2 minute read
QL 4 by James Garrison
QL 4 by James Garrison
Advertisement
PFC Bell, a newly-minted U.S. Army MP, quickly discovers that 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 corruption. He doesn't want to get involved, just serve out his time and go home, but life for an American MP in Vietnam in 1970 doesn't work that way. QL 4 leads Bell deep into a swamp of deception, mayhem, and death that insinuates its way both into towns the MPs patrol each day and into the old French villa where they live.
QL 4 was a highway in South Vietnam. In 1969, anyone going south from Saigon into the Mekong Delta would follow this national route, traversing an expanse of green rice paddies, passing through busy towns and quiet villages, and crossing wide fingers of the Mekong River by ferry. Squat red-and-white concrete posts marked the highway as “QL 4.” These concrete markers—old and battered and faded—mimicked those on the country roads of France.
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. After growing up in a small town, in a blue-collar family, Garrison was drafted during his first year in law school. The violence, corruption, and poverty he saw in Vietnam, along with the daily challenges of being a military cop in a war zone, left a lasting impression that reached well beyond his years of practicing law. Over those years he wrote reams of legal briefs and other legal folderol before his son, who was working on a video project for art school, asked him, “What did you do in the war, Dad?”
Jim Garrison is a recovering lawyer who lives and writes in Houston, Texas. Born in Statesville, North Carolina, he attended the University of North Carolina, where he nurtured his interest in creative writing, and Duke University Law School. After his first year in law school, he took a long sabbatical at Uncle Sam’s expense to tour the Mekong Delta, along with a couple of side jaunts to Tokyo and Sydney, whetting his appetite to visit exotic places.
