"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

In his important sociological study of these soldiers, Working-Class War (1993)—from which these statistics are quoted—Christian Appy has demonstrated that the class-division between those who would fight the war and those who would protest it was in fact ensured by government policy. The reserve manpower for wars was historically designed to be made up of men in the Army Reserves and the National Guard, but neither of these groups, which are made up of older men from more secure socio-economic environments, was called up for active service in Vietnam: out of a million reservists and national-guardsmen, only 37,000 were mobilized and only 15,000 sent to Vietnam. In fact, many men tried to enlist in the National Guard as a way of avoiding the draft and being sent to war, including the (later) Republican President, George W. Bush, who, with his father’s influence, was admitted into the Air National Guard in Texas. Restrictive admission policies to these units were a way of ensuring that the underprivileged strata of society would not be able to avoid being drafted. Besides, as Appy argues, going into the army after high-school, or even before graduating, was perceived by working-class youths as much an expected and unavoidable part of their lives as going to college was for those of their middle-class counterparts.57

The US government apparently wanted to maintain the war at a low social profile. Medical deferments, for example, were easier to obtain by the more socially and economically privileged classes, and college students were exempted from military service through a policy of draft-deferments for those who were able to maintain a certain grade-point average in their classes.58 As the war ground on and the need for manpower increased, these socially-selective policies were not relaxed; on the contrary, the government continued to resort to the underprivileged, its primary replacement depot. Secretary McNamara’s program known as “Project 100,000” was designed to call up an additional 300,000 men who had been previously rejected from the armed forces because of low test scores. Through this program, youths of the underclass (80% high-school dropouts, 40% African Americans), would be given the opportunity to acquire employable skills and, incidentally, go to war in the place of students and reservists. These men did go to war (half of all the men who had entered the program did so, more than a third directly into combat), and they were both court-martialed and killed at twice the usual rate without acquiring the promised skills.59

It is notable that the patriotic motives (stop Communism, promote freedom) cited as the nation’s justification for going to war were admitted by only 11% of the enlisted men who volunteered in 1964 (a percentage that dropped to 6.1% four years later, when the war was more unpopular). Appy lists a variety of other motivations, social and cultural, that were given by the men who joined the armed forces: a) escape (bad home, mean streets, the police); b) a strong need, however undefined, for self-affirmation; c) solidarity with high-school and working-class buddies; d) a job-prospect in a future perceived as generally hopeless; e) assimilation of the media culture (especially war movies); f) pressure from fathers, uncles, and other men who had fought in previous wars; and g) a traditional cultural assumption of war as a rite-of-passage to manhood.60 It can be readily perceived that these various motivations may be interlocking joint influences, for example, (a), (b) and (d), or (e), (f) and (g).

Once these men, whatever their true motivations, were in the Armed Forces, they were taught, as part of the military’s indoctrination program, that they were helping an Asian nation to resist Communism, preserve democracy, and protect freedom. Their actual war experiences, however, contradicted those expressed aims at every turn. Communism turned out to have widespread popular support in both North and South Vietnam, even while the soldiers were told they were saving South Vietnam from Communist aggression. Accordingly, in the fiction of the war, the need to stop Communism tends to be invoked only by officers and “lifers,” as career soldiers were contemptuously called in the Army by the others, as if a career in the Army was a life sentence.

Soldiers newly arrived “in-country” learned that South Vietnamese civilians were often Vietcong or Vietcong sympathizers, and they naturally began to ask themselves why the South Vietnamese should be saved from an enemy with which they were in such obvious sympathy. Even worse, there was no training, or, for that matter, no accurate method for telling the difference between friend and foe, a circumstance that greatly increased the American soldier’s anxiety and suspicion towards his supposed allies.61 While the obstinate silence of the civilians whom the troops were supposed to be protecting was an important advantage enjoyed by the NLF (Vietcong), it was a source of constant frustration to the American soldiers trying to glean information about its intentions, whereabouts, and movements.

Given these circumstances, the veterans who emerged from this war were, in a number of important ways, unlike those of previous wars. There was a high rate of desertion. For those men who had terminated their tours, as many as 70,000 suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.), a condition that in previous wars had been known as “shell shock” or “combat fatigue.” In addition, material and psychological problems resulting from the shortage of jobs in a less responsive economy, as well as an often hostile civilian reception, made it more difficult for these returnees to readjust to civilian life. Citing one indicator of social and psychological maladjustment to civilian life, Walter Capps claims that there were as many suicides among veterans from 1975 to 1990 as combat deaths in the war itself.62

For his part, Samuel Hynes has called the labeling of Vietnam veterans as victims one of the war’s necessary myths:

The story has been absorbed into the Vietnam story for the same reason that all war myths are accepted—because it gives events a comprehensible shape that is consistent with the myth of the war itself—the Bad War that was lost. Because the war was wrong, because children were killed and a country was devastated, men who fought there were devastated too.63

In support of his hypothesis of the myth of the veteran-victim, Hynes goes on to quote statistics showing that most men who went to Vietnam were not damaged by the experience and so their stories “have not entered the canon of Vietnam memoirs.”64 But one may legitimately ask how many men from this undamaged majority were actual combatants. Apart from the difficulty of assessing psychological damage, especially of men who do not overtly complain of it, the acceptance by veterans of their experience is perhaps true of any war, but it is also true that a great many Americans who fought in World War II and were supported by virtually the entire nation were also psychologically damaged—more, in fact, than were actually killed.

Many people, including veterans of earlier wars, have scorned the Vietnam vets as “losers” and “crybabies,” but the distress of these men was real and may partly be explained by the unique circumstances of the war. Psychological research has shown that killing in war actually causes more distress than the fear of being killed or seeing other men killed. General S.L.A. Marshall, the US Army’s chief military historian during World War II, found that the majority of men in combat did not even fire their weapons: “Fear of killing, rather than being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual,” Marshall wrote in his influential study Men Against Fire (1947), citing cultural upbringing and religious education against the taking of human life as the cause.65

Marshall’s findings were incorporated by the US Army into new training techniques to teach soldiers how to perceive their enemies as “targets” rather than as people and therefore be more willing to fire upon them. Trainees were also taught to fire at an area target like bushes or clumps of trees, rather than recognizable individuals, a technique facilitated by the newer, fully automatic weapons.66 The revised training regime was successful: by the time of the Vietnam War, as many as 90% of the men were firing their weapons. The technical success, however, had a psychological price: a study of veterans (1999) found that soldiers who had killed, or believed they had killed, people in combat had higher rates of P.T.S.D.67

Another way of making soldiers more willing to kill their declared enemies is through demonization, a technique that is more effective when dealing with a racial “other.” The Japanese during World War II, for example, were represented in propaganda as sub-human and so especially worthy of being killed. The Vietnamese enemy were subject to similar perceptions: dehumanizing epithets such as “gooks,” “dinks,” “slopes” and the like were routinely used among soldiers (as can be constantly seen in the fictional literature), and, like the Japanese in the former war, the Vietnamese enemy was seen as treacherous and fanatical, but there may be other cultural factors at work here that go beyond prejudice and racism. Jonathan Shay sees the roots of the demonization of the enemy in Biblical texts, using as illustration I Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath, which he argues shows David’s lack of respect for his enemy. Shay’s contrasts this Biblical text with the duel of Hector and Ajax, in Homer’s Iliad, where neither warrior shows disrespect for the other.68

A great deal of blame has been assigned to American soldiers for morally despicable acts committed in Vietnam. The mother of Paul Meadlo, one of the men who participated in the My Lai massacre, is said to have complained: “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer”. Meadlo was ordered by his platoon leader, Lt. Calley, to open fire on a group of civilians, and they both stood about ten feet from the victims, blazing away on full automatic: “It was pure carnage, with heads shot off along with limbs…” After a few minutes, Meadlo was emotionally unable to continue. Only a few children who had been protected by their mothers remained alive, but “Calley opened fire again, killing them one by one.”69

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