A few years ago when I began teaching the American literature of the Vietnam War, I tried to find an anthology my students could use—a book that collected all the major work in one place. This didn’t seem far-fetched; the war had been over for twenty years, and thousands of books had been written about it. But as I searched through libraries and catalogues, new- and used-book shops, I discovered there wasn’t one.
Yes, there were anthologies, but most were out of print and none put together all the pieces I considered essential. Some were fitted together like polemics, others relied too heavily on dull reportage. There were solid poetry anthologies, most notably W. D. Ehrhart’s Carrying the Darkness, but few books had tried to collect everything—the fiction, the oral histories, the memoirs, the films, the photos—and those that did inevitably had gaps. Imagine a comprehensive Vietnam anthology without the work of Michael Herr or Tim O’Brien or Larry Heinemann, without a healthy sampling of the oral histories, without a single mention of Platoon, without Ronald Haeberle’s famous picture of the ditch at My Lai.
Instead of ordering a single volume and sending my students to the campus store, I began digging through the individual novels and poetry collections, poring over the photographic essays, watching the films, taking notes, making photocopies. I haunted the used-book stores for sadly out-of-print work, borrowed books from colleagues, sat in the stacks of libraries. What I finally came up with was a course packet weighing in at around six pounds, the permissions for which were impossible to secure in time for the semester.
While I’ve cut a great deal from that original manuscript, this book remains true to its core. I believe I’ve chosen and hunted down the elusive permissions for the best and best known works about the war, selections that will give the reader both an essential overview and a deep understanding of how America has seen its time in Vietnam over the past thirty years.
Any Vietnam anthology should bring its reader closer to the war, and in teaching my course I found that one way to accomplish that, beyond presenting students with the usual literature, was to include such powerful and immediate material as photographs, films, and popular songs. They bring the war home inescapably, in the same way they inflamed and informed the public when they first appeared. It’s one thing to tell a class that the average age of the combat soldier in Vietnam was nineteen, another to show them a roomful of recruits no older than themselves. By examining the films and songs, my students gained a deeper appreciation for how the war, and its representation, has always been debated in a charged, extremely public forum, and how that debate has changed over the years. As with the literary selections, the photos, songs, and films I’ve chosen to include are the best and best known, some, like Haeberle’s shot of My Lai, practically iconic at this point.
The Vietnam Reader is organized according to two chronological schemes. The first is the typical arc of the Vietnam narrative and traces the tour of duty from induction all the way through returning stateside. The second scheme is the timeframe during which these books and films were released. In certain chapters (such as the popular songs) I found it did more justice to the material to collect works that span a great deal of time but are similar in either theme or genre, thereby illustrating how trends in representing Vietnam echoed the changes in American popular and political culture. This combination of approaches is intended to give the reader a better sense of how both the soldiers’ and the public’s attitudes toward Vietnam have changed as the years pass.
An important point to keep in mind is that this anthology isn’t concerned with the Vietnamese or French points of view, which have produced an equal if not greater number of insightful and important works. Instead, this volume is restricted to American views of the war. One remarkable aspect of America’s involvement is that its literature focuses almost solely on the war’s effect on the American soldier and American culture at large. In work after work, Vietnam and the Vietnamese are merely a backdrop for the drama of America confronting itself. To balance American views with others’ here—in retrospect—would be to rewrite history and to present a false portrait of America’s true concerns.
A number of themes run through these works or can be read into them, the most obvious the representation of the American soldier, since he (most decidedly he) is usually the main character. In Vietnam literature, even more so than in the literature of previous American wars, the hero is the combat infantryman, whether he’s regular Army, Special Forces, or a Marine; there are few pieces concerned with Navy or Air Force personnel, and only a smattering deal with support troops. The soldier and later the vet are often given to the reader as types, if not stereotypes already familiar to the casual reader or viewer. Here’s a brief list: professional warrior, reluctant draftee, terrified new guy, hardened grunt, psycho killer/psycho vet, deluded lifer, bumbling ROTC lieutenant, disabled protest vet, troubled/addicted vet. Of course these end up being reductive if not outright slanderous clichés, but the reader will recognize variations on all these characters throughout this book and should be aware of them, and also of who on that list is eligible to play the American hero, and why.
Another major concern in these works is their view of the American presence in Vietnam—that is, the question that tortured all of America back then and still troubles some now: Was the war right or wrong? And was the American presence simply an extension of the American character, and not an anomaly? That is, can (should) the war be related to the larger cultural forces that produced it? Most of these works comment overtly on these questions, though some operate more subtly. Every author (filmmaker, photographer, songwriter) has his or her view of the war, and it’s rare when that view doesn’t surface in the work. The stances of some—say, Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July—are unequivocally critical of U.S. involvement, while an alternative viewpoint can be found in the way James Webb’s Fields of Fire passes judgment on those who opposed the war. What, the reader should ask at this point, is the relationship between subjectivity and war literature? How can the author’s politics not influence his or her depiction of the war? Does this extend beyond the political to the personal—that is, the emotional relationship the author has with his or her experience, especially if it’s traumatic? This takes us back to the basic philosophical question of what is true and how we as readers can tell. It’s a sticky question, especially since the final authority for portraying this war—unlike any other American war—has been by default ceded to the individual participants. Instead of a monolithic history of the war, a mural painted by seemingly trustworthy official historians, what Americans have to sort through is an infinite number of puzzle pieces, few of which seem to fit, and some of which seem to be negatives of each other.
How the author or character perceives the military is a constant theme, as is the culpability of the government with respect to the war, the military, and the individual soldier. Questions of truth and responsibility often take the form of a struggle between private thought and public speech, usually in the form of lies, silence, or a tacit acceptance of the unacceptable. Several pieces highlight the use and misuse of language, whether by the media, the government, or the troops themselves. Matters of race and gender as well as class pop up in these accounts, often as a consequence of the soldier or civilian questioning his or her position not merely in the war but in American society. The fact that the war is being debated back in America is inescapable for soldiers in Vietnam, and returning vets quickly realize that the country has changed as drastically as they have. The Vietnam era witnessed the most sweeping and rapid social change in American history, and naturally the writings and films reflect the flashpoints of the culture. The only thing missing, it seems, is the Vietnamese.
On a more literary level, academic critics find the different forms and styles used by Vietnam writers interesting, most championing more technically adventurous work and decrying realism as plodding and incapable of getting the true feel of the war. General audiences, on the other hand, tend to prize the documentary, wanting to trust in the authenticity of what they’re being shown. Other critics question various authors’ use of the bildungsroman form, wondering whether the tour of duty can be so neatly squeezed into the German learning-novel, the youth’s positive movement from innocence to experience. Some have even labeled the typical Vietnam narrative an anti bildungsroman, wherein the lesson learned is destructive and leads not to wisdom but confusion. Others denounce the very process by which a chaotic, often formless experience is presented by the artist in formal dramatic terms; these critics look for new styles and forms springing organically from the war, not the tired formula fiction and films of the World War II era.
How America sees and has seen Vietnam across time depends on a number of volatile, not always reliable factors such as the overall political climate and the individual reader or viewer’s politics—and in some cases personal relationship to the war. Above and beyond these concerns is the very basic proposition, put forth endlessly by veterans and civilians alike, that you can’t know what it was like if you weren’t there. Add the difficulty of relating the chaos of war through a structured form (the plotted novel or conventional drama), and it seems impossible that the reader could understand the experience.
This is what I call the “gap” between veterans and civilians, even civilians who were there (Michael Herr has some interesting things to say about this in Dispatches), and we see it crop up repeatedly in these selections. Civilians don’t or won’t understand; veterans shut themselves off or refuse to talk because they feel distant, different. Much of the drama in these accounts of the war and its aftermath—and certainly much of the despair—comes from a self-conscious recognition of the gap. How America sees the veteran and how the veteran sees America are views, as it were, from the opposite sides of the gap.
Part of the gap has to do with the elusive nature of truth. In a war smothered in lies, silence, and misinformation (even now, well after the fact), how does a writer or screenwriter claim to be the bearer of truth? In American Vietnam literature, as perhaps nowhere else, it often seems the author’s authority comes not from his or her work but simply from being there, with the strange corollary that nonfiction’s spurious claim to the status of objectivity is extended to fiction written by veterans. The latter is particularly an issue given the pronounced split in methods or modes of portraying the war. While some authors choose a documentary realism, others, hoping to come closer to the emotional and intellectual effect of the experience, shoot for a more poetic or metaphorical truth, employing wild satire (Stephen Wright), magical realism (Larry Heinemann), or absurd allegory (David Rabe). When an author purposefully mixes real and metaphorical forms, the result can leave the reader with more questions than answers. As readers will see from Tim O’Brien’s great metafiction “How to Tell a True War Story” and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, this can be a valuable thing.
So how, against these odds, does the artist bridge the gap, send his or her work sparking across it so readers and viewers feel that, briefly, they understand what it must have truly been like in Vietnam? One provocative answer is that the Vietnam artist does it the same way any artist does it, using point of view, concrete detail, and the power of language and image, sound and vision—all of the artist’s sharpest tools—to transport the reader or viewer there. Another answer is that it’s impossible. Regardless, year after year, American artists—vets and otherwise—try. This book is a testament to how well they’ve done.