Shamanic Healing in Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story

Dealing with the traumatic experience of post-Vietnam War America, Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story presents the homecoming of Paco Sullivan, the lone survivor of a cataclysmic firefight in Vietnam, and, interestingly, foregrounds Paco's dead comrades as narrators. Describing how persistently the ghosts haunt a living Paco and interrupt his present life in the U.S., Heinemann challenges people's effort to put the war behind in the past and allows them to confront what they want to forget. Particularly, for his truth-telling, Heinemann represents Paco as a mediate storyteller to connect the dead veterans and the living. As a kind of shaman to convey the voice of spirits to community, Paco unfolds a true war story often restrained and distorted by the government and the media during and even after the war. In this process, writing itself becomes a means of healing. Narrating the painful story of the tragic war, the writer cures the anguish of both the dead and the living and finally reconciles them.