Tom Burns - There It Is - Narratives of the Vietnam War

63Hynes, Samuel, The Soldiers’ Tale—Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 221.

64Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, p. 222.

65Baum, Dan, “The Price of Valor,” in: The New Yorker (July 12 & 19, 2004), pp. 45-46. The findings of Marshall, in Men Against Fire (New York: William Morrow, 1947) have had considerable impact on the US Army. Marshall also wrote a widely distributed manual for soldiers in the Vietnam War. For Marshall’s influence: Frederick D. Williams, SLAM: The Influence of S.L.A. Marshall on the United States Army (Ft. Monroe, VA: US Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1990).

66Baum, “The Price of Valor,” p. 46.

67Baum, “The Price of Valor,” p. 46. The study referred to is a PhD dissertation (1999) by Rachel McNair on the psychological effects of violence, using data from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, which interviewed 1,700 veterans in the 1980s. Reanalyzed P.T.S.D. data obtained from these veterans suggested that one in five veterans suffered from the malaise, rather than one in three, as formerly believed. Baum, however, thinks that this new analysis may have been motivated by the desire of the Veteran’s Administration to cut back expenses for their treatment (p. 46).

68Shay, Jonathan, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994), pp.108-109 and 111-115.

69Bilton, Michael and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York, Penguin, 1992), pp. 120-121. This book was an outgrowth of a British TV documentary and contains the photographs of the massacre by an Army Sergeant that served as proof at Calley’s trial. Many veterans naturally resented being called “baby-killers” by American civilians, but this terrible crime was evidence that the accusation was at least true for some soldiers in some documented cases.

70Herzog. Tobey C., Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 106.

71Cronin, Cornelius A., “Lines of Departure: the Atrocity in Vietnam War Literature.” In: Jason, Philip K. (ed.), Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 215.

72Fussell, Paul, Wartime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 113, emphasis in the original.

73FitzGerald, Frances, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), p. 359.

74Just, To What End—Report from Vietnam, p. 71.

75Qtd. in Appy, Working-Class War, p. 233.

76Fox Butterfield, “Who Was This Enemy?” The New York Times Magazine (February 4, 1973), rptd. in: Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975 (New York: Library of America: 1998), pp. 408-409.

77Roth, Robert, Sand in the Wind (New York: Miracle Books, 1974), pp. 563-564.

78Herring, America’s Longest War; p. 243; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 422-423. For Loren Baritz, the figure for hard-drug users is much higher: 28%. Baritz, Backfire: A History of how American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 315.

79FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 422.

80O’Nan, Stewart, “Introduction” to The Vietnam Reader, ed. Stewart O’Nan (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), p. 1.

81For example, Renny Christopher’s The Vietnam War/The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).

82Nguyen, Viet Thanh, The Sympathizer (New York: Grove Press, 2015). The quote is from page one.

83O’Nan, “Introduction” to The Vietnam Reader, p. 3.

84Hanley, Lynne, Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), pp.103-104. The internal quotations are cited by the author from Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook (1973).

85Hanley, Writing War, p. 105; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, passim.

86Tal, Kali, “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma.” In: Jason, Fourteen Landing Zones, pp. 217-218.

87Tal, in “Speaking the Language of Pain” (cf. previous note) argues that while trauma resulting from war, the holocaust, rape, etc. can be managed, it cannot be completely exorcized, as it can never really be forgotten.

88Ringnalda, Don, Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War (Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), p. viii.

89Ringnalda, Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, p. 91.

90Fussell, Wartime p. 268.

91Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, p. 328.

92Jason, Philip K., Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 3.

93Bates, Milton J., The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 2.

94Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam, p. 3.

95Caputo, Philip, “Postscript.” A Rumor of War (1977; New York: Owl Book, 1996), p. 353-354).

96The novels of Stephen Coonts may be cited as examples: Flight of the Intruder (NewYork: Pocket Books, 1987) about a Navy renegade bomber pilot later adapted into a film, as well as the two sequels to Rambo: First Blood starring Sylvester Stallone (1985/88).

97Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, p. 177.

98Jason, “Introduction,” Fourteen Landing Zones, p. xiv.

99O’Brien, Tim, Going After Cacciato (New York: Dell, 1978), p. 237, italics in the original.

100O’Brien, Going After Cacciato, p. 320.

101Jacqueline Lawson believes that virtually all the soldier-writer accounts are divided into these distinct phases. See Lawson, “‘Old Kids’: The Adolescent Experience in the Non-Fiction Narratives of Vietnam,” in: Searle, William (ed.), Search and Clear: Critical Responses to Selected Literature and Films of the Vietnam War (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), p. 27.

102Pratt John Clark, Bibliographic Commentary, “From the Fiction, Some Truths,” in: Lomperis, Timothy J., “Reading the Wind” The Literature of the Vietnam War: An Interpretative Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 127.

103Jason, Acts and Shadows, p. 77. It should be said, however, that Pratt’s scheme in “From the Fiction, Some Truths” does contemplate other works besides combat novels.

104See, for example, the works mentioned and discussed in chapters 4, 7, and 8 of Jason’s Acts and Shadows.

105There are 666 novels listed in the Third Edition of Newman’s bibliography (1966), while Wittman (1989) lists 582 literary and adventure novels, 481 personal narratives up to 1988. Newman, John, Vietnam War Literature: an Annotated Bibliography about Americans Fighting in Vietnam (Landham, Md: The Scarecrow Press, 1996); Wittman, Sandra M. Writing About Vietnam: A Bibliography of the Literature of Vietnam Conflict (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989).

106Pratt, “From the Fiction, Some Truths,” p. 124.

In such dangerous things as wars the errors which

proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst

(Karl von Clausewitz)

It will be recalled from the Introduction that in the mid-1940s, at the end of World War II, the French colonial army was allowed by the Allies to regain control of Hanoi, at which point the Communist Viet Minh forces faded back into their bases in the countryside to fight an eight-year-long guerrilla war of resistance to the restoration of French control. Meanwhile, as part of its effort to halt Communist advances in Southeast Asia, the US recognized the French puppet emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai (February 1950), thereby declaring itself to be an adversary of the Viet Minh leader, Ho Chi Minh. For their part, the Viet Minh built a political organization strong enough to sustain the guerrillas and field a regular army that was eventually successful at the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954).