The Fire Does Not Know
The Personal Diary of Danny Kovalchik
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Audible Standard 30-day free trial
The Fire Does Not Know
Buy for $9.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Virtual Voice
This title uses virtual voice narration
July 4, 1967. A chaplain gave him a notebook. He did not ask for it. He was a mechanic from Michigan and he had nothing to write. The chaplain said write to yourself. So he wrote to himself.
He wrote in the monsoon and he wrote in the dry season and he wrote on the wire at night when the treeline was dark and the dark was the thing you watched. He wrote after the first man he knew was killed and he wrote after the village burned and he wrote after Hue when there was nothing left to write and he wrote anyway.
The notebook held the things his hands could not.
Danny Kovalchik is nineteen. He is a Polish kid from Hamtramck who can diagnose a diesel by sound and strip a carburetor blindfolded. He is not a writer. He joined the Marines because his uncle was a Marine at Chosin and his uncle told him he was an idiot and he went anyway.
The men around him are the men. Pop reads the jungle the way a master mechanic reads an engine. Pham is a former Viet Cong scout who burned his own war diary and now walks point for the side that is trying to kill the side he left. Lindstrom carries the M60 the way a farmer carries a shovel. Doc keeps them alive with hands that move the way hands move when the hands know what they are doing and the knowing is the only thing between a man and the dying.
From the Arizona Territory to the Battle of Hue to the assassination of Martin Luther King heard on a radio in a hooch ten thousand miles from Memphis, Danny records what happens. He records it clean and honest and without decoration because he is a mechanic and a mechanic does not decorate. A mechanic says what the thing is and what the thing does and whether the thing is broken.
By the end the thing that is broken is the man holding the pen. And the pen is the only tool that works on the break.
Diary of a Grunt is a novel told in diary entries from July 4, 1967 to July 4, 1968. It is about a war. It is about the men in the war. It is about the notebook that one of the men kept because a chaplain told him to and because a sergeant told him to keep going and because a burned man told him not to burn it. It is about what the notebook holds and what the man cannot.
The notebook is open.