"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

i. The Vietnam War

ii. The Soldiers

iii. The Narrative Literature of the War

iv. The Present Study

Part I Partisans

Chapter One Early Adventurers

i. Lieutenant-Colonel Landsdale

ii. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

iii. William J. Lederer & Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (1958)

iv. M. J. Bosse, The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (1959)

v. Jean Lartéguy, Yellow Fever (1962; English Translation, 1965)

vi. Epilogue: Ward Just, A Dangerous Friend (1999)

Chapter Two Fictional History & Historical Fiction: The Fall of Diem

i. President Ngo Dinh Diem

ii. Stuart Hempstone, A Tract of Time (1966)

iii. Robert Vaughn, The Valkyrie Mandate (1974)

iv. Morris West, The Ambassador (1965)

v. Conclusions

Chapter Three Advisors & Friendlies: Pro-War Novels

i. Optimism in the early phases

ii. Robin Moore, The Green Berets (1965)

iii. Scott C. S. Stone, The Coasts of War (1966)

iv. Richard Newhafer, No More Bugles in the Sky (1966)

v. Gene D. Moore’s The Killing at Ngo Tho (1967)

vi. James Crumley, One to Count Cadence (1969)

vii. Charles Larson, The Chinese Game (1969)

vii. Conclusions

Chapter Four Advisors & Friendlies II: Ambivalent Warriors

i. Doubt sets in

ii. David Halberstam, One Very Hot Day (1967)

iii. Daniel Ford, Incident at Muc Wa (1968)

iv. John Rowe, Count Your Dead (1968),

v. Alan Clark, The Lion Heart: a Tale of the War in Vietnam (1969)

vi. Josiah Bunting, The Lionheads (1972)

vii. Bo Hathaway’s A World of Hurt (1981),

viii. Donald McQuinn, Targets (1980)

ix. Conclusions

Chapter Five Soldiers & Civilians

i. Protestors & Reporters

ii. Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night (1968)

iii. Pamela Sanders, Miranda (1978)

iv. Thomas Fleming’s The Officers’ Wives (1981)

v. Joan Didion, Democracy (1984)

vi. Takeshi Kaiko’s Into a Black Sun: Vietnam 1964–65 (1968, English trans. 1983)

vii. Bernard Kalb and Martin Kalb, The Last Ambassador (1981)

viii. Conclusions

Part II Modes and Genres

Chapter Six Combat Memoirs

i. Autobiographical War Writings

ii. Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

iii. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (1977)

iv. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1975)

v. Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone (1978)

vi. W.D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie—A Combat Marine’s Memoir (1983)

vii. Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (1983)

viii. Tobias Wolff, In Pharoah’s Army—Memoirs of the Last War (1994)

ix. Conclusions

Chapter Seven Allegory

i. Allegorical Vietnam

ii. Jonathan Rubin, The Barking Deer (1974)

iii. Asa Baber, The Land of a Million Elephants (1971)

iv. Victor Kolpakoff, The Prisoners of Quai Dong (1967)

v. Norman Mailer, Why Are in Vietnam? (1967)

vi. Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers (1974)

vii. Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1975)

viii. Conclusions

Chapter Eight Combat Realism

i. Conventions of Realism

ii. Robert Roth, Sand in the Wind (1973)

iii. Stephen Philip Smith, American Boys (1975)

iv. Tom Suddick, A Few Good Men (1974)

v. William Pelfrey, The Big V (1972)

vi. William Turner Huggett, Body Count (1973)

vii. Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters (1974)

viii. Conclusion

Chapter Nine Combat VS. Ideology

i. Two Authors

ii. James Webb, Fields of Fire (1978)

iii. John Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (1983)

iv. Comparisons & Conclusions

v. Epilogue: Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2010)

Chapter Ten Deviations

i. Alternatives to Realism

ii. William Wilson, The LBJ Brigade (1966)

iii. James Park Sloan, War Games (1971)

iv. John Clark Pratt, The Laotian Fragments (1974) & Vietnam Voices (1984)

v. Ward Just, Stringer (1984)

vi. Lloyd Little, Parthian Shot (1975)

vii. Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers (1979)

viii. Conclusion

Chapter Eleven Inventions: Fantasy & Metafiction

i. Literature of the Optative Mode

ii. William Eastlake, The Bamboo Bed (1969)

iii. Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (1975)

iv. Nicholas Rinaldi, Bridge Fall Down (1985)

v. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

vi. Conclusions

Chapter Twelve Correspondents

i. Reporters in the Nam

ii. Library of America collection: Reporting Vietnam (1998)

iii. John Sack, M (1966)

iv. Harrison E. Salisbury, Behind the Lines—Hanoi (1967)

v. Jonathan Schell, The Village of Ben Suc (1967) & The Military Half (1968)

vi. Gloria Emerson, Winners and Losers (1976)

vii Mary McCarthy, Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968)

viii. James Jones’ Viet Journal (1973)

ix. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1968)

x. Conclusions

Chapter Thirteen Ordinary People: Oral Memoirs

i. War Stories & Oral History

ii. Al Santoli, Everything We Had: an Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-Three Soldiers Who Fought It (1981)

iii. Mark Baker, Nam—The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (1987)

iv. Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-Six American Women Who Served in Vietnam (1985)

v. Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984)

vi. Conclusion

Chapter Fourteen Vets: The Return of the Repressed

i. A.R. Flowers, De Mojo Blues (1985)

ii. Jack Fuller, Fragments (1984)

iii. Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (1985)

iv. Larry Heineman, Paco’s Story (1986)

v. Stephen Wright, Meditations in Green (1983)

vi. Michael H. Cooper, Dues: a Novel of War and After (1994)

vii. Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1994)

viii. Conclusion

Bibliography

Primary Works

Secondary Works

Acknowledgments

Parts of this book in modified form have appeared elsewhere:

A shorter version of Chapter Six: “Combat Memoirs of the Vietnam War,” in: VIA LITTERAE. Vol. 5, N o. 1, jan/jun 2013. Universidade de Goiás. Anápolis, Goias, PP. 257-280.

A shorter version of Chapter Seven: “Allegorical Narratives of the Vietnam War,” in: REVISTA ESTUDOS ANGLO-AMERICANOS. Abrapui, S. Paulo. Edição 35, 2012.

A modified and expanded version of Section ii, Chapter Eleven: “Deviations from Realism in the Vietnam War Novel,” VERTENTES São João del-Rei, MG, Brazil, no. 34, July-December 2009, pp. 42-52.

A shorter version of Chapter One: “Art Imitates Life: Edward G. Landsdale and the Fiction of Vietnam,” in: ACTA SCIENTARUM—Language and Culture. Vol. 31, No. 1, Jan-June 2009, pp. 95-102

A modified version of Section ii, Chapter One, “American Interference: A Political-Cultural Reading of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. VERTENTES. São João del-Rei, MG, no. 30, July-December 2007, pp. 129-137.

I would like to give thanks to several people who were helpful in the research and writing of this book: to Prof. John Clarke Pratt, with his unmatched knowledge of the literature of the war, my advisor who guided me in the planning and writing of the first half of the book during my stay as visiting scholar at Colorado State University, and to the college, which lent me an office and computer, and the library and staff of special collections at CSU; to the Department of English and Corresponding Literatures at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and Prof. Eliana Àvila, my advisor there; to the College of Letters (FALE), of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), which granted me six months sabbatical leave on those two occasions; to my colleagues of the Center for Study of War, Literature and the Arts (NEGUE), especially José Otaviano Mata Machado, Marcela Gontijo, Elcio Cornelsen, and Volker Jaeckel, for their help and many useful discussions.

My special thanks to my former student and co-founder of NEGUE, Luiz Gustavo Vieira, who spent many hours with me discussing war, literature, and other aspects of life, and who read the entire manuscript, correcting mistakes and offering valuable criticisms at every point.

Luiz Gustavo—a valuable friend, student, colleague, and often teacher—to whom I gratefully dedicate this book.

There it is…The phrase was much used by stoic grunts everywhere.

Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

There it is, they‘d say. Over and over—there it is, my friend, there it is—as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can´t change what can´t be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.

Tim O‘Brien, The Things They Carried

Introduction

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time,

and your government when it deserves it”

(Mark Twain)

i. The Vietnam War

With the end of World War II, the economically developed and politically stable democracies, the so-called First World nations, led by the United States, engaged in the global struggle known as the Cold War with the Second World or socialist states in Eastern Europe, which were unified and controlled by the Soviet Union. The conflict had actually begun before the war was over, with the “Big Three”—the US, the USSR, and Great Britain—planning to divide up the globe among them, but the opening salvo of the Cold War, at least symbolically, was fired by Winston Churchill in a speech of March 1946 in the United States, when he declared that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” a warning about what he regarded as the danger to the “Free World” of Soviet expansionism and the lack of the necessary western military strength to counteract it. While President Truman apparently approved of the content of this speech, which took place in his home state of Missouri and pointedly referred to the “special relationship” of the US and Great Britain, US officials feared that what Churchill really wanted was to enlist their country in propping up the crumbling British Empire. For his part, Josef Stalin predictably referred to the speech as imperialistic “war mongering.”1

The Cold War was waged for the hearts and minds, as well as the material wealth, of the rest of the planet, inevitably grouped together as the “Third World.” This was a geographically, politically, and culturally diverse group of countries that could only be perceived as a cluster of states by their common condition of instability, because, as Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, they formed what was, in effect, “a worldwide zone of revolution—whether just achieved, impending or possible.”2 Attempting to suppress it, the United States identified this revolutionary instability with the Soviet Union, which in turn attempted to exploit it, for the postwar Pax Americana reigned only over the First World and could not for the time being reach or affect the Second World, which remained under the control of the Warsaw Pact. The fear engendered on both sides by the prospect of global thermonuclear war between the two superpowers actually contributed to the military stability even while the maneuvering of propaganda and espionage contributed to the political instability of the Cold War. According to Hobsbawm,

Almost from the start of the Cold War, the U.S.A. set out to combat this danger [i.e. revolution] by all means, from economic aid and ideological propaganda through official and unofficial military subversion to major war; preferably in alliance with a friendly or bought local regime, but if need be without local support.3

The many wars waged against perceived global Communist expansion, numbering over a hundred between the end of World War II and the demise of the Soviet Union and other Communist states in the late 1980s, were all fought in the Third World. The most extensive of these wars, and the only one, besides the Korean War of 1950-1953, in which American troops fought, was the war in Vietnam. This conflict may be described from a longer historical perspective as the “Vietnam Wars,”4 since Vietnam’s anti-colonial war against the French (1945-1954) was taken up again right after World War II once the Japanese had been driven out of the region by the Allied forces and the Vietnamese. The war(s) in Vietnam did not even end with the withdrawal of the American interventionist forces in 1973 and the subsequent fall of South Vietnam in 1975. The unified north and south, now officially called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, suppressed continued opposition in the south of the country, invaded Cambodia to overthrow the US-supported regime of Pol Pot, and resisted a Chinese incursion that was only the most recent one of centuries of attempted Chinese expansionism southward into Vietnam.

What is generally thought of as the Vietnam War is more narrowly defined as the ten year hot war (1965-1975) waged between the South Vietnamese government supported by the US, and the revolutionary forces of the National Liberation Front (NLF), the official name of the Communist guerrilla insurgents in South Vietnam—known by the anti-Communist southern regime derogatively as “Vietcong,” or Vietnamese Communists—which was encouraged and later supported, but crucially not controlled, by the government of North Vietnam.5

One might contest, however, this ten year period of the American War in Vietnam as too brief to comprehend (in both senses) the conflict, especially since American intervention in colonial Indochina began as early as the 1950s, with the US taking over the conflict after the decisive military defeat of the French by General Vo Nguyen Giap’s forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.6 Simply put, the American war in Vietnam was waged based on the goal of a South Vietnam free of Communism, but how that goal was established is worth examining. Fortunately, the process has been described in detail by the US government itself in the collection of documents that came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers.”

The Pentagon Papers were based on “investigative reporting by Neil Sheehan, written by Sheehan, Hedrick Smith, E.W. Kensworthy and Fox Butterfield,” from the collected papers and documents of the secret Pentagon study of the Vietnam War, originally commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. They consisted of a “massive top-secret history of the United States role in Indochina,” which took a year and a half to write, was written by anonymous government historians—including officials from the State department, intellectuals from government financed institutes, and military career officers—and incorporated material from the White House, the CIA and the military Joint Chiefs of Staff. There were some 3000 pages of narrative history and more than 4000 pages of documents appended to the narrative, all collected in 47 volumes. Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst for the Rand Corporation, illegally copied the collection of secret documents.7 The New York Times obtained most of the collection and began publishing a series of articles based on them in June 1971. The US Justice Department tried to suppress publication, alleging a breach of “national defense interests,” but, in June of the same year, the Supreme Court upheld the right to publish under the First Amendment to the Constitution.8

The narrative leading up to the ten year war may be summarized as follows. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original plan for placing French Indochina under international trusteeship to prepare it for independence was diluted at the 1945 Yalta Conference in the interests of European colonialism. The British, fearing for their own overseas colonies and aided by President Truman’s administration, which, for its part, feared postwar Communist gains, supported the restoration of French sovereignty after the war, ignoring the North Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh’s plea for the help of the US in preventing that outcome. The Eisenhower administration also gave the French material support in their ultimately unsuccessful attempt to suppress the Viet Minh, the anti-colonialist forces in the north, who had fought for independence against Japan before finally defeating the French.9

The Truman Doctrine (1947) had pledged American resistance to Communism wherever it should emerge. The succeeding president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. believed that Ho Chi Minh, who had repeatedly, unsuccessfully, and—as it would turn out, tragically—sued for US support against French colonialism, even citing the values stated in the American Declaration of Independence, was initially ignored and eventually deemed “an instrument of international Communism.”10 With the end of World War II and throughout the following decades, however, Ho Chi Minh was more concerned with keeping his country independent of all foreign forces, including Communist China on his northern border. The Americans, however, believed that the Chinese (and the Soviets) were dictating strategy and supplying arms to North Vietnam. Ho accepted the aid of weapons and supplies from both Moscow and Beijing but there is no hard evidence that he allowed these politically allied nations to impose their strategies of defense on North Vietnam.11

According to Fox Butterfield, the “watershed decision” to intervene in Indochina first came after the fall of Nationalist China to the Communists (1949) under Mao Zedong. At this development, Washington, fearing further Communist advances in Asia, abruptly ended its wavering about whether or not to support French colonial interests by offering financial aid to the Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai, a puppet of French colonialism, and to the French military forces, to fight against the anti-colonial, Communist-led Viet Minh (eventually, the US would pay $1.1 billion in 1954, or 78% of the French war effort).12 With this decision, the US committed itself inexorably to blocking further Communist expansion in Asia. The justification for this came to be called the “Domino Theory,” first enunciated by the National Security Council (NSC) in February 1950. Never seriously questioned, the Domino Theory supposed that the “loss” of a single country to Communism would endanger all the neighboring countries and eventually all of Asia and even beyond.13 The principal justification for the war in Vietnam therefore was the strategic need to “hold the line,” or, in the language of the controlling metaphor, to prevent the dominoes (states) from tumbling one after another.

David Halberstam claims that it was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, the ultimate cold warrior, who believed in “our cause, our innocence and our worthiness”—as well as our political advantage—for Dulles was convinced that the US could go into Vietnam without the taint of French colonialism: “We could start in South Vietnam,” Dulles decided, “by sending a couple of hundred American advisors there” (curiously, however, Dulles also thought that American chances for success in Vietnam were no more than one in ten).14 As stated above, by 1950, the official policy of the US government on Indochina, as stated in NSC 64, declared that the Communists’ war was “one phase of anticipated plans to seize all of Southeast Asia,” and recommended that all practicable measures be taken to prevent further expansion.15 As a response to the French military defeat by the Viet Minh forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Eisenhower publicly invoked the Domino Theory, which would be cited then and thereafter as signifying the global danger of other countries falling to Communism—a predictable tragedy that only firm American intervention could prevent.

The argument about when the war actually began is nicely reflected in a passage from Michael Herr’s Dispatches:

You couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? Mission intellectuals like 1945 as the reference date; if you saw far back as War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. ‘Realists’ said that it began for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission folk insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution, as though all the killing eJthat had gone before wasn’t really war.”16

Politically, the US engagement in Vietnam may be said to have begun with the division of the country. With the signing of the Geneva accords on July 21, 1954, the country was split into what was to be regarded as two military zones along the 17th parallel, to be administered by two civilian governments: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to the north, and what was then called the “State of Vietnam” in the south. The military forces pertaining to both sides were to regroup north and south of this line after the signing of the agreement, and nationwide elections were to be held within a two-year time period to decide who would govern the entire country.17 The US refused to sign the agreement, thereby undermining its effectiveness, because it was thought that Ho Chi Minh, who was widely perceived as the leader opposed to foreign occupation, would win the elections. Responsibility for maintaining order belonged to the signatories of the armistice: the DRV in the north and the French in the south. Three months before the deadline for holding the elections, however, the French forces pulled out, in effect turning over political power in the south to the anti-Communist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Dulles had, in any case, already begun bypassing the French and dealing directly with Diem.18

A hot war erupted when Diem, encouraged by the Americans, declared the southern part of the country the independent Republic of South Vietnam (1955). The guerrilla forces of the NLF in the south thereupon devoted themselves to undermining Diem’s regime. The US sent military advisors, civilian aid workers, and a great deal of money to South Vietnam to aid the southern regime in repressing the opposition in a series of actions that were justified and approved of at the time as part of a praiseworthy effort to help preserve the freedom of the new nation by repelling a supposed Communist invasion from the north. It is surprising to learn from the Pentagon Papers that the US military was initially opposed to sending troops to Vietnam. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised: “Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token U.S. armed forces to that area would be a serious diversion of limited U.S. capabilities,”19 a realistic assessment compared to the wishful thinking of the American civilian officials who would prevail.

In short, the US government gave up Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declared opposition to European colonialism toward the end of World War II for a policy of what would be called the “containment” of Soviet expansionism.20 Note that this expansion was assumed to be directed by Moscow, even in Third World countries like Vietnam that were not controlled by it. Every US president in the half century from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan championed and implemented some form of this policy, most materially those who held office during the war—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon.

In reply to speculation after the assassination of Kennedy (November 1963) that he would have called a halt to the war, Heydrick Smith, writing on the Kennedy years, concludes that in fact the president “transformed the ‘limited-risk gamble’ of the Eisenhower administration into a ‘broad commitment’ to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam,” often by secret measures that concealed from the American public the extent of the US role there. The US had not signed the Geneva accords but had promised not to undermine them. The expansion of military personnel, the sending of 400 Special Forces troops to South Vietnam as military advisors, however, was only the first breach of the Geneva agreement. This force was run by the CIA rather than the regular military so that “it was possible to handle these troops covertly,” and the number of advisors soon rose to 16,000.21 Smith adds that specific measures that were not disclosed included the beginning of a “covert warfare campaign in North Vietnam.”22

In his “bear any burden in the defense of liberty” 1961 inaugural address, Kennedy reiterated presidential guarantees of the cause, and the speech had considerable influence on the nation’s idealistic youth. The president saw Vietnam as a “test case” of the nation’s determination to maintain its commitments.23 His civilian advisors, drawn from the country’s intellectual and corporate elite, “the best and the brightest” in David Halberstam’s ironic words, scorned the accumulated knowledge and experience of the academic and government experts on Asia, believing in the superiority of their own class and education to make the right decisions.

John Kenneth Galbraith has asserted, however, that this Harvard-educated power elite knew nothing about the world, “ours or theirs,” believing that it was enough to know the “difference between a Communist and an Anti-Communist” without regarding the changing nuances of history and by clinging to the ideology of the Cold War that was still the prevailing line of thinking in US foreign policy in the 1960s.24 The rabid anti-Communist McCarthyism of the early 1950s had not completely died and still had a major influence on the thought and policies of politicians of both parties, particularly the Democrats, who felt especially vulnerable to attacks on their patriotism for being (as the expression went) “soft on Communism.” On the other hand, most Vietnamese perceived the Viet Minh, their leader Ho Chi Minh, and later the NLF, as liberators from a series of foreign oppressors: first, the French, then the Japanese, again the French, and eventually the Americans.

After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson would give continuity to his policies by retaining the former administration’s key figures—Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense, and McGeorge Bundy as National Security Council advisor—men who thought that the expanded global role of the US had increased the importance of holding the line in Indochina.25 If the containment of Communism had worked in Europe, where internationally recognized spheres of influence were established after World War II, it was mistaken to try to extend that policy to Asia, where the specter of Red China sent out more tremors. Besides, holding the line in Southeast Asia was based on the mistaken assumption that Communism—which was not only a political system, but also a set of practices, a creed, and an ideology—could be contained militarily. Even if that were possible without another world war, it would probably have been counter-productive at the time. The threat perceived as embodied in China was not so much military as political and cultural.26

The implementation of US policy was carried out with the arrival of civilian and military advisory and support personnel in southern Vietnam. The Saigon Military Mission (SMM) was to be led by Colonel Edward G. Landsdale, a notorious figure who will appear as a model for a character in several novels that will be discussed in these pages. The SMM was to enter Vietnam quietly and assist the Vietnamese, not the French, in unconventional warfare, with the French being retained as friendly allies.

The following years saw Ngo Dinh Diem as the USA’s favorite anti-Communist, although his increasingly autocratic rule alienated American leaders, who tried to link US financial and military aid to governmental reforms on his part, which he resented and often ignored. When he and especially his powerful brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who were Catholics, began to repress the protests of the Buddhist majority, which led to the self-immolations of Buddhist monks that shocked world opinion, the popularity of the government dropped to an all-time low. Popular discontent focused on Nhu and his outspoken wife, known as Madame Nhu (who notoriously referred to the Buddhist monks’ suicides as “barbecue”). Eventually, the Ngo brothers would be ousted by a coup of conspiring military commanders with the direct connivance of the CIA and its experienced operator Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, a veteran of the Indochina war.