Unlike so many other Vietnam veterans who deal with the war primarily through the eyes of American combatants, Robert Olen Butler, an Army translator in Saigon in 1971, has opted to create a much wider spectrum of plot considerations and characters in "The Deep Green Sea" (Henry Holt, $23) to populate his fictive world.
"A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain," for instance, was a collection of 15 stories told in the voices of Vietnamese refuges, seven of them women, who have been transplanted from the Mekong Delta region of their homeland to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, where Butler, as it happens, teaches creative writing at McNeese State University.
In the inter-connected pieces of that collection, it is the Vietnamese who are tormente
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