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Mark A. Heberle
The third edition of John Newman’s Vietnam War Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (1990), published 20 years after the end of the war, included précis of 666 American Vietnam War novels, 291 collections of stories or individual stories, 41 plays, and nearly 300 collections that partially or exclusively include American Vietnam War poems (and over 30 individual poems). Twenty years after this compilation, the Vietnam War continues to occupy an important place in American literature and film, as witnessed by the success of Karl Marlantes’s massive combat novel Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2009) and Tree of Smoke (2007), Denis Johnson’s epic fable of American anti‐communist involvement in Southeast Asia, which won the National Book Award. The catastrophe of 9/11 and Washington’s subsequent interventions in the Middle East may have eclipsed Hollywood’s interest in new war films set in Southeast Asia, but successful reprises of that earlier intervention, by Mel Gibson (We Were Soldiers, 2002) and Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn, 2007), suggest how representations of the war in popular culture have evolved in the post‐Vietnam War era, when American military interventions and the moral and ideological questions they pose have shifted to the war on “terror” and Islamic extremism. In Gibson’s work, the war in Viet Nam is an arena for violent and heroic sacrifice, and the film is dedicated to the young soldiers on both sides who died fighting each other in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. Herzog uses the secret American flights over Laos in 1966 as the setting for a true‐life adventure that follows the generic conventions of heroic survival and rescue from captivity. The commercial success of Tropic Thunder (2008), the most expensive movie ever filmed on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, suggests that controversy over the war has receded sufficiently by now for American filmmakers to risk producing a comic parody in which staples and tropes of Vietnam War representations (e.g. booby traps, prisoner‐of‐war torture, Vietnam veteran writers, the making of Apocalypse Now, and the ending of Platoon) are hilariously rewritten, with cameo performances by Nick Nolte and Tom Cruise. The film was even nominated for an Academy Award!
Three rather more serious Vietnam War‐related films produced after 2000 point to new directions through which such literature and film are being transformed as the generation of American writers and playwrights who lived through the war years passes. Tony Bui’s Green Dragon (2001) and Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country (2004) trace the Vietnamese diasporic struggle from postwar oppression in reunified Viet Nam to finding new lives in America. Revisiting the war and its aftermath from a Vietnamese or Vietnamese American viewpoint not only opens up a perspective largely absent from American works through the 1990s, but also raises issues of immigration, race, and American identity that are becoming political flash points in post‐Obama America. Rules of Engagement (2000), scripted by the American Vietnam War novelist and 2016 presidential candidate James Webb, begins with combat scenes and a putative war crime in Viet Nam and then fast forwards its two combat Marine protagonists and comrades to a bloody US Embassy evacuation in Yemen and subsequent court martial of the Marine commanding officer for the deaths of 83 Yemeni anti‐US protestors. Released 25 years after the end of the Vietnam War and just before the new American wars that began with 9/11, the film also anticipates the burgeoning body of Iraq, Afghanistan, and jihadi terrorist war‐related American literature (and film) that finds itself anxiously influenced by issues and questions that were both represented and left unresolved by the earlier war and its representations.
The title of a study of American Vietnam War poetry by Subarno Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War (2001), defines well what is most characteristic of that literature and film. Not only does the war continue to be represented imaginatively nearly 40 years after its conclusion, but nearly all of the present canonical works were conceived and produced years after their authors’ experiences in Viet Nam and after the end of the war itself in 1975. The recursiveness and belatedness of American Vietnam War literature can be seen even in writers who are not now known as “Vietnam” writers as well as in those who have come to juxtapose Viet Nam and America in their imaginative worlds. For example, Joe Haldeman, inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012, achieved almost immediate and lasting fame with his first science fiction novel, The Forever War, in 1974. But his first book, War Year (1972), is a straightforward, thinly veiled memoir of his tour of duty as a US Army draftee in Viet Nam (1967–1968), where he was seriously wounded and received a Purple Heart before writing his second war novel, which is waged over centuries in the frozen wastes of outer space, and yet has been acknowledged as a fabulist metamorphosis of the Vietnam War, both by scholars and by the author himself. Despite his achievements in science fiction, Haldeman’s career has periodically returned to writing and publishing Vietnam War fiction, including the novel 1968 (1994) and additional short stories and poems in Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (1993) and War Stories (2006), in which Haldeman discusses the connection between the Vietnam War and his career as a science fiction writer.
The works of the award‐winning American poet Bruce Weigl, another early combat veteran (1967–1968), are also irrevocably haunted by memories of the war in ways that more directly juxtapose past and present, Viet Nam and America. Weigl is the author of 13 books of poetry from 1976 to 2012. But he also wrote a 2000 memoir about the adoption of his Vietnamese daughter in 1996 (The Circle of Hanh) and has co‐edited two bilingual collections of Vietnamese war poetry (Poems from Captured Documents [1994] and Mountain River [1998]) and a collection that combines American and Vietnamese poetry and fiction of the war (Writing Between the Lines: An Anthology on War and Its Social Consequences [1997]). His own poetry, like Haldeman’s work, illustrates the persistence of memories of the war, not only for Weigl but also for the Vietnamese who appear in the poems he has written since beginning return visits to Viet Nam in the 1980s. Chronicling sometimes brutal landscapes and the people who inhabit them, Weigl’s poems are frequently set in the post‐industrial American Midwest, including Lorain, Ohio, his home town, but the collections Sweet Lorain (1996) and Declension in the Village of Chung Luong (2006) include poems set in Ohio with poems set in Viet Nam. The speaker in the title poem of Weigl’s collection The Abundance of Nothing (2012), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, lets a dying sparrow “have the life it has left” (Weigl 2012: 48), and many other poems focus on decay and mortality. Yet a few are set physically in Viet Nam, and “Flash,” the penultimate poem, intrusively recalls the speaker’s horror when he saw a peasant obliterated “by a two‐hundred‐and‐fifty‐pound / American bomb the Vietcong had rigged into a booby trap” until a sergeant grabs him back to life with the assurance that “It don’t mean a thing” (Weigl 2012: 73). Memories like this are indigenous to the Ohio and to the Vietnam that have been reimagined by Weigl, who asserted in The Circle of Hanh that “The war took away my life and gave me poetry in return” while “the fate the world has given me is to struggle to write powerfully enough to draw others into the horror” (Weigl 2000: 6).
Trauma, the most common subject in Weigl’s work, is also the most common subject in American Vietnam War literature. The pervasiveness and variety of actual and fictionalized trauma are not simply a product of direct combat experiences, however. The argument often found in critical as well as popular works that the war in Viet Nam was a uniquely terrible war for Americans has typically understated or ignored how much more terrible it was for the Vietnamese, but it also ignores the fact that war itself is a traumatizing human experience, whatever its form. What made this trauma unique for American soldiers was the second term in Subarno Chattarji’s title: the war was a complete failure, and this historical outcome inevitably colors the myriad imaginative representations of combat that were produced from the 1970s to the present, coating them with a sometimes ironic, sometimes tragic, and nearly always bitter atmosphere no matter where the battlefield was located or when combat took place. There was, in addition, a sort of belatedness to Americans’ awareness of that terrible loss. Each phase of the war – Kennedy’s Green Berets, Johnson’s intervention with whole divisions and Operation Rolling Thunder and even the massive American and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) counter‐offensives after the crucial North Vietnamese Army (NVA)‐supported Viet Cong Tet Offensive in 1968, the gradual Vietnamization withdrawal punctuated with brief invasions of Cambodia and Laos, the joint American–ARVN blunting of the 1972 NVA offensive, and the Christmas bombing of Hanoi – all seemed to have been military successes, so that President Nixon could claim a “peace with honor” on April Fool’s Day 1973, since all American soldiers had come home, including the prisoners of war held by Hanoi. But the war did not actually end until 30 April 1975, with the conquest or liberation of Saigon by the North and the reunification of the Vietnamese nation more than two years after American combat troops had been withdrawn. This belated total defeat of America in 1975 ironically undercut celebrations of the country’s 200th anniversary the following year and was bitterly and futilely registered by an official freezing of American diplomatic and commercial relations with Viet Nam for the next two decades. “Wasted” was a common GI vernacular for much of what soldiers experienced in Viet Nam, and to Americans looking back in grief and anger after 1975, the term seemed darkly appropriate for the entire 14 years of blood, treasure, and planning that had gone into the debacle.
As we have suggested above, belatedness and recursiveness also characterizes American creative responses to the war. The first National Book Award for a Vietnam War‐focused book was Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night: History as Novel, the Novel as History (1968), an account of the October 1967 anti‐war march on the Pentagon, which won the 1969 Prize for Arts and Letters but also the Pulitzer Prize for General Non‐fiction. Most of the now canonical works were published or produced years after the war had ended, with Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978), Michael Cimino’s The Deerhunter (1978), Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) notably initiating the flood of works that were to follow. Thus, if it is true that one of the few redeeming outcomes of the lost war are its literature and film, we must also acknowledge that body of work as the record of a catastrophe. “Breathing Out,” the final section of Dispatches, a work that began when Herr visited the war for Esquire in 1967, achieves closure only on its final page and only eight years later: “The war ended, and then it really ended, the cities ‘fell,’ I watched the choppers I’d loved dropping into the South China Sea as their Vietnamese pilots jumped clear, and one last chopper revved it up, lifted and flew out of my chest” (Herr 1977: 259–260). Herr’s catharsis in the final paragraph that follows would not have been shared by most of the GIs who had survived but had accomplished nothing that would last in Viet Nam, or by their fellow citizens, who had “been” to Viet Nam through newspaper and television accounts, stories, or films; all would only fully realize, in spring of 1975, the final truth.
Even novels that purport to be direct representations of brutal battlefield experiences carry with them the additional stain of all that was lost not only in the war but after it was over. Three of the most important and powerful hyperrealist novels provide examples of what we might call post‐combat codas. Larry Heinemann, who fought in a tank unit of the 25th Infantry Division in 1967–1968 presents a fictionalized version of those experiences in his novel Close Quarters (1977). The novel graphically represents how young American soldiers become brutalized by the war even as they successfully kill Viet Cong (VC), and the scene that ends the novel provides little satisfaction for Pvt. Philip Dosier, Heinemann’s protagonist, standing “sad and bitter” vigil at the grave of a beloved comrade now buried in an Illinois veterans’ cemetery (1977: 335). In Fields of Fire (1978), James Webb, who won the Navy Star for heroism as a Marine First Lieutenant in the An Hoa Valley in 1969, provides a gripping, often harrowing account of suffering, death, heroism, and unlikely victory in that combat zone, but at the cost of two of Webb’s most respected protagonists; the third, a young Harvard graduate named Goodrich but mockingly nicknamed “Senator” by his less privileged comrades, has had his initial anti‐war instincts fully confirmed by what he and his buddies have gone through in the war, and prepares to give public testimony at an anti‐war protest upon his return. Recalling his battlefield comrades and their suffering, however, he ends up denouncing the demonstrators and finds his car spray‐painted with swastikas as he drives away at the end of the novel. The 13th Valley (1982) fictionalizes a 1970 operation (Texas Star) in which John Del Vecchio, a draftee and Army journalist, had participated. Like Fields of Fire, it provides operational maps and a glossary of official and colloquial Vietnam War military terms (like Close Quarters) as well as quasi‐official reports on the fictional operations, material supplements that are typical of self‐consciously realistic Vietnam novels that seek to authorize and authenticate the truth of their fictions and to embed the reader discursively with the soldiers’ experiences. At the end, although their operation in the thirteenth valley is successful, the bodies of their exemplary African American platoon leader, platoon sergeant, and medic are left behind under fire, and the book’s once naive and idealistic central protagonist, James “Cherry” Chelini, has become an almost psychotic berserker, brushing off (for now) the loss of men he had come to love with the chilling GI mantra “Don’t mean nothing.” These three combat novels were written by soldiers whose tours of duty comprised the years 1967–1969, but they were published between 1977 and 1982 in the wake of America’s catastrophic failure, when Chelini’s mantra would have comprised a futile destructiveness broader and more inclusive than one meaninglessly successful operation in 1970. Although the heroism and the brutality of GIs and Marines under nearly impossible combat conditions are the common trope of virtually every realistic narrative, they also function as exposures of ultimate failure, whether the reader attributes it to the military or political authorities in charge of the war. “Virtues Rewarded and other Crimes,” the title of Part Three of Webb’s novel, bitterly sums up his charge against those who were ultimately responsible for defeat.
America’s ultimate loss in Viet Nam is crucial to the more limited combat stories that Del Vecchio and others created and, perhaps, to the final postwar pain that may have inspired those stories. Such pain was certainly experienced by the Vietnam generation of Americans who initially supported the war and who were at least theoretically prepared to “bear any burden, pay any price” to defend and support “freedom.” Initial support for the war rested on shared unexamined assumptions and principles that have frayed almost beyond recovery in the wake of that war and the ones that have followed: that communism was a monolithic political, moral, and economic evil potentially more powerful than democratic capitalism; that America had never lost a war and would never lose one; that when it did fight, it was pursuing a just cause and it always fought justly; and that its ideological principles and practices were welcome to people all over the world and could help transform their own societies positively. The war in Viet Nam exposed and contested all of these commonly shared beliefs, and the national conflict over that exposure constitutes the peculiarly and exclusively American metonym “Vietnam,” which as Renny Christopher (1995: 2) and other critics have warned, is not to be confused with or to efface the people and nation of Viet Nam, with its independent political identity and culture.
Within the vast body of American film and literature of the war itself, the most important and pervasive exploded illusion is moral idealism. The American invasion of Iraq and the abuses of Abu Ghraib were decades away when the citizens and the soldiers of America embarked on what they largely believed was a righteous war against communist aggression and totalitarianism in which they would be welcomed as liberators motivated by the best of intentions, whatever might be the necessary violence and destruction to effect their purpose. While hideous physical wounds and disabling psychic trauma pervaded both the Vietnam War experience and its representations, the moral wounds of the war are often as prominent in those representations, and they raise the most significant works to a level of imaginative and dramatic seriousness that is the hallmark of the most valuable works. While neither James Webb, John Del Vecchio, nor other veteran writers believe that the war was either unjust or fought unjustly, thousands of soldiers were involved in actions and operations that left them feeling guilty or ashamed, and those with post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were morally as well as psychically wounded. The war in Viet Nam thus radically undercut important tenets of American exceptionalism: not only did the United States lose this war but, to many former soldiers as well as other citizens, it did so while pursuing an unjust war and fighting it unjustly, a moral wounding that was literally exposed in the My Lai war crimes investigation of 1969. Beginning at least as early as the march against the Pentagon in 1967, the national debate over the war’s morality (as well its strategy and purpose) was the most important political issue in American life for the next decade and the most important component of that distinctively American political, moral, economic, and cultural episteme that may be labeled “Vietnam,” a term that Americans continue to use in reference to the undoing of their national character brought about by the war in Viet Nam.
The four Vietnam novels that have won National Book Awards, beginning with Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers (1974), illustrate this extension of the war. Only the beginning of Stone’s novel is set in Viet Nam (a malevolently corrupt, inferno‐like Saigon, which Stone had visited briefly in 1971), where an American correspondent, John Converse, picks up a shipment of heroin and transports it to California. The heroin and its deadly and/or morally corrupting effect on everyone in the novel figuratively transfers the poisoning effects of America’s involvement in the war to the homeland. Although Tim O’Brien’s protagonist Paul Berlin in Going After Cacciato (1978) is a soldier pulling guard duty in Quang Ngai Province, he spends the entire night of the novel remembering in detail the earlier deaths of his comrades or imagining the chase of a deserter all the way to Paris, the site of the early stages of the Paris Peace Talks in spring 1969, but also the place where the United States was born as a nation at an earlier peace conference in 1781. Paco’s Story (1986), Heinemann’s award‐winning second novel, begins in the United States, where his earlier quasi‐autobiographical combat novel had ended. Here, however, the horrific war experiences of its physically, psychically, and morally crippled protagonist are interjected intrusively by an omniscient narrator who can tell the story that Paco cannot, which culminates with the annihilation of everyone else in his company by an apocalyptic artillery barrage of friendly fire after they have raped and killed a VC girl. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (2007), which begins on 22 November 1963, metonymically recreates the terrible darkening of JFK’s anti‐communist crusade in Asia, from early CIA operations in the Philippines through the aftermath in Minneapolis of Operation Baby Lift, eight years after the evacuation from Saigon. None of these prize‐winning works are conventional war novels situated in Viet Nam, yet each participates significantly in the representation of Vietnam as a variously destructive, immoral, or tragic American experience centered in the war and in Viet Nam but not limited to either experience or setting.
Like the vast majority of American stories, plays, poems, and films, the subject of these novels includes America as refracted in the light of Vietnam, not the actual war that was fought in Vietnam, and certainly not the Vietnamese themselves, whether “friendly” or hostile. As important studies of the war literature by Milton Bates (The Wars We Took to Vietnam [1996]) and Katherine Kinney (Friendly Fire [2000]) argue, the civil war among Americans (e.g. black vs. white, officer vs. draftee, peacenik vs. patriot, soldier vs. civilian, male vs. female) is often more important than the fight against the Vietnamese enemy. Even realistic combat novels typically critique the lost war, as in Matterhorn’s devastating representation of deadly careerism and incompetence among field grade officers at the expense of their men. More metaphorical and metafictional works like Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) or O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1994) align themselves with radical and extended critiques (e.g. Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation [1992]) of American history as the myth of an elect nation. Such a perspective does not see the war as an anomaly but as the logical outcome of America’s drang nach westen, or, in the words of Michael Herr’s post hoc prophecy, “Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter; might just as well lay it on the proto‐Gringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up with their own imported devils” (1977: 49). Herr’s subsequent reference to the demise of Alden Pyle, Graham Greene’s naively dangerous CIA agent, invokes perhaps the most significant of all prophetic anticipations of America’s tragedy in Viet Nam, and even though the author was an Englishman covering the aftermath of France’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia, The Quiet American (1955) is a frequent source of dark enlightenment for subsequent American writers. If “it was already over for us in Indochina when [Pyle’s] body washed up under the bridge at Dakao” (1977: 49), as Herr hypothesizes, that belated recognition would take at least 40 years to be registered and, as Herr notes, since it “happened in a novel” it likely would have been ignored by policy makers.
Yet the distinction between fiction and non‐fiction in literary representations of Vietnam breaks down in many of them. In the Lake of the Woods (1994), Matterhorn (2011), and Ward Just’s novel A Dangerous Friend (2001), set in Saigon among civilian managers of the war in 1965, all won the Cooper Prize of the Society of American Historians. Conversely, with few exceptions (e.g. Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk [1983]), the most valuable of the numerous non‐fictional memoirs of the war by combat veterans reproduce but also reshape those experiences into exemplary testimonies or critiques of the war’s larger moral and imaginative significance, as sometimes reflected in their titles (e.g. Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July [1976], Tobias Woolf’s In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War [1994], Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War [1977]). A memoir like Caputo’s (with its quasi‐literary biblical title and section and chapter epigraphs from the Roman military strategist Vegetius to Shakespeare to Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon) exemplifies the standard stages of virtually all realistic American combat narratives, whether “fictional” or “non‐fictional”: transition from civilian to military identity; basic training; arrival in and orientation to Viet Nam; first combat and subsequent operations of the year‐long tour (sometimes with changes of assignment to occupational specialties and/or new units); rest and recreational leave; leaving Viet Nam; returning home and readjusting to what has happened in the war. Variations on this standard pattern are found throughout war narratives, including A Rumor of War, which ends with Caputo’s honorable discharge from the Marines in 1966 after undergoing a trial for murder of two Vietnamese civilians in a war that he has come to find criminally unwinnable. Yet Caputo, like Herr, could not finish his book, published 10 years after he had left Viet Nam, without an epilogue that describes the desolating closure of the war’s end, when he returned to Saigon, now as a war correspondent, a witness and a participant in the final evacuation of Americans and South Vietnamese.
For Don Ringnalda, it is the deliberately non‐linear, absurdist representations of the war that have represented it most valuably for audiences and readers in need of moral and political enlightenment, and therefore Dispatches is the only non‐fictional first‐person narrative that he analyzes in Fighting and Writing (1994), his comprehensive survey of the genres of Vietnam literature. While personal memoir and autobiography have attempted to present a circumstantially true account of the war, drama is the genre least able and least satisfied to reproduce a narrowly mimetic account, and therefore for Ringnalda it is Vietnam War playwrights “who most need to be watched and listened to” (1994: 205). They are certainly the most directly polemical, as Nora Alter’s study Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996) surveys and celebrates. Two less polemical examples by women playwrights are Emily Mann’s Still Life (1980), staged as a post‐traumatic confession of a war crime by its only male protagonist, and Maria Irene Fornes’s A Vietnamese Wedding (1967), which encouraged spectators and actors, all participating in a traditional Vietnamese wedding ceremony, to incarnate Viet Nam imaginatively as a people and a culture that transcend the war.
David Rabe, who worked as a combat medic in Saigon during his year in the war (1967), has produced the most substantial body of dramatic work, a trio of plays that judged the war a catastrophe long before it came to an end, as an early version of the third play and both of the first two were written as early as 1969. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) takes Pavlo through a series of disconnected, quasi‐expressionist scenes from basic training to a sordid and meaningless death by fragging in a Saigon bar, while Sticks and Bones (1971) is an absurdist postwar play that rewrites the popular Ozzie and Harriet television show with racist overtones, as the returning veteran David, traumatized by the criminality of the war and his abandonment of a Vietnamese lover, is led to commit suicide by his parents and younger brother. Streamers (1976), the most critically acclaimed of the plays, is also the most conventional and realistic in its seamless two‐hour action, and the least war‐centered, since its setting and action are confined to an army barracks sometime before 1967 and none of its six principals ever get to Viet Nam: two of them, a young soldier waiting for his overseas orders and an older Korean War veteran, are murdered by a troubled black draftee, also waiting for orders. Streamers viscerally illustrates Katherine Kinney’s thesis that American Vietnam literature is about America, not Viet Nam, and its themes of racism, homophobia, and male violence illustrate Rabe’s final judgment in an Afterword to an edition of his Vietnam plays (1993):
The humanity of the men wandering the nightmarish circumstances that gave Vietnam its identity is always present in the plays, as is the way its stress mixed decency and dutifulness, stimulating desperation and savagery and selfishness. Nobility marched with folly and ignorance. Innocence stood beside men who were petty, misguided, and mean. Fear and courage shared the night with sadism and heroism. (1993: 195)
Rabe’s paradoxical testimony is most intensely realized in the huge body of first‐person poetry that was provoked by the war, perhaps the greatest body of war poetry in English since World War I. “Illumination Rounds,” Herr’s title for the fourth section of Dispatches, aptly characterizes the best of these pieces, which often violently force open the reader’s eyes and imagination to register unsettling moral, psychological, and ideological truths that are embedded with the most particularized, circumstantial details of the war in American Vietnam literature. Among the dozen greatest poems is the title poem of Weigl’s collection Song of Napalm (1988), a title that mocks our notion of lyric poetry even as it upsets our understanding of war and the warrior. The word “napalm” enters the poem only twice, emerging just at the end of the middle line of the middle stanza of the poem’s 45 lines, where it collapses the distinction between a green field in Ohio after a thunderstorm, where the poem begins, and the (napalmed) “stinking jungle,” which suddenly intrudes upon the speaker’s vision so that, he laments, a Vietnamese girl is “burned beyond my eyes” now, again, and forever “into that final position / burning bodies so perfectly assume.” By the end, he can only partially recover the “jungle‐green pasture” in front of him and his wife and the unchangeable truth that neither her love nor the cleansing “rain‐swept air” (1988: 35) of Ohio can undo or deny what happened and what he saw in the war.
War memories and trauma are not always so explicitly or so powerfully registered, but like “Song of Napalm” the very best poetry carries with it a moral or ethical charge as well an emotional one. Besides first‐person experiences, many war poems provide striking mini‐narratives that outlast the war itself. In “Rice Will Grow Again,” Frank A. Cross, Jr. recalls how a GI named Mitch committed a common war crime in VC‐controlled territory, killing a rice farmer whose attempt to plant a “shoot” seems hostile and threatening and who curses him as he dies, promising that “The rice will / Grow again!” And so it does, the narrator notes, on “dark nights / In Kansas,” when “The farmer comes to / Mitch’s bed: / And plants rice shoots / all around” (Ehrhart 1989: 79). The poems and collections of Weigl, John Balaban, W.D. Ehrhart, Yusef Kumanyakaa (who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Dien Cai Dau [1988]), and Walter McDonald are among the most important poetic representations and judgments on the war, and each voice, like each poem, reflects what is distinctive and uneffaceable about each writer’s experience of the war.
The grim hallmarks of Vietnam fiction, memoir, drama, and poetry are found in Vietnam films. If “cinema involves putting the eye into uniform, when before it was naked,” as Franz Kafka lamented (Hoyles 1991: 171), it seems nonetheless the perfect medium to most Americans for the most authentic mimesis of the experience of the war. Expectations of the war film as a genre are partly responsible for the saturated violence of so many of these films, but so too is the basic function of hyperrealistic literary representations: exposing (in the title of Karl Marlantes’s post‐Matterhorn memoir and meditation) What It Is Like to Go to War (2011). Vietnam War movies enlist viewers’ expectations of combat in ways that more directly capture soldiers’ experience of anticipated yet sudden and unexpected violence from an unseen and seemingly invisible enemy who might appear at any time. In the best examples (e.g. the opening scene of We Were Soldiers or much of Platoon), what might seem mundane details in another film are charged with expectant arousal until the screen explodes. The film adaptation by Norman Jewison (1989) of Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985), the one canonical Vietnam War novel authored by a woman, exemplifies this need to satisfy the expectation of sudden violence. While Samantha Hughes, Mason’s teenage heroine, explores the war indirectly (like all readers) by going through her father’s alternately taciturn and morally disgusting diary, the film shifts its own scene from a swamp in postwar Kentucky to a swamp in Vietnam, where we see her father and his unit annihilated by an enemy mortar barrage, an event that is necessarily missing from Sam’s testament of her father’s fate. Like In Country, some of the most significant Vietnam films (e.g. Go Tell the Spartans [1978] and First Blood [1982]) have eclipsed their literary sources (novels by Daniel Ford and John Morrell) by extracting the figural potential from circumstantial written narratives and recreating them as quasi‐mythic parables: the war in Viet Nam as a replay of Thermopylae and Dien Bien Phu; the Vietnam veteran as an alien in his own country.
The grandest of the figural war films are Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978), released within a year of each other. Both films include spectacularly violent scenes within the war, and the sunrise First Air Cavalry descent upon what had been a silent Vietnamese hamlet, with its operatic sensorium of the Teutonic myth of the Valkyries, is probably the scene that audiences most identify with Coppola’s spectacularly over budget reprise of Heart of Darkness, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Golden Bough, ritual animal sacrifice, and a thermonuclear final solution to human violence. Coppola’s vision rewrites the war as an insane enterprise ludicrously or inappropriately introjecting America into Viet Nam (surfing, barbecues, Playboy Bunnies, drugs), on the one hand, and reducing the Vietnamese to barbaric political violence (cutting off the arms of children vaccinated by the Americans) and, ultimately, Stone Age decapitations of water buffaloes and human beings. As in other works, the ultimate conflict is between Americans (e.g. Captain Willard versus Colonel Kurtz) or even between good and evil in the American (male) psyche. Willard ultimately rejects his dark side, but to do so he must both kill Kurtz and condemn the men whose orders he lethally follows out, a peculiarly American catharsis through violence that contrasts with the “noble lie” that Marlow tells to Kurtz’s Intended in Heart of Darkness to cover up the things that men do.
Coppola’s Vietnam vision thus attempts to transcend the war in Viet Nam by mythologizing American violence. Cimino’s vision simply rejects Viet Nam and sees the war as a tragedy for Americans who fought there. Three of Willard’s four comrades die in Viet Nam, and Lance, the one survivor, becomes one of Kurtz’s followers. Of The Deer Hunter’s three steelworker friends who fight in Viet Nam, Nick (like Lance) succumbs to its lethal influence before his body is returned to the United States; Stevie returns as a paraplegic; and only Robert de Niro’s Michael survives the war intact and attempts, with mixed success, to rescue his two beloved friends. Deer hunting, Russian Orthodox religious services, steel working, and spending free time at the bar constitute the working‐class cultural ceremonies of Cimino’s Pennsylvania soldiers, but the film’s title furnishes the fundamental trope that associates his hero with American literature and the American myth of masculine virtue. Michael is not crippled or destroyed by the war, but he is changed, unable any more to function as a “one shot” deerslayer, and in need of love. The scenes in Viet Nam take up the middle of the film and include violent combat action and scenes of desolation and despair among crowds of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the war, but Cimino’s helpless Americans are captured and tortured, and the film (in)famously uses the dark ceremony of Russian roulette as a trope for the alien murderousness of the war, associating it with both North and South Vietnamese and a symbolic Frenchman who only leaves Saigon when the Americans do. Like Caputo and Herr, Cimino vividly represents the end of the war, using newsreel footage of the evacuation of Saigon in spring 1975 while following Michael’s failed attempt to stop Nick from playing one last game of roulette and blowing his brains out with “one shot.” The final scene in Welsh’s Lounge the morning after Nick’s funeral in Clairton brings the survivors together as an extended American family, but even this tragic catharsis is a crippled gesture: a dark, faint, and solemn “God Bless America” punctuated with sobs.
During a post‐wedding party in the lounge just before The Deer Hunter moves to Viet Nam, a spectral Green Beret enters and orders a drink. Asked by the three friends about the war they are about to enter, he spits out “fuck it” twice. John Irvin’s Hamburger Hill (1987), one of the best sheer combat films, registers a similar but more significant judgment. The great heroism of the GIs who in 1969 successfully stormed the seemingly impregnable NVA positions atop Apbia Mountain is here graphically presented in all its traumatizing carnage, and it transcends problems of racial divisions, resentment against officers, and hatred of anti‐war civilians that were typical in the Army after 1968. At the end of the film, however, as throughout, the soldiers’ judgment of their victory, of the losses they have incurred, and of the certainty of subsequent sacrifices is brutally accurate: “don’t mean nothin’” (the NVA reoccupied their position a month later – and took back their country six years later). Like The Deer Hunter and Hamburger Hill, American films of the war itself are either condemnatory, tragic, or both. At best, it is represented as a terrible experience with survival the only light at the end of the tunnel.
The belatedness of Vietnam War films is even more striking than that of Vietnam literature, since virtually every significant Vietnam War film was produced after the war had been lost. Perhaps because it was such a polarizing and politically radioactive issue from at least 1967 onward and because Americans were still fighting and dying in Viet Nam for the next six years, neither Hollywood nor independent film producers were willing to fund any combat films prior to America’s withdrawal (except for the egregiously unprophetic The Green Berets in 1968), though important anti‐war documentaries were released by major studios and some even won Academy Awards (Woodstock [1970] and Hearts and Minds [1974]). There is even more emphasis on defeat and ultimate waste in American war films than in American Vietnam literature, perhaps since no filmmakers had been participants in the war but were able to capitalize on the nearly universal revulsion with its outcome among Americans, whether they had supported or opposed it. The release between 1977 and 1979 of Coming Home and Go Tell the Spartans as well as the epics of Coppola and Cimino constituted the first wave of Hollywood films reflecting the now fully confirmed disaster of the war, and another group of important 1980s films by major directors (e.g. Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket [1987], Brian de Palma’s Casualties of War [1989]) was initiated by Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), the first of his three Vietnam films.
Something of a cinematic counterpart to David Rabe’s Vietnam work, Stone’s trilogy similarly moves into and then away from the war, presenting a hyperrealist morality play in the first film (which enters the jungle near its beginning and does not exit until the final shot), followed by Stone’s 1989 film version of Ron Kovic’s childhood to adult memoir that situates its combat trauma in the center of a story that ends with the damaged hero’s denunciation of the war from his wheelchair at the 1972 Republican National Convention and his subsequent redemption at the Democratic Convention in 1976. The third film, Heaven and Earth (1993), an adaptation of Le Ly Hayslip’s memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace (1989), incorporates some details of her new life in America from the sequel Child of War, Woman of Peace (1993). Less successful and less critically acclaimed than his first two films (both of which won Oscars for best direction), Heaven and Earth at least attempts to provide a perspective on Vietnam that is largely missing from American literature and film of the war: not only a woman’s point of view, but also an extraordinarily complex Vietnamese perspective. While the film simplifies its heroine’s testimony and shifts its balance of attention toward the story of her troubled husband (played by Tommy Lee Jones), it nonetheless anticipates what has become a growing shift of attention in Vietnam literature toward the Vietnamese American diasporic experience, as reflected in later films like Green Dragon (2001) and The Beautiful Country (2004).
Very little American Vietnam literature or film deals with the people among whom and the land in which the war was fought beyond the novels and stories of Robert Olen Butler (whose collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain [1992] gave voice to the Vietnamese of mid‐1990s Louisiana and won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) and the Southeast Asian and postwar fictions of Wayne Karlin, whose work as an editor for Curbstone Press was instrumental in the publication of contemporary Vietnamese literature for American readers from 1995 through 2009. Like the postwar memoirs of William Broyles, Ehrhart, Heinemann, Weigl, and a number of other former American soldiers who became writers, Karlin’s work includes an account of his returns to Viet Nam in War Movies: Journeys to Vietnam (2005).
Such works, which might be seen as postwar supplements to the war narratives and poetry of the generation of American writers who either served in the war or were in country during it (from Frances Fitzgerald to John Balaban), might be characterized as “peace” literature. They also raise the question of what American Vietnam War literature might become once the “Vietnam generation” passes on. One answer, it is clear, is the continuing story of Vietnamese Americans and of American identity itself in an era when xenophobic and even racist political appeals seem to be clashing with broader American myths of inclusiveness, immigrant assimilation, and multiculturalism. Vietnamese American writers like the essayist and short fiction writer Andrew Lam, the poet Truong Tranh, novelists Monique Truong and Lan Cao, travel writer Andrew X. Pham, memoirist Nguyen Qui Duc, playwright Qui Nguyen, graphic novelist G.B. Tran, and Linh Dinh (poet, story writer, novelist) use the American war only as a starting point for new Vietnamese and American identities and destinies, typically focused on family rather than simply individual experience. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s extraordinary 2016 Pulitizer Prize‐winning novel about a Vietnamese counter‐spy suspended between two flawed histories and cultures, as well as his Vietnamese exiles short story collection, The Refugees (2017), marks a new level of literary and public recognition of that tragic American and Vietnamese story.
A second answer, tied at least indirectly to the first, is the return of debilitating symptoms of the Vietnam syndrome in the American wars without ends in the Middle East. The most telling symptom linking Vietnam with Iraq and Afghanistan is the overwhelming incidence of PTSD among American soldiers who have carried home with them the physical and psychic consequences of repeated tours of duty. Although almost no literature or movies that cross over from the war in Viet Nam to the wars that have succeeded them have yet appeared, they are likely to emerge. Literary and cultural criticism has already merged them, from a handful of essays in the collection Thirty Years After that I edited in 2005 to Reading Vietnam Amid the War on Terror (2012), Ty Hawkins’s seminal rereading of five canonical Vietnam writers (Caputo, Herr, Heinemann, O’Brien, Mason) in the aftermath of our continuing post‐Vietnam wars. Conversely, in “The Ghost that Won’t be Exorcised: Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story” (Boyle 2015: 137–158), Stacey Peebles uses her analysis of Paco’s trauma to illuminate America’s torture of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib.
While literary works and films focused on the American war in Viet Nam might be expected to recede in significance and frequency as the years go on and to become associated with a generation of American artists tied to a particular event and era, Vietnam is likely to influence literature and film considerations of American identity as well as America’s involvement with and interventions in the rest of the world for some time. Literary and cultural criticism of such works is likely to evolve as well. As with much of the canonical literature and film, most of the pathbreaking and subsequent criticism of the war was by white male war veterans, beginning with Philip Beidler, the dean of Vietnam literary critics. Objections by critics like Renny Christopher, Kali Tal, and Lorrie Smith to privileging of combat veterans’ experiences and interpretations of those experiences, assimilating Vietnam War literature within American literary and normative ideological traditions, and omitting Vietnamese points of view point to a significant body of at least quasi‐feminist criticism that has perhaps become the most pointed counter to earlier commentary on literary and cinematic representations of the war.
The most recent collection of essays on the war (The Vietnam War [2015]), edited by Brenda Boyle, may point a way forward. Six of its seven chapters were written by female critics, and while these include interpretations of canonical writers like O’Brien and Heinemann, they also provide a new Vietnamese‐inflected, post‐9/11 reading of Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country as well as chapters focused on (North) Vietnamese war literature and on le thi diem thuy’s novel of the Vietnamese diaspora, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003), written by the Vietnamese American author of the first critical study of that literature. As noted, Peebles focuses on both Vietnam and Iraq, and Boyle’s concluding study brilliantly uses masculinist totemic ideology to critique Tree of Smoke and Matterhorn as well as Tatyana Soli’s The Lotus Eaters (2010), the most recent novel of the war in Viet Nam, whose protagonist, Helen Adams, an American woman correspondent who covers the war from its beginning in 1965 through its end and who emerges from the hell of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, “come back from the dead” to rejoin her South Vietnamese lover Linh at the end of the novel. Boyle provides a valuable, forward‐looking Introduction for those interested in Vietnam 40 years after, and her “Further Reading” list features works by diasporic, female, and non‐combat authors. Boyle’s collection and the novels that she critiques remind us that “the lessons of Vietnam” have been badly learned but that the rich body of literature and film that have emerged from the war is being supplemented by new works and new perspectives on that tragedy.
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