but also to the individuals within the nation, and to those who fought, survived, and returned to American soil.