The Vietnam War, Reascendant Conservatism, White Victims

Terry Collins

General College
University of Minnesota
<tcollins@gcmail.gen.umn.edu>

 

Rowe, John Carlos, and Rick Berg, eds. The Vietnam War and American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

 

Jason, Philip K., ed. Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1991.

 

The Bloom-D’Souza-NEA-NEH silencing of feminist and multiculturalist positions, trivialized in the popular press as tritely inflated rhetorical agonics over who gets control of the English Department budget and reading list, masks the larger struggle for control of ideology in America, for the terms of our history and future. The contested discourse of intellectual authority and privilege extends directly from reinscription of the Vietnam War, and both are central to the conservative reascendance of the Reagan-Bush period.

 

The willful national amnesia about the U.S. war in/on Vietnam is, in fact, prerequisite to the current domestic war against the intellectual left. Revisionist history of the Vietnam war is transubstantiative to the conservative reascendance from war criminal status to uncontested author of a “New World Order.” The right has asserted and then reaped the fruit of the myth of rectitude planted and nurtured by Reagan’s reinvention of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause.” This re-creation of the war has gone virtually unchallenged. Norman Podhoretz was able to write, in Why We Were in Vietnam (Simon and Schuster, 1982), that the war was an act of “imprudent idealism whose moral soundness has been overwhelmingly vindicated”– with barely a stir of outrage in the popular press voicing opposition to this macabre rewriting. Equally little notice was taken when, phoenix- like, Richard Nixon issued No More Vietnams (Arbor House, 1985), his self-serving apology for genocide. Celebrating the exorcism of the “ghost of Vietnam” under Reagan, Nixon gloats that “Since President Reagan took office in 1981, America’s first international losing streak has been halted.” He writes (and gets away with it), “Of all the myths about the Vietnam War, the most vicious one is the idea that the United States was morally responsible for the atrocities committed after the fall (sic) of Cambodia in 1975,” dismissing the laws of cause and effect as neatly as he does the idea of truth.

 

The reclamation of the hearts and minds of the American suburban diaspora, relieving the national consciousness of the burden of the “Vietnam syndrome” (a cynical rearticulation of what might have passed, in a reasonable moral climate, for something like depression growing out of deserved collective guilt), was a prerequisite for the conservative reascendance that so enervates the intellectual discourse of our era. Once vindicated and remythologized, the right launched its Education/NEA/NEH-mediated search- and-destroy mission at home, Bloom, Bennett, Hirsch and D’Souza walking point, on radio to Helms and the Onanites, tipping Coors at recon.

 

It is logical to look to oppositional discourses in the fiction and film of the Vietnam War for relief. But, in fact, the relative absence of a collective public rejection of and response to the revisionist readings of our war in/on Vietnam is problematized by the personal, fictive, and cinematic narratives of grunt-vets, journalist-vets, and medical-vets who write, from oppositional postures, their experiences in the war. Michael Herr, Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, William Eastlake, Oliver Stone, and the other writers featured in the criticism collected in the books reviewed here have (no doubt authentically, no doubt painfully) written large the psychic and ethical dislocation of young men inserted into the survivalist landscape of the free-fire zone. The problem is this: the prose and cinematic fictions fragment and monadize the war, make it a matter of individual(ist) survival–ethically, bodily. It is easy to imagine the origins of such texts. The stunningly horrid collective lies, pandered by government agents in the pressrooms of Vietnam, had to be countered, producing Dispatches. The clean, faceless, stinkless body counts had to be countered by Paco’s Story.

 

But Hemingway’s dictum–that fiction tells truer truths about war than history–distorts. The memoirs, fictions, and films which recreate the Vietnam War as primarily a matter of the individual ethical and bodily survival of articulate white men, rather than as genocide, simply reconstitute this as a war of blue-eyed victims. And in the struggle for the history of this war, these fictions, most powerfully those intended as narratives of resistance to LBJ-Kissinger-Nixon, stand complicit, by making Vietnam the individual’s story, a war on Vietnamese peasants reconstructed as a war valorizing the white American grunt’s individual ethical and physical pain, however real. In the most powerful of the Vietnam War books and films, it is still a white American war, a white American morality play enacted on a stage built of dead Asians, albeit an individualist drama sometimes brilliantly re-read for the violently sexist and misogynist spectacle that the Vietnam War was/is.

 

But in fact this was/is a war on the brown-eyed, and no fictional, cinematic, or critical gloss will make it otherwise. In the field of vision in these narratives, the individual white man’s pain obscures our view of American minorities dying and bleeding, all out of proportion to their numbers. Above all, the individual(ist) pain of the white GI, struggling with his soul, blocks whatever light the authors might want to have shined on Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian men, women, children burning, being raped, zipped, zapped, poisoned, free-fired, dis-eared, and forgotten against the glow and smell of white phosphorous, the jell of napalm. The best-written of the novels, the best-made of the films, are most disturbing in this failure. Oppositional by intention, they finally effect a conspiracy of eloquence. As textual representations of the war as the cauldron of the individual white American male soul’s struggle, they Tonto-ize the minority experience and overtly replace MyLai-scapes as the national memory, reaffirming the American master narratives of white male individualism and rebirth.

 

Furthermore, the best Vietnam narratives represent a reading of Vietnam as anomaly. Far from anomaly, the Vietnam War was/is an exceptionally logical outgrowth of U.S. history and policy. Vietnam may have been Manifest Destiny’s most compellingly horrid spectacle, but it was not an aberrant moment. The more painfully eloquent the struggle of individual grunts represented in these narratives, and the more compelling their individual struggles to adjust ethical calibrations to the horror show of the killing field, the more fully obscured is the historical consistency of Vietnam. And the more obscured our vision of the historical consistency of this genocidal strain of American hegemony becomes, the less likely are we to see the same truth embodied in our contemporary American cityscapes, our drug wars, our increasingly brown-eyed urban villes which putrefy under intentional, national neglect. To atomize the Vietnam War’s reality in its textual representation, to portray it as the individual struggle for physical/ethical survival (rather than as a logically constructed episode leading out of expansionist centuries, leading out of Indian genocide, leading out of slavery, and leading into the New World Order) is to deny the centrality of Vietnam and its consistency with American history. To the extent that the Vietnam War is represented as primarily the individual white male’s struggle with his conscience in an aberrant territory, the war becomes peripheral to our understanding of the national epistemology of slash-and-burn, rape-and-control, genocide. Tim O’Brien’s Paul Berlin Going After Cacciato) Larry Heinemann’s Paco Paco’s Story), and their fictive brothers-in-arms may have been conceived in rage, remorse, or celebration of survival, but as atomized agents, they are surely close cousins to John Rambo.

 

The collections of essays reviewed here move in and out of coherent visions of the central position occupied by the Vietnam War and by its reinvention as part of the rightist national myth. Interestingly, they follow on the heels of John Hellmann’s American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (Columbia UP, 1986). Hellmann’s book ends in a call to America to integrate this “nightmare” somehow (via Lucasfilms, he suggests!) into the traditional white American myth of the new world Adam/new world Order. Therefore, the Rowe/Berg and Jason collections are tacitly positioned against Hellmann’s invitation to wishful denial.

 

The Vietnam War and American Culture grew out of a special issue of Cultural Critique (1986), edited by Rowe and Berg. Of the two collections under review, it is the more consistently aggressive in demanding historical and cultural integrity of the novels, memoirs, and films which attempt to represent the Vietnam War. It is introduced by a long, lucid essay by Noam Chomsky which argues a reading of the Vietnam War as exercise in national slavery to privilege, predicting the reascendant right’s inscription of a canonized discourse of the Vietnam War as erasure of historical consciousness in the service of elites. Divided into sections on “The Vietnam War and History,” “The Vietnam War and Mass Media,” and “The Vietnam War and Popular Media,” the Rowe/Berg collection contains nine strong essays and (as a fitting close to a volume that theorizes the human experience of the war) a sampling of fine concrete poems by W. D. Ehrhart.

 

Of the essays in Rowe/Berg, three–besides the Chomsky piece–are stunning. The dilemma of the atomized-male- coming-of-age narratives is addressed directly (though in terms quite different from those I use above) by Susan Jeffords. Her essay, “Tattoos, Scars, Diaries, and Writing Masculinity,” re-reads the Vietnam War and the rich lode of male fiction about the War (including oppositional fiction from the left) as misogynist acts and icons. The essay anticipates the extended argument she develops in The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Indiana UP, 1989). Rick Berg, in “Losing Vietnam: Covering the War in an Age of Technology,” posits TV and film readings of the war as foundational of the revisionist gestures that would follow: “What is lost and forgotten with each imagined win are those who fought and suffered. It is all well and good to turn Vietnam vets into heroes, but not at the expense of their children and their history. As Brecht’s Mother Courage reminds us, war profiteering has a long, honorable, and expensive history. I wonder if Stallone and his fellow revisionists are willing to pay the price.” And John Carlos Rowe struggles with the conflation of documentary and docudramatic accounts of the war in film as devices which foster a false sympathy with its (white male) victims in “substituting myth for knowledge.”

 

The essays in Rowe/Berg are consistently clear, expansive, well-documented, and respectful of the historical and human pain their subject embodies.

 

The essays collected in Philip K. Jason’s Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature are self-consciously tentative. Jason positions them as “paths,” not fully realized or conclusive readings. It’s a reasonable humility that takes such a stance before the enormity of this war and its varied literature, it seems. And at their best, the essays test the popular readings of the war, the prevailing ideologies captured in myth, against history or close analysis. At their worst, though, the essays whine, as only the terminally academic can, “Let’s talk about me!” Some of these essays lose sight of the blood and bone.

 

Lorrie Smith’s “Poetry by Vietnam War Veterans” is less essay than it is prosodic connective among eloquent poetic chunks. Wisely, I think, she mutes her analytic discourse in favor of a type of reading that we used to call “appreciation”–she lets the poetic fragments weave themselves into the eventual essay. Jacqueline E. Lawson’s “She’s a Pretty Woman . . . for a Gook,” like the Jeffords essay in Rowe/Berg, examines the war in view of contemporary theories of misogyny, rape, and media-proliferated degradations of women. Kali Tal’s “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Pain” reads the war and its writing in the company of theorists of the literature of extremity, most usefully Terrence Des Pres’s study of Holocaust literature in The Survivor. Tal gives a smart, but too tentative critique of Hellmann and the other mythic-apologist readings of this literature. These three essays are the strongest in the book, to my mind.

 

At its worst, the tentative nature of essays in the Jason collection fosters a lapse into a kind of new critical reduction of the literature of the Vietnam War. Stuart Ching’s “‘A Hard Story to Tell’: The Vietnam War in Joan Didion’s Democracy,” for example, seems satisfied to examine the literature as “Literature,” pretending to neither a breathing reader nor a positioned writer.

 

Understanding the Vietnam War and its literature probably isn’t possible. Conflicted writings-toward such an understanding serve two mutually exclusive functions, are built on internal contradictions. In the one instance, our studies–even the most thoughtful and humanely analytical–must stylize Vietnam, reinscribe it out of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of Vietnams that rattle around in the heads of vets and their families, that scream in the heads of Vietnamese people, that moan from the graves. And thereby, our studies must trivialize the war, its causes, and its consequences. That war existed so many ways, was so many wars, that its fictions will reinvent only fragments, and thereby re-fragment the whole, will situate its atrocities in physical and psychic landscapes, moral landscapes, textual landscapes, that are individual. All such atomized textualizations of atrocities of this scale must themselves be atrocities. In the other instance, we submit to the Nixonian re-inventions, the Reaganesque “noble cause” narrative. The first is the path of choice, quite clearly. Rowe/Berg and Jason move us toward that ambiguous end.

 

Tonight, as I write, L.A. burns, troops are in our streets, the war is on TV again. Black men are the gooks this time.