Jim Garrison
Much of the material for QL 4 comes from Jim Garrison’s experiences with the U.S. Army Military Police in the Mekong Delta in 1969-70. He went from a sheltered, small-town life to Vietnam as an Army MP drafted out of law school in far less time than it took him to write QL 4. The endemic violence, corruption, and poverty, as well as the daily challenges of being an MP in a war zone, left a lasting impression that reached well beyond his years of practicing law.
Garrison returned to Duke Law School following Vietnam and wrote reams of legal briefs, memos, and other legal folderol. He began writing QL 4, after being questioned by his son, “What did you do in the war, Dad?”
The novel is shaped by Garrison’s belief that life is determined by choices made, even when those choices must be made in the middle of the Vietnam War in the Mekong Delta.
Garrison’s law career came to a close when he was paid to go away in a corporate merger. He traded in his law briefs to become a full time father and to pursue his first loves, reading good literature and writing.
QL4
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2012/05/15/photographer-collection-horst-faas-vietnam/5689/
PFC Bell, ex-grad student and newly-minted U.S. Army MP, knows there’s more than a war going on along QL 4, the main road from Saigon into the Mekong Delta. It’s old-fashioned crime and vice, and he doesn’t want to get involved. But life for an American MP in 1970 Vietnam doesn’t work that way. QL 4 leads deep into a quagmire of deception, corruption and death not only in the towns and military posts along the route but also in the old French villa where Bell and his fellow MPs live.
Bell’s head tells him to mind his own business, serve his time and get out. But his heart, conflicted by a strong sense of morality in the midst of an unpopular war and the allure of an exotic place and its people, especially pretty young women, compels him to confront a black market operation run by his own superiors in the MP villa.
Brutally honest, unflinchingly poetic, QL 4 is the final test for a disillusioned American GI as he searches for an honorable way out of his predicament.