ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512150032
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.
SOURCE: RICHARD BENKE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Vietnam is a long trek from Navajo Country, but novelist Tony Hillerman says the courage of his latest hero transcends geography.
Hillerman, who usually writes about Navajos, has based the characters for his latest book, the best-selling ``Finding Moon,'' on people he knew during World War II.
Moon Mathias, a self-effacing Colorado newspaperman and master mechanic, is thrust into the April 1975 evacuation of South Vietnam to find his brother's Amerasian daughter. He finds a good deal more.
Hillerman began developing the book more than 10 years ago.
``I originally thought I would do the story based on the Belgians pulling out of the Belgian Congo. I tried to write it a couple of times, and I wasn't good enough,'' he said over coffee in his kitchen - cottonwood leaves shimmering yellow in the Rio Grande Bosque outside his window.
``So then I thought, `Well, try again, but I'm going to forget about the Belgian Congo.'
``People will still remember all those awful images - getting out of Vietnam,'' he says. ``Ten years had passed. So I went to the Philippines [in 1985]. I was told I couldn't get a visa in those days for Vietnam or Cambodia. They were still pretty touchy.''
His health was touchy, too - not Vietnam-able - with prostate cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and a heart attack in recent years, he says.
``But I'm in great health now'' - robust and energetic at 70.
In Manila, a cab driver showed him where things likely had been in 1975.
``Then I went up north and found a cock fight outside a little village, just about the way it's described in the book.''
Then he flew south to an island prison where inmates were allowed to house their families. One of his characters was imprisoned there.
``It sure teaches you something about prisons,'' says Hillerman, who as a newsman had covered prison troubles in New Mexico and Oklahoma.
``The warden said their daily cost per convict was 65 cents, and it's much more humane. They bring their wives in. They build their own houses. The school bus comes in and picks up their kids and takes them into the school. `Colonists' they called them.
``They were teaching crafts, making ebony canes and stuff like that - woodwork,'' he said . ``They had these old machine tools, and all these convicts raised their own pigs. There were pigs everywhere. I mean there were pigs under the lathe, sleeping.''
``Finding Moon'' is dedicated to C Company, 410th Infantry, Hillerman's old World War II outfit, which he recalls was full of soldiers who had scored exceptionally well on intelligence tests and been placed in special training units. But with heavy losses in North Africa, the intelligentsia was moved to the front and given dogface assignments just like everybody else, he says.
``For example, I was a mortar gunner, and a guy carrying ammunition for me was a guy that had made the highest score ever posted on entrance exams for Yale out of Kansas, and here he is, hauling 60-mm ammunition in a sack like a mule.''
It didn't matter if soldiers were big, little, dumb or smart when it came to sorting out heroes from their more timid comrades, he says.
``You go over there and get in combat, and you see how people change.''
One kid from California looked like the weak end of a Charles Atlas body-building ad - the one with sand on his face - but turned out to be the ``to-hell-with-it hero kind of guy,'' Hillerman says. ``He was the guy that went in the house with the tommy gun to make sure all the Germans were gone.
``I always thought after the war, I'm going to find a situation where I can write a novel showing the way a guy's personality changes under stress or tension.''
But he says he didn't want it to be set during World War II because he wanted the hero to be a civilian, not a soldier.
A parallel plot in ``Finding Moon'' involves an aging Chinese man seeking the bones of his ancestors - a cargo consigned to Mathias' brother's airline.
When the brother dies, the ``kam taap,'' as the reliquary is called, vanishes. Lum Lee is as intent on finding it as Mathias is on finding his niece.
Although Hillerman has never been to Vietnam or even reported about the war, he says that didn't impede the story.
For his Navajo novels he always checks facts with Navajo friends. For ``Finding Moon'' he checked with his Vietnam veteran buddies.
Does Hillerman have any desire to see Vietnam?
``Not really. I would like to take the train ride from Bangkok down to Singapore,'' he says, adding that he'd like to see Angkor Wat, the Cambodian shrine.
``Maybe I'd like to see some of those battlefields, but they'd all be grown up with jungle.''
He researched the region and period. He especially credits a National Geographic study of the Mekong River.
``But, no, I don't much think I'd like to go to Vietnam. It would make you feel sad, I think.''
Anyway, he adds: ``You almost feel you've been to Vietnam, you saw so much of it on television.''
He has put Vietnam behind him. He has no plans to resurrect these characters but is writing another mystery involving his familiar Navajo detectives - Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. It's set on Shiprock mountain, the Four Corners landmark and involves a 10-year-old skeleton.
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Tony Hillerman, who usually writes about Navajos,by CNBhas based the characters for his latest book, the best-selling
"Finding Moon," on people he knew during World War II.