Review by Victor R. Volkman
Larry Buege’s autobiographical Growing Up in Sparta And Other Adventures is a story in three acts. In the first act, he describes the realities of growing up in the 1950s in a small rural Midwestern town of Sparta, Michigan (population 4,000). As the author points out, this wasn’t a unique experience but rather kind of a template for anyone living in an agricultural area of Michigan. Accordingly, Buege tries to express the universality of growing up as a “free range child”. I having grown up a decade later, can attest to this craziness as a member of the last generation of free range children. A time when social services would not be knocking on your door for letting your child go to the park unsupervised, or ride a bike many miles from home, or just roam the streets until the streetlights came on. Even so, some of Larry’s experiences definitely pre-date my own such as living with a coal furnace (ours had been converted to natural gas) and starting cars with a choke control. Yes, I have no doubt that younger readers will find it an altogether eye-opening experience to read about these primitive times. And that’s the point of the first act, to expose Buege’s yet unborn great-great grandchildren to a world that he lived in.
The book opens with a provocative statement questioning the point of the exercise —“The author has accomplished nothing worthy of ink in a history book.” But then he counters with: “To fully understand our history we must understand the lifestyles, activities, and hardships facing the common citizen. Ordinary people are essential to our understanding of our history.” In the second act, I think Larry more than fulfills this mission. Here we follow the author’s journey from a bored, lackadaisical college student to the draftee experience in the Vietnam War. By dint of a few months experience as an ambulance EMT, Larry ends up as a medic through a convoluted set of circumstances. His entire first year is spent stateside, first in training and then in practice. Worried that his skills would never match the task, he volunteers to be trained and work in the base’s Emergency Room. An unprecedented request and one that would prove invaluable.
Eventually Larry’s deployment unavoidable arrives, as he writes:
Twelve months was the typical Vietnam tour. I have been on tours of the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania and the Gerber factory in Fremont, Michigan. This was not that kind of tour. My first month in Vietnam was petrifying. I assumed bullets would be flying through the air like a summer hailstorm. Most of this misconception was caused by watching too many newscasts prior to my arrival. Yes, people were getting killed, but most Americans returned home without purple hearts. I did not live in constant fear once I established my routine.
He has a poet’s ear for language, even as he speaks in the clipped style of an Elmore Leonard protagonist. Larry’s gift for understatement keeps the narrative grounded. Having edited a Vietnam anthology and helped other vets with their memoirs, his story rings true. The long weeks of boredom and makework military duties punctuated by moments of sheer horror and dread are par for the course. At the end of it all, his summation can hardly encompass any of it:
I knew I would never be the same after eleven months in Vietnam. I slept leaning against a burned-out school after the Tet offensive. I sat on a decapitated corpse while I tried to save the life of a teen-age combatant. I [accidently] consumed brain tissue from a dying patient. I felt the loneliness of a silent sky filled with endless stars. I experienced the wrath of the Magic Dragon as it shattered that silence with thousands of tracer fire. I then relied on the accuracy of unknown artillerymen as their shells exploded around me. How could I be the same man I was eleven months earlier?
And yet, there is of course a third act which carries us from age 20 onwards. Larry’s career takes twists and turns as he first certifies to become a high school science teacher and as newlyweds they have to live in camping tents for a while. Eventually, he’s able to parlay his medic training into joining the first class of Physicians Assistants to graduate from Western Michigan University. However, there’s a slight wrinkle as nobody knows what to do with a PA yet, and so he lands a job a Marquette’s notorious state prison. There’s much more to Larry’s story than I can possible tell you here, but I think contrary to his closing chapter, there’s a bit more to come. If Buege’s story inspires even one other person to put down their life in words, I think it has achieved its goal. We are all richer for knowing Larry’s story and his contribution to the tapestry of U.P. life will not be forgotten thanks to his literary legacy of fiction and now autobiography.
