"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

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.

iv. The Present Study

The list of narrative works on the Vietnam War continues to grow (one bibliographer lists 3,500 titles since 1977 to his time of writing, although only a fraction of these are imaginative works),105 It is therefore obvious that every work, perhaps even quite a number of deserving ones, cannot be discussed by a single writer. Starting from a list compiled by Pratt, as well as his bibliographic commentary and personal suggestions, I have tried to include a much larger number of works than usual in the critical commentaries of previous books and articles. Such commentaries proliferated during an earlier period, but they seemed to me to constantly recycle criticism of a half-dozen of the same works. In the present study, I have therefore tried to discuss a much greater number of works than are usually discussed, including a few that have to my knowledge never been discussed. To do this required providing extensive plot-summaries, although these have been intertwined with the criticism of the novels in question. It is unlikely that any reader (except perhaps one writing a book like the present one) would read all these novels in their entirety; retelling their stories at length has the function of informing the reader of several works on the same subject or theme that he/she may not wish to read while helping him select one he/she might like to read. I myself have never particularly enjoyed reading articles or hearing lectures on works that I had not read but that seemed to presuppose that I had. At the same time, to appeal to non-academic readers, I have tried to keep Lit-Crit jargon to a minimum, introducing such terms only when it seemed useful for the discussion at hand. Finally, as Tobey C. Herzog did with his study of the combat literature, I have also tried to establish parallels with earlier works of war literature.

As for the organization of discussing these works, I have generally followed Pratt’s proposed bibliographical chronology, which has two axes: in reading Vietnam fiction, he writes, one “should establish two frames of reference...first, the approximate place and time period of the book’s internal action; and second, an external frame of reference that includes a knowledge of the basic historical events plus the book’s date of writing and publication.”106 The only difficulty to this admirable plan is that while the basic historical events ground the fiction in history, the date of writing (an indeterminate time after the events depicted) cannot always be established.

The early narratives on Vietnam discussed in Part I, “Partisans” (cf. Table of Contents), are more easily arranged chronologically. These works are particularly interesting for their varied political attitudes and perspectives, which are often missing in later narratives that take the war for granted and concentrate mainly on action and events. To begin the study of narratives of the Vietnam War, four novels are discussed in the first chapter. They are distinguished by their diverse national points of view—British, American, French, Vietnamese—and will be examined in the order of their historical chronology as determined by the time of their internal action. Three of these novels are said to have been based on the exploits of the quintessential American adventurer, Edward G. Landsdale. The first section, accordingly, focuses on his life and activity within the historical context of the early American participation in Vietnam during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Graham Greene’s seminal novel of 1955, The Quiet American, whose context is the French struggle with the Viet Minh during the years 1951-52, seems to have inspired both Lederer and Burdick’s Cold War tract, The Ugly American (1958), and a more recent response, Ward Just’s A Dangerous Friend (1999), a “rewriting” of Greene’s novel but about events that occur over a decade later. Both M. J. Bosse’s The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (1959) and Jean Lartéguy’s Yellow Fever (1962) give an imaginative glimpse into the historical events of the French colonial war in the mid-Fifties, albeit from opposite sides.

Chapter Two is devoted to five novels that have varied political stances on the Diem regime, its demise, and related military events in the year 1963. Chapters Three and Four discuss a fairly large number of novels that represent the fighting during the period of American advisors after Diem’s fall: the years 1963-64. Certain themes and character types are introduced in these two chapters as being pervasive in the works discussed, even while the individual novels vary widely both in literary value and political attitudes. The fictions examined in Chapter Three, mostly published in the pre-Tet mid-1960s, I have defined as “pro-war” (e.g. the best-selling The Green Berets, by Robin Moore, 1965). These novels are more optimistic and naïve about motivations and possible outcomes. By contrast, those discussed in Chapter Four, which were published in the late 1960s or even later, exhibit greater sophistication in handling the political and moral ambivalence of their characters, and, probably not coincidentally, seem to me to be more accomplished literary works.

Finally, Chapter Five discusses works written by civilians that view the war from the “outside,” whether through the character of a journalist standing apart from it (Pamela Sanders, in Miranda, 1978) or involuntarily immersed in the fighting (Takeshi Kaiko, in Into a Black Sun, 1980). The war in these works is portrayed on a larger canvas—both in space (Miranda) and time (Thomas Fleming’s The Officers’ Wives, 1981). Kaiko’s work, as well as the earliest example analyzed in this chapter, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night (1968), take a step further by problematizing the status of the narrator-observer, and in so doing become good examples of the blurred line between fiction and non-fiction present in so many of the more interesting works to come out of the war. The Kalbs’ The Last Ambassador (1981) is included here to give closure to the historical sequence that began with Morris West’s The Ambassador (1965), discussed in Chapter Two.

Part II, “Modes and Genres,” as the title suggests, is less concerned with the historical sequence and more focused on types of narrative. It discusses novels and autobiographical works published mostly in the late 1960s or the 1970s. Written by combat veterans about events that took place starting with the intervention of American combat units from 1965 onward, these works—with the important exception of the numerous combat novels in the mode of realism—tend to be critical of the war. As suggested above, what makes the narrative literature of the Vietnam War interesting, as compared to that of World War II, is the great variety of types of fictions, the narrative strategies employed in fictional and non-fictional works, and the blurring of dividing lines between the two. The chapters in this part have accordingly been organized according to narrative strategies, both traditional and innovative.

Autobiographical memoirs are a traditional form of war writing. The Vietnam versions discussed in Chapter Six illustrate the traditional (Philip Caputo’s Rumors of War, 1977), the polemical (Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, 1976), the comic (Tobias Wolf’s In Pharaoh’s Army, 1994), and the unorthodox (Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone, 1975), as well as other examples. Chapter Seven discusses half a dozen allegorical novels, which is an unusual type of narrative for war novels but a traditional form of older literature. The extremes here may be illustrated by Norman Mailer´s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), a hunting tale that recalls classic American fictions, and Joe Haldeman´s The Forever War (1975), a science-fiction novel about an intergalactic war.

In terms of quantity, most fictional works about the war are combat novels written by soldier-authors that are also in the mode of traditional realism. These novels show the greatest continuity with the fictions of previous wars and the least variation in narrative structure. I have chosen nine examples of these for Chapter Eight, perhaps a greater number than is needed, in the hope that their common narrative themes and strategies, and their nearly interchangeable characters, become that more apparent. Chapter Nine discusses two examples of lengthy and more explicitly ideological combat novels that have been more highly praised in the press than the examples in Chapter Eight, as well as more widely discussed in the critical literature: James Webb’s Fields of Fire (1978) and John Del Vecchio’s The Thirteenth Valley (1983). They relate stories similar to those of the novels discussed in Chapter Eight, but are more concerned with both describing and justifying the war. My last example of the combat novel, Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn (2010) is the most recent work and serves as an Epilogue to this chapter, perhaps the last traditional combat novel to be written about Vietnam. It exemplifies how the combat novel of realism is a perennial and popular form, taking up so many of the characters and themes of both this and previous wars.

Finally, more oblique narrative approaches to the representation of war, commonly known as postmodernist, can be seen in the imaginative works discussed in Chapter Ten, where “Deviations” from traditional realism are examined, and Chapter Eleven, “Inventions,” where even more radical narrative strategies of fantasy and metafiction point to a possible future of the Vietnam novel. It is argued that the fictions discussed in these two chapters—unlike those of Chapter Eight and Nine—could only have emerged from the Vietnam War.

Part III, “Alternatives,” discusses other types of narratives, as well as fictions about the postwar period. Chapter Twelve features works by journalists, which are generally critical of the political motives behind the war, and, unlike the works discussed in Chapter Three, not just the way it was fought. The political stances and the reporting styles of novelists Mary McCarthy and James Jones are contrasted, as well as those of journalists Harrison Salisbury and Jonathan Schell. Finally, Michael Herr’s postmodernist Dispatches (1977), a widely praised work that challenges traditional journalistic narratives, calls into question the notion of the narrative representation of the war itself.

Chapter Thirteen discusses the less “literary” oral narratives of veterans, a form, it is argued, which is crucially intermediated by journalist-editors. Chapter Fourteen, “The Return of the Repressed,” concludes this book with discussions of fictional works produced by soldier-writers about their experiences as returning veterans. Chronologically, these novels—some of which are among the most critically well-received of all the writings about the war—have expanded time schemes that cover the postwar lives of their characters, typically moving from home to the war and back again. Some of these works, notably Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green (1983), could have been discussed in Part II for their interesting generic features and innovative narrative strategies, but the thematic emphasis, the reflection on the war in retrospect, seemed me to justify their being included here. Conversely, Tim O’Brien’s critically acclaimed The Things They Carried (1990) takes up the theme of the veteran after the war, but I have included it in an earlier chapter on narrative inventions. It seems likely that the important works on Vietnam now being written, and to be written in the future, are likely to be of this kind. We probably already have too many gritty combat novels—even while popular culture has churned out a seemingly endless series of what might be called Vietnam action stories—but there may never be enough analytical and imaginative works to help us reflect better on the meanings of the war and its important place in the history and culture of the United States.