"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

Without exculpating Calley, who led the massacre, or the men who followed him (some of them refused), it should be more widely understood that, historically, evil has been perpetrated by every army upon both POWs and civilians in virtually every war. In World War II, atrocities committed by American soldiers remained unknown to the general public because reports and images of such acts were censored by the government propaganda apparatus, which, in the absence of television cameras and independent reporting, was more effective in controlling images and information from battle zones.

It is also noteworthy that the GIs in Vietnam have assumed a greater share of responsibility for their actions than veterans of previous wars, a point that becomes clear when one compares the fiction and memoirs of the two world wars with those of Vietnam. In his discussion of Larry Heinemann’s novel Close Quarters (1977), in which the characters engage in atrocities, Tobey C. Herzog asks if the responsibility for such acts belongs to the individuals, what he calls “the evil within,” or the war environment, “the evil without.” He concludes that the issue is evaded in this novel as well as in others, but adds that “evidence in Heinemann’s novel points toward an environmental cause.”70 Cornelius Cronin has argued in his discussion of atrocities that, contrary to the external cause theory, in this particular aspect the Vietnam veterans may be differentiated from their counterparts in earlier wars:

There is a clear sense that evil and good are inextricably mixed in war, and that soldiers must see themselves as individuals capable of acting and therefore capable of performing evil actions. World War I and II soldiers tended to see themselves as passive, as being acted upon by the war and their societies.71

There is a consensus among commentators that another important reason for the distress of the Vietnam veterans, as compared to those men who had undergone the horrors of combat in earlier wars, is the awareness of the Vietnam veterans that they had been singled out and that their sacrifices were not appreciated because they were pointless. It is worth noting that during World War II, nearly every able-bodied man in the United States, 12 million in all, from every social class and occupational group, went into the armed forces. There was a popular perception, Paul Fussell writes, that World War II was the most democratic war ever fought:

Some readers will remember the Vietnam antiwar slogan “What if there was a war and nobody went?” Well, in 1939-45 there was a war and everybody went, or nearly everybody: all classes, all races, both sexes. Civilians, too, worked, suffered, sometimes fought, died. For once in human history, a war was fought that was everybody’s war.72

These soldiers had the full support of a civilian population that agreed with their president that the war was necessary and just, requiring a united effort by all Americans, but the case of the Vietnam combatants was markedly different. In the oral and written accounts, the men in Vietnam constantly register bitter complaints about what they consider Vietnamese ingratitude. But as Frances FitzGerald has argued, after the US had set up a military dictatorship in Vietnam, defended it against all native resistance, killed or maimed thousands of Vietnamese, made thousands more homeless and destroyed their livelihoods, it was unrealistic to expect the Vietnamese to feel gratitude, especially when it was felt that the Americans were using Vietnamese soil to fight a war that was really directed against the USSR and China.73 Such geopolitical matters, however, were of little concern to the fighting men, who were misled about their role as liberators, since they often harbored in their minds the stories of fathers and uncles and the heroic cinematic images (such as the often seen films of American troops marching and riding triumphantly into Paris) of World War II.

In their disillusionment, these soldiers came to realize that instead of liberators they were regarded by both the Vietnamese people and an increasing segment of their own people as brutal invaders, because once in the field they were often ordered by superiors to do things that resulted in the destruction of villages and the terror of the civilian population—hardly the most effective way to win hearts and minds. Such acts generated negative feelings toward the American soldiers, which were often returned with interest. As extreme reactions, outrage and anti-Vietnamese feeling could result in atrocities. By this logic, it is no accident that the My Lai massacre, the worst recorded atrocity, occurred in 1968, the year of the highest number of American casualties.

Another factor contributing to increased stress was lack of motivation. In the limiting circumstance of the one-year tour, the men naturally wanted to be in the field for the shortest time possible to reduce their chances of being killed or wounded. As Ward Just wrote: “The principal criticism of the twelve-month tour was that it tended to institutionalize impermanence. Men in Vietnam were transients, traveling salesmen of war and democratic processes.”74 Their adversaries, however, knew that they were in the war for the duration and were far more ideologically motivated. The American combatants in Vietnam were in fact aware of their own lack of motivation compared to the apparent dedication, staying-power, and moral purpose of their adversaries. As one man put it, “we were playing games and they were fighting for keeps.”75 As Fox Butterfield has described the enemy, they were

men who were well-disciplined enough to march down the [Ho Chi Minh] trail even while thinking that for the vast majority of them it would be a one-way trip. They were men who subsisted for weeks at a time on little better than a handful of rice and some roasted salt. They were bombed by B-52s that fly so high they could neither see nor hear them until the bombs exploded. Once in the South they were not able to send or receive mail; and if they died, their families were not notified for years afterwards, if ever.76

What the men of the revolutionary forces lacked in sophisticated weaponry they made up for in commitment, as can be seen by comparing their combat effectiveness with that of the far less motivated soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), who fought well only when they were protecting their native villages. Political lessons were as important a component of the NLF and NVA soldier’s life as military training. Communism was taught as, and perceived to be, a political system that offered greater material prosperity and justice for the Vietnamese people as a whole, as well as liberation from foreign rule, a notion that is much more plausible to soldiers fighting on their own soil. In the fictional narratives, American soldiers are often represented as well aware of the enemy’s commitment, as seen in this dialogue between two “grunts” (infantry soldiers):

“They really come at you.”

“They’re hard-core.”

“They come right at you. And they keep coming until you kill them…They ain’t never gonna stop, are they, Pablo?”

“We’ll never stop them.”77

In this aspect—a much greater individual commitment to winning the war—the soldiers of the NVA and NLF were, ironically, akin to the Allied soldiers of World War II who were the cultural touchstone of the young American soldiers who went to Vietnam. The notion of the necessity of decisively defeating the enemy before going home, ingrained in the combatants of World War II, was regarded as hopeless by their American counterparts in Vietnam. With the lack of any territorial gains—those defined “lines” that moved slowly but relentlessly forward toward Germany and Japan, the enemy homelands—how could progress toward victory be measured? By the staff, it was measured by the “body count,” a consequence of General Westmoreland’s declaration that the conflict was a war of “attrition.” The sole concern of the lowly American soldier in Vietnam therefore was to avoid becoming a statistic by lasting out his individual tour of duty—exactly one year (thirteen months for Marines). “How many days?” became the overriding question, from which arose the frequently evoked superstitions and comic cult practices (jokes, calendars) of the “short-timer,” the man who had a only short period remaining before being recycled back to the US. The short-timer phenomenon may have actually increased anxiety because it ensured a greater degree of individualism and lack of cohesion in the unit. No one wanted to die when he had only a short time to return to the “World.”

American soldiers, who were well trained and equipped, are reported to have fought well up to 1968, when the suffering and frustrations of taking part in a war they realized they could not win begin to take their toll. Combatants felt keenly the futility of a war whose progress was based on body counts rather than conquered territory, and they understood the tactical weakness of search-and-destroy missions, which drew fire from a well-concealed enemy on the ground, who could then be shelled by artillery or bombed, strafed, rocketed and napalmed by US aircraft. Being used as “bait” to draw enemy fire was, unsurprisingly, deeply resented.

Once the troop withdrawals began in 1969, the continuation of the war became even more pointless to those fighting it. Discipline broke down in some units and became weaker overall, as seen by the increase in the shirking of patrols and “fragging” attacks on officers (2000 reported incidents, in which, for example, a fragmentation grenade is thrown under an officer’s bunk), as well as milder forms of protest like the wearing of peace signs and helmet graffiti. Evidence of relaxed discipline may be also seen in attitudes (racial tensions) and practices (drug use) imported from the US. A large number of men smoked Cannabis both on and off duty, and a significant number (an estimated 10%) were doing hard drugs like heroin to bear the pressure.78 These numbers suggest that the military was now manned by draftees who were not ready to die for what they perceived as an abandoned cause.79

iii. The Narrative Literature of the War

The literature of the Vietnam War has been to a great extent the production of the men who fought it and reflects the conclusions about the American soldiers reached in the previous section. This literary production, in all its variety, constitutes the “American Literature of the Vietnam War,” as Stewart O’Nan has properly called it.80 It is worth recalling that the war is called the American War by the Vietnamese. There are now a growing number of works written by Vietnamese-Americans that are taking their place within the corpus of Asian-American literature, as well as imaginative works written by non-Asians about Vietnamese immigrant communities in the United States.81

The most notable fictional work written by a Vietnamese American is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s superbly written The Sympathizer (2015), about the fall of Saigon and its aftermath. The unnamed narrator is a “spook,” but “one able to see any issue from both sides.” His narrative is a “confession” to his Communist superiors, written in a re-education camp, about his time served as the aide-de-camp and intelligence officer to an ARVN general during the time in which he was actually an infiltrated NVA spy. The novel shows him to be sympathetic to both the cause of North Vietnam and the plight of the people of the defeated south, as well as a close observer of American politics and culture.82

The radical critic Don Ringnalda has argued against the possibility of any narrative representation of the war “getting it right” because of the ineffectiveness of any master narrative to explain such a complex event. This may be true, but every narrative adds something to the whole picture and most fictional narratives of war, especially those written by subalterns or enlisted men have always focused on a limited field of action. Ringnalda views these narratives as simultaneously attracting and repelling. Aestheticising war is perhaps impossible to avoid completely despite the depiction of its horrors (cf. the Iliad), but readers must reflect—something that is more difficult for filmgoers, who are willing voyeurs—on war as spectacle versus war as historical moment.

Most of the narratives discussed here focus on the American soldier, but there is a broader perspective in the earlier literary works that reflect the period before the United States became the overwhelming presence in Vietnam, as well as in the later works that reflect social and cultural concerns that go beyond the war itself. Although the Vietnamese people are explored in the exile and immigrant literatures mentioned above, as well as in the plethora of historical and cultural studies that followed the war, in the American novels, autobiographies, and memoirs of the war discussed in this book the Vietnamese tend to be stereotyped. As O’Nan puts it: “In work after work, Vietnam and the Vietnamese are merely backdrops for the drama of America confronting itself.”83 The anti-war feminist writer Lynne Hanley states the situation more bluntly:

…virtually all our well-known representations of Vietnam in literature and film ask us, first and foremost, to pity the white American soldier—to share his guilt, to weigh his wounds, to forgive his degradation, to understand his loyalties, to admire his endurance, to appreciate his betrayal, to recognize “the superior spiritual status” of the American soldier “trapped by history, dragged down into the animal mud” of Vietnam.”84

Hanley’s assessment is harsh, but with the exceptions discussed in Renny Christopher’s book on exile narratives, it is undoubtedly true. At the same time, one might ask what these unprofessional soldier-writers were supposed to write about if not their own experiences, and it seems that the indictment Hanley makes of the American literature and films for their “shockingly thin version of the Vietnamese” in the representations is not a condemnation of the soldier-writers but of American society and culture as a whole. As she observes, and as Frances FitzGerald shows again and again in her book Fire in the Lake (1970), the failure to understand the Vietnamese “was very close to the heart of our problems in that country.”85

Because most of the war narratives were written by veterans, they have also been included in what is called the “literature of trauma,” thus connecting them with survivor narratives from other wars and other kinds of traumatic experiences, a grouping that makes explicit the status of the veteran as victim. Although certainly not all veterans would classify themselves in this way, the classification has the merit of showing how their narratives are “the product of three coincident features: the experience of trauma, the urge to bear witness, and a sense of community.”86 Through their narratives, these soldier-writers have borne witness to, and, to some extent, come to terms with their traumas while at the same time establishing common ground—a community—with other survivors.87

Remembering also remains an important experience for the culture as a whole, especially American culture, which tends, like other cultures, to mythologize its past. Ringnalda, for example, complains that

much of America’s memory of Vietnam is on the [Catch-22’s Snowden’s] hip wound inflicted on the proud myths of the City on a Hill. And sad to say, much of its energy is focused on restoring those myths. Too often the radical wound goes unattended, perhaps out of collective and in individual fear that it’s beyond treatment.88

Ringnalda cites novelist Tim O’Brien, who told a group of students that the First Gulf War, so soon after Vietnam, proved that the latter war never happened: “History and memory had been air-brushed out of existence.”89 The misinterpretation of history can be a way of reinterpreting reality, and it has not been confined to the war in Vietnam. World War II was a horrific historical event that has been relentlessly mythologized as the “Good War” ever since its close in 1945. As Fussell, a student of the culture of the two world wars, has written, “America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and thus been able to use such understanding to re-interpret and redefine the national reality.”90 Although some commentators have drawn connections between American myths and attempts to explain—or explain away—the war, Marilyn B. Young argues that the war is too large an event in our consciousness to be able to will it to disappear:

What militarists deplore as the Vietnam syndrome can better be understood as a relatively unique event in American history: an inability to forget, a resistance to the everyday workings of historical amnesia, despite the serious and coordinated efforts of the government and much of the press to “heal the wounds” of the war by encouraging such forgetting.91

One motive for this will to forgetfulness is that until Vietnam, defeat in war, with the exception of the American South, had not been a part of American historical experience. Indeed, the collective trauma of defeat seemed to be so strong that the Vietnam War was forgotten—repressed—for a decade. But it refused to go away, insisting on being recovered because of the traumatic collective consciousness of national defeat.

In the meantime, historians, social scientists, literary critics, and other scholars have attempted to explain the war for their own purposes. Here, as always in American history, American literature has played an essential critical role in interpreting the collective past. In Philip K. Jason’s view, “the imaginative literature of the Vietnam War, broadly defined, participates—whether overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously—in a struggle for the national memory.”92 Another important critic, Milton J. Bates, also reminds us how literature may play different interpretive roles: “the war story, like war itself, is politics by other means.”93 Bates argues that other critics who have written lucidly about the literature of the war (e.g. Myers, Melling, Capps, Martin), have shown how popular culture, especially film, “endorsed President Reagan’s attempt to make Vietnam a ‘noble cause’,” while the more serious literature has “resisted the conservative drift of popular myths.”94 In this study of the Vietnam War literature, I shall pay more attention to the serious literature of the war but also discuss a few popular works that mythologize the war and its American participants.

The memory inscribed in the fiction and memoirs of the war is a necessary and important part of this work of historical recovery. The culture of the past, as Northrop Frye once said, is not only the memory of mankind but also of our own buried life. Politicians like Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and George Bush, as well as their conservative epigones, have done their best to bury Vietnam, with its lingering smell of defeat—defeat being perceived as somehow un-American. As one of the soldier-writers, Philip Caputo, has written: “Our self-image as a progressive, virtuous, and triumphant people exempt from the burdens and tragedies of history came apart in Vietnam, and we had no way to integrate the war or its consequences into our collective and individual consciousness.”95 The attempted conservative transformation of the historical experience of the war into myth has already taken place in popular fiction and film, in which patriotic distortions serve to mythologize the war’s sad realities.96

It is my contention in this book that the serious literature of the war has refused that time-honored cultural move. As Hynes has written, the Vietnam War

lingers in American minds like the memory of an illness, a kind of fever that weakened the country until its people were divided and its cause was lost. That fever is in the narratives Americans have written about the war, and it makes their soldiers’ tales different from the tales of other modern wars—not simply because the United States lost, though that had not happened before, but because in the loss there was humiliation and bitterness and the burden of complicity in a nation’s moral failure.97

The American literature of the Vietnam War is dominated by narratives, fictional and non-fictional,98 although the distinction between fictional and non-fictional has often been called into question in those very narratives, as will be seen in Chapter Six on war memoirs and some of the later chapters. The more conventional combat narratives, like those of the two world wars, recall and recreate characters from the military rank-and-file, the soldiers who actually fought, forming therefore a literature of experience that maintains thematic continuity with the narratives of previous wars, a theme developed in Chapter Eight on combat realism. A character from a fictional work by Tim O’Brien, one of the most important novelists of the war, recognizes this connection in his novel Going After Cacciatto (1978), when the narrator refuses to concede that the elemental experience of the men in Vietnam was distinct from that of previous wars:

War kills and maims and rips up the land and makes orphans and widows. These are the things of war. Any war. So when I say there is nothing new to tell about Nam, I’m saying it was just a war like every war. Politics be damned. Sociology be damned…I’m saying that the feel of war is the same in Nam or Okinawa—the emotions are the same, the same fundamental stuff is seen and remembered.99

The insistence on the experience of war as universal, a claim made by so many previous war novels, holds true with respect to the individual soldier under the stress of combat, the focus of many of these works, including those examined here. When a man is under fire, it hardly matters to him who is doing the firing or the shelling, or why it is taking place, but it is also true that wars qua historical events are significantly different and are experienced in different ways. The motivations and concerns of the combat infantryman in any war are rarely a question of global politics, but the men who fought in World War II knew, even when they did not want to be there, that they had to win the war before they could go home. The cynicism of the men who fought in Vietnam, on the other hand, is closer to that of the combatants of World War I, who also experienced individual and collective disillusionment from their participation in a kind of war for which they had not been prepared. The soldiers in Vietnam often suspected that their war would never be won and that their sacrifices were therefore in vain. The point is succinctly made by O’Brien in the very same novel cited above, in speaking of the soldiers in Vietnam (“They”), with allusions to those of World War II as a meaningful contrast:

They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory of satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause.100

Not only the tone but the structure of the narrative works was to a certain extent pre-determined. Because the soldier’s individual tour of duty lasted a single year, the narrative trajectory of the war narratives dealing with individual experience has been determined by this time bracket. These works have a typical narrative arc.101 They begin with the new soldier arriving in Vietnam—with his prewar and training experiences either presented as a kind of prologue or inserted later into the body of the text as flashbacks—struggling to adapt to the disorienting atmosphere of the war, confronting his fear at his first taste of battle, gradually leaving behind his New Guy status to become an accepted member of the group, and, after experiencing hardships, horrors, and even some joy, ends with his boarding the “Freedom Bird,” the plane that will take him back to the “World,” as soldiers called the States, home, or civilian life. In many accounts, however, the story does not end there, as the “World” itself has become a place that seems alien to the returning vet. Chronologically, the part of this master-narrative that takes place in Vietnam is conveniently contained within the year-long in-country time bracket. Chronologically, it may therefore be contrasted with the World War II narrative accounts that cover an individual’s experiences during a single battle, or a campaign, or even the entire war.

The individual narrative of Vietnam can also be seen as forming a part of an overall historical narrative within which the individual works may be read. In a widely cited bibliographical commentary (1987), John Clark Pratt divided the narrative fiction of Vietnam into a “tragic drama” of five acts, including prologue and epilogue, a scheme that has the virtues of making evident the fundamental historical grounding of the narratives and allowing the insertion of a great number of works. It is characteristic of the novels, Pratt writes, that they “have as their crisis actions the events of a major political, social, or military upheaval,”102 for example, the assassination of Diem, the Tet offensive, a major military operation, or the fall of Saigon. It has been suggested more recently that although Pratt’s scheme has been useful for grouping the first wave of novels, works that can be “primarily defined as combat novels,” in recent years a “second stage” of imaginative works has emerged that focus on the return of the veteran to civilian life. These novels chronologically overlap the war and postwar years.103

Other new works (which may be seen as constituting a third stage in Vietnam fiction) have brought the war home, “expanding” it chronologically and spatially as well as thematically, to include narratives that treat the reverberations of the war in American society and culture beyond the experiences of individual veterans. Clearly, both volume and scope of what was once confidently called the “Vietnam novel” have greatly increased, so that Philip K. Jason can even include science-fiction novels that allegorize the war and detective novels with hard-boiled protagonists who were Vietnam veterans as examples of Vietnam War novels.104 Evidently, this category, like that of the larger category of the “war novel” within which the Vietnam War novel may be placed, has in turn become part of the “loose, baggy monster” that Henry James saw as the essence of the novelistic genre.