Dear Mr. President
by Gabe HudsonKnopf, 164 pp., $19
Gabe Hudson’s debut collection of short stories is certainly timely: The stories are about Gulf War soldiers shipping out, presently involved in the war, or suffering its aftereffects at home — all of this just as George Bush II is itching to ignite the Gulf War II in real time. Suddenly, Desert Storm doesn’t feel like ancient history anymore, and it’s safe to say that Hudson is plowing fresh ground with these stories. Himself a former rifleman in the Marine reserves, Hudson (a UT alum) is able to take the reader into that time period and those locales — that violence and bloodshed, but also the comic surrealism of war itself — as well as inside the heads of the soldiers, with compelling immediacy.
But sometimes having fresh material is not enough. “The Cure as I Found It” is about a soldier suffering from the Gulf War Syndrome: His hair falls out and his bones seem to be crumbling. Interesting possibilities there. But the plot — his run-in with a neighborhood thug, his love for his luscious girlfriend, the inevitable violent end — feels trite and melodramatic. Other stories, including “The American Green Machine,” read more like playful-but-failed experiments, and thus lack much of a punch. Some of the stories are far more successful and reveal Hudson’s imaginative talent and promise. The narrator of “Cross-Dresser,” shaken over both his stint in a P.O.W. camp and the death of his daughter while he was away, becomes convinced that he is the one who is dead and that his daughter’s spirit entered his body through his bellybutton. Hence, the little-girl dresses he starts wearing. And the clearly brain-warped letter-writer in the title story, who has sprouted an extra ear on his stomach, begs President Bush to write a letter to his own wife so that she will come back to him. “I mean if a man doesn’t have a family, what does he have?” he writes.
The collection’s finest piece is its concluding novella, “Notes From a Bunker Along Highway 8.” Here, Hudson abandons the show-offy playfulness and disturbed narrators while spinning the funny but sad story of a deserting soldier who drags an injured comrade with him, holing up in an abandoned Iraqi bunker that’s filled with caged chimpanzees. Interspersed are letters from the boy’s father, a former Green Beret in Vietnam who turns gay to protest the idiocy of the Gulf War. The father writes, “I piss on your war, and it has no more bearing on history than an ant’s testicle. I can’t wait to see the great stories your generation writes about their war. Oh boy. That’s going to be fascinating.” In this powerful novella and in his maniacally oddball stories as a whole, Hudson has already proven the soldier’s father wrong.
This article appears in September 20 • 2002.