Vietnam veteran who left his heart in the Highlands
John Mulligan staved off the horror of war until alcohol took hold, but out of that grew his novel, writes Tim Luckhurst
In his heavily autobiographical novel, Shopping Cart Soldiers, the Scots-born novelist John Mulligan recounted an incident in which his best friend has his legs blown off and half of his face destroyed by a mine in Vietnam. Finn MacDonald, the character he modelled intimately on himself, honours a death pact the two have agreed upon in the event of such an injury. He shoots his friend in the head. Then, to avoid prosecution, he has to retrieve his bullet. “Finn steps up to the gurney. He probes the bullet hole in Johnny’s forehead. He hits soft stuff at first. He feels sick. Then solid stuff. Is it the bullet? Forget it, man. It’s just bone. Skull. He’s nauseous . . . Why am I doing this, he wonders. What am I doing here inside my buddy’s brain?” Mulligan might equally well have asked what he was doing in Vietnam, where on one helicopter gunship mission, he really did see his best friend blown apart. Born in Kirkintilloch in 1950, the second of 10 children, he arrived in Indianapolis mere months before he was sent to war. But 17-year-old Mulligan felt committed to its cause. He once explained: “Just before I left Scotland, Russian tanks were rolling into Prague and the local populace was trying to fend them off with broomstick handles. So when I was told we were fighting communism in southeast Asia I was willing to fight it.”

He felt obliged to “do a wee bit more than American kids my age, simply because I was an immigrant”. Later he admitted a degree of naivety. “I found myself looking around, feeling like I was outside and looking in because I was learning how to be an American in the jungles of Vietnam.”

One lesson he learnt as he struggled to adjust to his adoptive culture was that Americans could die horrible deaths. He saw comrades shot and savagely eviscerated by Vietcong booby traps. He could have died like that. Later, homeless and traumatised on the streets of San Francisco, he witnessed the lonely, unmourned deaths of alcoholics and drug addicts. He could have died like that too. But when it came his end was cruelly prosaic. At 9.51pm on Wednesday, October 12, Mulligan’s attention wandered as he crossed a busy street near his San Francisco home. A car hit him and he died instantly. In his hand was a pizza he had just bought to share with his fiancée Kristen Jensen.

The novel, laconically named after the supermarket trolleys in which tramps keep their possessions, won America’s prestigious Pen-Oakland literary award for outstanding writing. Mulligan described his style as “Scottish magic realism with a slight leaning towards the surrealistic”. That was a generous recognition of the influence of a land that barely noticed him in life and seemed unmoved by his death. But Mulligan loved Scotland so much that he returned home on his first extended leave from the US Air force in July 1970.

It was here that he first experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress. “The muscles in my face just wouldn’t work no matter how hard I tried. I first discovered my inability to smile when I returned home to Scotland on leave.”

At first he managed to stave off the horror. After six years in the military he returned to America, married and had a daughter. Then, at the beginning of the 1980s, the full weight of his repressed memories hit him. He began to go on wild drinking sprees and to use drugs. Then he walked out on his family and spent the next 10 years on the streets of San Francisco. He wrote the first half of his novel in the stairwell of the Basque hotel in San Francisco “after about 20 drunken binges ”.

His fiancée, 48-year-old poet Jensen, is sure his talent owed much to his Scottishness. “Perhaps even now he is striding the Highlands, walking stick in hand.” Mulligan’s own attitude to identity is probably best expressed in words he attributed to MacDonald. “And America, what of America? He knows he will never be an American, that he never can be an American. Nor is he a Scotsman any more. The many thousands of miles of separation and the many rounds of spent ammunition and the blood and the guts and the heroin overdoses have seen to that, have made him a stranger, a loner.”

That confusion is reflected in his legacy. A collection of short stories Jensen is preparing for posthumous publication contains two that are set in Glasgow but his family has asked that donations should be made to America’s National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, of which he was a dedicated supporter. His daughter, Marielle, plans to come to Scotland to scatter some of his ashes but the rest will be taken to Vietnam.

Shopping Cart Soldiers by John Mulligan is published by Scribner at £7.99
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