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Strategies of Representing Victimhood in American Narratives of the War in Vietnam

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Strategies of Representing Victimhood in American Narratives of the War in Vietnam Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach Wydział Filologiczny Aleksandra Musiał “An American Tragedy” Strategies of Representing Victimhood in American Narratives of the War in Vietnam Rozprawa doktorska napisana pod kierunkiem: p r o m o t o r : dr hab. Leszek Drong p r o m o t o r p o m o c n ic z y : dr Marcin Sarnek Katowice 2018 Table of Contents Introduction: Secret Histories..................................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1: Vietnam Syndromes: Symptoms & Contexts 1.1. The American cultural narrative of Vietnam...............................................................................................17 1.2. Repudiating the 1960s................................................................................................................................... 23 1.3. Squandering Vietnam’s subversive potential.............................................................................................. 34 Chapter 2: “War Is as Natural as the Rains”: Myth and Representations of the Vietnamese landscape 2.1. History..............................................................................................................................................................65 2.2. Myth..................................................................................................................................................................75 2.2.1. “The sins of the forest are alive in the jungle”.....................................................................................82 2.3. “Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam” ..................................................................................................................... 95 2.3.1. Landing Zone Loon.............................................................................................................................. 103 2.4. In-country.......................................................................................................................................................123 2.4.1. The homicidal environment............................................................................................................... 125 2.4.2. St Vith, SV N ..........................................................................................................................................139 2.4.3. Fire Base Harriette to Ben Suc............................................................................................................ 145 2.4.4. Lurpism.................................................................................................................................................. 150 Chapter 3: The Horrors in Quang Ngai: Representations of the Victims of “Vietnam” 3.1. My Lai.............................................................................................................................................................161 3.1.1. “An American tragedy”.........................................................................................................................167 3.2. A war between victims................................................................................................................................ 174 3.2.1. A necklace of tongues........................................................................................................................... 175 3.2.1. American war crime literature............................................................................................................ 181 3.2.1. Casualties of war .................................................................................................................................. 203 3.2.1. “They’re all V.C.” ................................................................................................................................. 219 Conclusion: Don’t Support the Troops................................................................................................................ 239 Notes ......................................................................................................................................................................... 247 Works Cited..............................................................................................................................................................269 Summary/Streszczenie..............................................................................................................................................283 Introduction Secret Histories My first contact with the American war in Vietnam was Michael Herr’s Dispatches. I was in my final year studying toward a B.A. in Ancient World Studies when I took a seminar in ancient Greek warfare, which spurred a general, if light, interest in the history of war. Following a friend’s recommendation, I then watched the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, about American paratroopers in World War II, which hooked me completely—I think I watched episode 6 daily for about two weeks. Gorging on Tumblr posts and forum entries about the show and the real-life soldiers whose story it followed, I also began looking at more and more combat photography, which soon became a hobby in the form of a small private blog where I collected pictures from all the major twentieth-century conflicts. Around the same time, I also happened to read the memoir from Afghanistan and Iraq by a British ex-soldier (and Oxford English graduate) Patrick Hennessey, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, in which he briefly mentions Dispatches (1977) as “the best writing on war, ever, period.” It wasn’t long before I bought and read the book. I loved it. Prior to Dispatches, I had no real knowledge about the war in Vietnam, only a vague awareness of it. Born and educated in Poland, I never learnt about it at school. I had seen Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket—although my father, a great lover of war films, always said that he didn’t like Vietnam movies much. The iconic Vietnam photographs were of course lodged somewhere 6 Introduction in my consciousness along with a sense of what they depicted, as they probably are in the minds of most Westerners. But Dispatches was the first real contact. Trudging through the dense paragraphs and the monsters of sentences, I was as enthralled with Herr’s language, so unlike any other writer’s, as I was with the Vietnam War he described: dazzling, mysterious, ironic, brimming with enigmatic meanings, terrible and beautiful, sexy, almost mythical. With my blog growing and the prospect of choosing a topic for my M.A., which I would write in an English department, I decided to focus on the photography from Vietnam. As this thesis proves, I have stayed with that war for some years. I’m writing all this because I want to use my own story of gaining a knowledge of Vietnam to make a point. In Dispatches, Herr wrote about what he called the “secret history” of the war. What he meant was the very senselessness of the death and suffering of American soldiers, on insignificant battlefields of a bad war fought incorrectly and for wrong reasons, buried, the way Herr saw it, under the official languages of military and government propaganda, and left largely uncovered by much of the wartime press. But what Herr probably couldn’t have foreseen was that in the decades since the publication of Dispatches at the end of the 1970s, a different secret history of the war would come into being. Beginning from nothing and proceeding from Dispatches, the research I conducted for my M.A. consisted of studies of the Vietnam-era media, and included also some brief, mostly fact- based histories of the war, and volumes and articles dedicated to its presence in American pop culture and literature. For a long time, the image of Vietnam that Herr’s book had planted in my mind continued to grow and clarify. It was only when, starting to think about my PhD dissertation, I began reading other novels and memoirs of the war that I began noticing certain patterns that troubled me. Perhaps because I’m not American, or perhaps because my own politics were evolving, I could not always easily sympathize with the protagonists of these texts or see them as the victims the authors portrayed them to be, and my curiosity turned to the representations of the Vietnamese civilians, which I thought to be formulaic and instrumental. Most directly, however, the idea for this thesis comes from an old Time article, titled “An American Tragedy,” which described the massacre of several hundred Vietnamese civilians by an American infantry company. The title perplexed me, and the question irked me: just how, and why, does one brand an event like My Lai an American tragedy? Introduction 7 Meanwhile, when I had familiarized myself with some of the “canon” of Vietnam literature scholarship, I made my way to other studies, like Jim Neilson’s Vietnam and American Cultural Narrative, Katherine Kinney’s Friendly Fire, and the recent volumes edited by Brenda Boyle, which offered more critical, sometimes radical, readings of that literature. From there, my research led me finally to cultural and political studies that traced the mainstream American discourses of the 1980s that effectively rewrote the very history of the Vietnam War in the United States. These were especially those related specifically to that war, like H. Bruce Franklin’s MIA, Edwin Martini’s Invisible Enemies, Jerry Lembcke’s Spitting Image, Patrick Hagopian’s The Vietnam War in American Memory, or Kendrick Oliver’s
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