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Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War

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Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War VETERAN NARRATIVES AND THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by John A. Wood August, 2011 Examining Committee Members: Kenneth L. Kusmer, Advisory Chair, Department of History, Temple University Gregory J.W. Urwin, Department of History, Temple University James Hilty, Department of History, Temple University Stanley N. Katz, External Member, Princeton University © Copyright 2011 by John Wood ii ABSTRACT This dissertation is a comprehensive study of the content, author demographics, publishing history, and media representation of the most prominent Vietnam veteran memoirs published between 1967 and 2005. These personal narratives are important because they have affected the collective memory of the Vietnam War for decades. The primary focus of this study is an analysis of how veterans’ memoirs depict seven important topics: the demographics of American soldiers, combat, the Vietnamese people, race relations among U.S. troops, male-female relationships, veterans’ postwar lives, and war-related political issues. The central theme that runs through these analyses is that these seven topics are depicted in ways that show veteran narratives represent constructed memories of the past, not infallible records of historical events. One reoccurring indication of this is that while memoirists’ portrayals are sometimes supported by other sources and reflect historical reality, other times they clash with facts and misrepresent what actually happened. Another concern of this dissertation is the relationship of veteran memoirs to broader trends in public remembrance of the Vietnam War, and how and why some books, but not others, were able to achieve recognition and influence. These issues are explored by charting the publishing history of veteran narratives over a thirty-eight year iii period, and by analyzing media coverage of these books. This research indicates that mainstream editors and reviewers selected memoirs that portrayed the war in a negative manner, but rejected those that espoused either unambiguous anti- or pro-war views. By giving some types of narratives preference over others, the media and the publishing industry helped shape the public’s collective understanding of the war. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have made the completion of this dissertation possible. Various fellowships and grants awarded to me by Temple University have been a great financial support throughout my graduate school career. My advisor, Dr. Kenneth L. Kusmer, provided invaluable guidance from the very beginning of my graduate studies. He has worked tirelessly over the last few years as a reviewer and editor of chapter drafts, pushing me to improve my writing and hone my arguments. I have also benefited from the considerable knowledge and experience possessed by the other members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Gregory J.W. Urwin and Dr. James Hilty. In the latter stages of the dissertation process, Dr. Stanley Katz of Princeton University generously agreed to serve as the committee’s outside reader. Finally, I am lucky to have friends and family that have kept me sane while working on this project. You have all kept me afloat during the rough spots. No one, however, has helped me more through this process than my parents. Without your support I never would have made it this far. This dissertation is dedicated to you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 2. WHO WERE THE VIETNAM VETERAN MEMOIRISTS? ..............................13 3. COMBAT CONDITIONS AND THE VIETNAMESE PEOPLE ........................40 4. RACE AND RACISM ...........................................................................................76 5. MEN, WOMEN, AND VIETNAM .....................................................................105 6. THE RETURN HOME AND LIFE AFTER VIETNAM ....................................132 7. THE POLITICAL CONTENT OF VETERAN NARRATIVES ........................171 8. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................196 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................206 vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION In December 1983, The New York Times announced that publishers and readers had “rediscovered Vietnam.” There had been a handful of successful books about the war before then, the Times explained, but in 1983, “books about Vietnam [were] rolling off the presses in record numbers,” and libraries and bookstores were eagerly stocking their shelves with such works. 1 In 1987, the Times reported that the “Vietnam-Book Boom” was still in full swing, and it asked several authors of books about the war to give their thoughts on this “latest artistic trend.” 2 One of the authors, Philip Caputo, who had fought as a Marine in Vietnam, dismissed this trend as “Vietnam chic.” Caputo speculated that the heightened public interest in the war would soon fade, and readers would move on to books about other conflicts. 3 Interest in the Vietnam War and books about that conflict may have climaxed in the 1980’s, but Caputo was wrong in thinking that such books were only a passing fad. Hundreds of titles about the war appeared in the years following the Times article, and many of them were written by American veterans of the conflict. Although veteran- 1 Edwin McDowell, “Publishing: Vietnam Rediscovered,” The New York Times , 2 Dec. 1983, C25. 2 “4 Writers Try to Make Sense of the Vietnam-Book Boom,” The New York Times , 4 August 1987, C17. 3 Ibid. 1 authors produced some well-known Vietnam War fiction, it was veterans’ memoirs, such as Caputo’s A Rumor of War ,4 that comprised the great majority of veteran-authored titles about the conflict. A number of these books were critically and commercially successful, as were several titles that featured the personal accounts of Vietnam veterans in the form of oral histories. Today, anyone perusing the shelves of a chain book store will likely find that a large portion of the titles in its “Vietnam War section” are veterans’ memoirs and oral histories. Due to their quantity and longtime popularity, veterans’ memoirs, like films, novels, news media coverage, political rhetoric, and other influential cultural products, have been important to the construction of the nation’s collective memory of the war. Millions of Americans, over several decades, have learned about the war--at least in part- -by reading veterans’ narratives. Despite the importance of these books, however, they have hitherto received inadequate treatment by scholars. Veterans’ memoirs have frequently been used in historical scholarship, but almost always simply as primary sources to support various arguments about the war. 5 Virtually no historians have regarded the Vietnam veteran narrative genre as a topic in itself, much less explored the 4 Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977; Owl Books, 1996). 5 Numerous historians who have written about the Vietnam War have used veterans’ memoirs and oral histories as primary sources, but most do so only sparingly. A few historians, however, use these sources extensively, such as Christian G. Appy in Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and Peter S. Kindsvatter in American Soldiers: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam (Lawrence, KS: Kansas University Press, 2003), which is almost completely based on veterans’ memoirs. As a result, there are a few instances where my findings overlap those of other historians. Crucially, though, this dissertation uses the information gleaned from veterans’ narratives to analyze how former soldiers portrayed various aspects of the war, and how these portrayals affected what readers learned about the conflict. Other historians treated these works as primary sources only useful for determining what happened in Vietnam. 2 potential effects of these works on America’s collective memory. 6 Literary scholars have done much analysis of veterans’ narratives, but their scholarship is also deficient in several ways. These writers often discussed just a few memoirs, made no distinctions between nonfiction narratives and veteran-authored fiction, 7 and focused on collective memory only in terms of how former soldiers portrayed certain aspects of the war, such as race relations. 8 Veterans’ narratives are important and deserve much more than the limited attention they have received so far from historians and other scholars. This dissertation will be the first comprehensive study of these documents. At the heart of the study are fifty-five veterans’ memoirs and three veteran oral history compilations. These books represent the most prominent narratives published between 1967 and 2005, 9 and were chosen for analysis because they were bestsellers, award winners, reviewed in The New 6 The only existing work of historical scholarship that regards veterans’ narratives as a separate topic,
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