The Mercy Killers
Reardon was there to do research for a thriller set during the Vietnam war, and she’d already spent three months reading up on the history and talking to veterans, many still living with the pain of their experience. But she felt that to understand where they’d fought she had to go there. She spent five days taking in impressions of the landscape and the people.
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When Reardon got back to the U.S. she felt the country had changed. “The atmosphere upon our return was frightening,” she says. “Oppressive national guardsmen in the airports, American flags everywhere, and all this talk of war. I couldn’t believe that we could be heading into another Vietnam situation. And sure enough, we were. The rest of The Mercy Killers was written with the underlying feeling that we were making the same mistakes again.”
Having spent months researching The Mercy Killers, Reardon knew she had to get the Vietnam details right. “I became extremely nervous about technical errors,” she says. “I felt responsible to every man and woman who’d been there. The tricky part was to finally let the research go and trust my imagination. My research was the act of taking the characters by the arm and showing them Vietnam. But after that they had to tell me their experiences.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/A. Jackson.
