THE THINGS WE DO TO MAKE IT HOME, by Beverly Gologorsky, Random House, New York, 1999, 211 pages, $22.95

“In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense,” observed award-winning writer Tim O’Brien after his 1994 return to Vietnam. The Vietnam War and its aftermath are central to the former infantryman’s fiction that includes “Going After Cacciato,” “The Things They Carried,” and “In the Lake of the Woods.”

Some of the people who were hit with the consequences of O’Brien’s aimless war were the women who loved, and often lost, the young soldiers who fought in Vietnam. These female voices have been mostly silent in the nation’s literature over the last 30 years.

Beverly Gologorsky’s slim first novel, “The Things We Do to Make It Home,” illuminates the lives of the wives, lovers and daughters of Vietnam vets whose stories have been hidden in the shadows of their men far too long. Gologorsky will read from her novel tonight at Border’s Books, Music and Cafe in Bangor.

Gologorsky, who works for a medical and legal publishing firm in New York and summers in Sargentville, said she did not set out to pen a piece of “Vietnam fiction.” The former anti-war activist wanted to write about “the limits of love” she explained in a phone interview over the weekend. “I didn’t realize it was a war book until it was finished.”

However, it would have been difficult for Gologorsky not to write a Vietnam book. The author became involved in protest efforts against American’s involvement in Indochina while still in her teens. In 1965, she worked with Carol Brightman, a Maine resident, who founded the Viet Report magazine. Gologorsky also was a member of the activist organization Students for a Democratic Society.

“Anyone now between the ages of 42 and 60 had a strong opinion, had strong feelings about the war,” explained Gologorsky. “My whole youth, 15 years, was consumed by the Vietnam War. … It is carved into our generation’s experience, and has been hard to overcome.”

Her characters and their stories are the tales the author heard working at a coffee shop near Fort Dix, N.J., and in strategy sessions with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Written in the early morning before she left for work, Gologorsky spent seven years putting the stories of Emma, Millie, Tess, Ida, Deede, Sara-Jo and others on paper.

These are working-class women who loved the working-class men who were “the grunts,” the American foot soldiers, in Vietnam. These are the women who were too busy working, too busy caring for their broken men and children to be a part of the feminist revolution led by their upper- and middle-class “sisters.” Their stories have rarely been heard in American literature, according to Gologorsky.

“The Things We Do to Make It Home” begins in 1973, the summer of the Senate Watergate hearings. It is the beginning of the end for these returning Vietnam vets and their wives. The novel ends 20 years later, the men’s lives in tatters, the women better able to move beyond the war, yet still bound to their former soldier-husband-lovers by one last invisible thread that binds like steel.

Much of these vets’ lives has been lost in a haze of alcohol and drugs. Millie’s Rooster lives on the street, Tess’s Sean still talks out loud to his alter ego Papa-San, Ida’s Frankie forgoes cancer treatment to return to Vietnam. As Emma and Rod are about to lose their home due to his inability to find work, she offhandedly suggests they simply stay and wait for the bank to evict them. Gologorsky describes how the “grunt” springs to action.

“Darkness surrounds the house, making the light inside seem warm and welcoming. She sits on the couch. He comes in wearing fatigues. Her stomach clenches. `Where did you find those?’

“He lowers himself down next to her. Their thighs touch. He pulls a red bandanna out of his shirt pocket, loops it around his head.

“She clicks on the TV.

“`Mute it a while so I can hear Frankie’s truck.’

“`You called him?’

“`Jason, too. And Sean. They’ll park in front.’

“`What good will that do?’ But she knows immediately what good it will do.

“`They’ll establish a perimeter, camp out. A tent in the back, another on the lawn. We need to secure the nights.’ …

“That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? But he’s gone so far, so fast. She stares at the silent, throbbing screen.”

It is this kind of spareness that makes Gologorsky’s prose so compelling, so bone-achingly painful. She tells these war stories minus the excesses that engulfed the times and the people who survived them, few unscathed or unscarred.

Readers who have experienced the Vietnam War only on the History Channel may find in Gologorsky’s fiction the limitations of love. However, those, who like her, came of age in the ’60s will hear the voices of the silent survivors — the women wounded by the aimless consequences of a senseless war.

Beverly Gologorsky will read from her novel, “The Things We Do to Make It Home,” 7:30 p.m. today at Border’s Books, Music and Cafe in Bangor.