Karl H Cameron-Jackson
Y OF
z o n
by Karl H Cameron-Jackson
Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Discipline of Englistr, School of Humanities University of Adelaide
December 2003 An exegetical essay concerning the novel, Thuyet
Karl H Cameron-Jackson (Creative B.A.@ehavioural science) M.A. (Clinical Psychology) M.A. writing)
An Exegetical Essay Karl H Cameron-Jackson submits his novel Thuyet, and its exegesis, degree of Doctor concerning the novel, Thuyet, as fulfillment of the requirements for the university, has of Philosophy. His supervisor, Professor Tom Shapcott of Adelaide assisted in its process.
Facutty of Arts - English
December' 2003
Acknowledgements
to my deceased father' Private George I wish to publicly acknowledge the debt I owe Service. Since starting at the Diploma Henry Jackson of the ls Australian Special Air by my supervisor Tom shapcott level five years ago I have been academically sustained journey. regard him as both mentor and friend' Many throughout my creative writing I in the form and representation of Thuyet' one of others have helped directly and indirectly vietnam war. Present at the conception of the whom is Thuyet, warrior and victim of the
novelsometwentyyearsagoandmyemotionalsupportforthewholeoftheprocessof of Thuyet' She has watched it ferment writing, my wife Frances understands the meaning
a fully supportive role during the agony of then grow into reality. The life of a person in
ecstasy of its completion' Frances' my father' producing a PtiD can only be justified by the 'there' for me. Thuyet represents my personal Tom, and other special friends have been
epitaph to the many warriors I love and respect odyssey in war and in peace. It is also my
enemy' became firm friends' who are featured in it, many of whom, as my
lv Abstract
number of real persons' It is a In the exegetical essay, Thuyet explores the odyssey of a Thuyet' her brother Vinh journey towards existential completeness of the main character and Dat, were my 'firm friends' acting and her Australian lover Gary. In my novel, Troy .Threshold others in vietnam' as Guardians' and mentors to me and to
the narrative juxtaposes the rival As a metaphor of and a commentary on this pilgrimage, provides motivation to engage on mythologies of America, Australia and vietnam. This on both sides of the the battlefield then a growing understanding between combatants to discover a sense of vietnam conflict. Its main focus is on Gary and Thuyet's efforts war. peace and self-fulfillment in the midst of the chaos of that
the formation of each character The exegetical essay examines writing issues in my novel, its thematic concerns Thuyet analyses and their historical reality and plot and structure. In war novel and the notion of cultural mythology, the development of the modern on soldiers, that of Existential Authenticity, with a specific focus on one outcome of war with the role of myth' .loneliness' and 'alienation'. The exegetical essay is also concerned of heroes, the Heroic warrior'' the genre of Thuyet and the evolution of a'special breed
the novel Thuyet' Its concern The final part of this four-part process is a 'Reflection' upon and to identify some of the is to introduce the reader to a synopsis of each Chapter and research in the writing' complex issues that arose between the demands of creativity
v An Exegetical EssaY concernmga
the novel... Table of Contents
Introduction Page . Thuyet and its Exegesis I
Part One - \ilriting Issues in Thuyet o The exegetical essay 3 . "Writing Lives" 7 o The development of Character l6
o Architecture, Stn¡cture and Plot 23
Part Two - Thematic Issues inThuyet and its Genre o The modern war novel prior to Vietnam 26 o Novels of the Vietnam War 1963 - 1975 30 o Authenticity as a central issue 39
o Existentialism as a key to understanding 44
Part Three - The Heroic Warrior's Journey in Thuyet o Introduction to the role of myth and its genre 5l o Vietnam's Ancient Heroic Warriors 53 o Australia's Ancient Heroic Warriors 59 o Modern Vietnamese Heroic Warriors 6r o Modern Australian Heroic Warriors 7l
Part Four -Conclusion o Reflections on the Novel, Thuyet 80
End Notes 86
Bibliography 92
vl lntroduction
Thuyet and its Exegesis
Thuyet is a 'naturalistic' modern war novel and remains true to the real history of the
First and Second Indochina Wars. Its main characters are drawn from real people and from both sides of the historic and ethnic divide between North and South Vietnam.
Its time-frame spans lives from 1939 to 1967.In this Exegetical Essay, I explore and define my terms and justify its genre and philosophy in the following four Parts of my thesis. I use an academic research orientation and therefore my thesis is grounded, not in subjectivity alone but is cross-referenced to other literatures. All is then related in detail to what I have written within Thuyet.
part One examines writing issues intrinsic to my novel. Traditional biblical exegesis emphasizes the meaning and substance inherent in a word or in a specific Biblical text. This is not my aim. Rather, it is to use the exegetical 'Method' to show how
Ihuyet complies or c¡ntrasts with each issue reviewed. I review 'Writing Lives' as a
representative process for the development of the Characters chosen for Thuyet. The
novel's Architecture highlights the strategic conflict of the Vietnam War.
part Two vindicates 'Thuyet's genre. The modern war novel's genesis is to be found
in Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, first published in 1895 and established a
tradition of war literature markedly different from any prior form.. Remarque (1929)
and Downing (1920) continued Crane's form in WWI Authenticity injects 'meaning
and realism' into the writing of 'men and women in war'. Existentialism is the effect
of war's overarching canvas on each individual and their existential experience of it.
I Part Three defines the Heroic Warrior. Since the beginning of recorded history they have been cultural icons fashioned within the crucible of war, 'Ordinary People' who emerge at intervals like comets to streak across the firmament of history. I discuss their literary forms, largely conferred on them by Myth. I trace heroes from ancient to 'Western modern myth in war literature and the development of Eastern and Heroic
Warriors and the uniqueness of the Vietnamese Woman Warrior.
'The Mystical Domain' has been a central motif to my life since my first heart attack in l97L In Vietnam I experienced the existential conflict of living in the moment and the intense pressure felt by the will's need to survive. Many things happened for which there can be no understanding. Afterward I went to India for two years on a spiritual quest and returned to Australia in 1975 to put my life together. The Indian experience changed me, giving me an appreciation of different 'realities'.
Authors don't just place facts and descriptions on paper. A novel is an exquisite view of reality. War novels, in particular, explore disturbing, ambiguous and complex behavioural effects on the human psyche. Thuyet is intended to convey the impact of the Vietnam War on each individual's psyche. Each character is a construction of MY reality. Their story would be a changed one.
All aspects of this Exegesis relate to the writing process: to the 'Journey of the
Writer'; tothe research and writing of Thuyet; all of which was engendered in me in
order to gr¡ide you, my reader, into the experience of the novel.
2 Part One - Writing lssues
'Take care lo express yourself in a plain, easy manner, in well chosen, significant and decent terms, and to give a harmonious and pleasing turn to your Periods; sludy to explain your thoughts, and set them in lhe truest light, Iabouring as much as possible, not to leave them dark nor intricale, but clear and intelligible.'
Cervantes, preface to Don Quixote The Exegetical Essay
Defined as "a literary composition shorter than a trealise" (Webster's Dictionary
1989, 131) an Essay is also a "dissertation on a particular theme" (396). Initially an exegesis referred to a critical and scholarly analysis of the Holy Bible (134).
Biblical exegesis, or "literary commentary", was non-existent until the Reformation.
Religious scholars confined themselves to 'authenticated' dogma. No freedom of
interpretation was allowed. The Reformation introduced the concept of personal
liberty, which eventually permeated every sphere of human activity. This allowed
scope for scholars to 'freely' interpret the textual content of the Holy Bible.
Theological scholars, from the post-Reformation period to the dawn of rationalism,
believed that to advocate a particular doctrinal viewpoint an exegesis had to be
referenced by a plethora of 'authentic' text. In Psychology I had to 'meticulously'
support any assertion made in theses or assignments with multiple 'references'. An
illusion of objectivity was assured by a heavy reliance on previous studies. In contrast,
George Orwell in Collected Essays 1940-1943, (1972) held that "Modern literature is
either the truthful expression of what one man thinks or feels or it is nothing" (162).
J 'An exegesis concerning the novel', was Brady's justification of her exegesis for her
Creative Writing novel Fragments of a Møp (1998). She stated that each exegesis needs to vary with individual novels and "...needs to be particular rather than general, selective rather than all embracing" (4). I agree. Also that:- "Some works will require a literature review of the theoretical concerns underpinning the work; others will seek to place the work within a cultural or historical frantework. Still others will eke out a genre or concentrale upon the details of techniques explored and developed" (5).
In The Best Australian Essays 2003, Craven defines 'the word essay in its extended or loosest sense' (xiii), as 'a testament to the essayist's love' (xiv) and quotes Morry
Schwartz that it is 'the essence that makes all writing possible' (xvi). Craven suggests the Essay has some characteristics among which the 'fire in the critic's belly' and 'the power of self-characterisation' are important.. His favourite 'stylish and sophisticated piece of work' (ix) is also a 'miniature masterpiece of prose' (x). Catherine Ford and
Thomas Keneally wrote their travelogues as 'the kind of traditional essay ... which
delineates the writerly eye as it takes in the world' (xiii).
Tredinnick in Ihe Art of the Essry (Quadrant 1998), claims there "is a great national
blindness to the essay" (62) adding "We have let the essay slip into disuse and
obscurity" (63). He states "I want to feel welcome, engaged in conversation, not
impressed" (64) and that Goldsworthy's essays are "showy and smart, and I feel
unwelcome". He validly argues that 'formal essays' give away the personal voice and
instead use "Logical argument, technical language and a more rigid structure" (ibid).
It is difficult, from all the preceding, to determine what constitutes a 'good essay'
4 My exegetical essay incorporates an academic style with 'poetic prose' in an attempt to find balance. Professor Tom Shapcott has been insistent with "show don't tell" and that successful writing must engage the reader. After six years this is my Mantra' It produces in the author a special 'tension' between storytelling and artifice.
The first depends on a 'passion for narrative' (Hodgins 2001), the fiery crucible that is the alchemical amalgam 'of imagination, experience, memory (19)'. I add 'passion'.
In order to function in this equivocal world each author has a unique conceptualisation of reality. If works are too 'passionate' however, they lend themself to the critique that the novelist may be imbued, albeit often unintentionally, with some pervasive ideology such as liberalist, feminist or humanist. The prevailing ideology in many veteran Vietnamese war novels and Australian war autobiographies is one of betrayal
by their nation's government. These authors remain biassed and this exemplifies life.
A fish once asked, "What is water?" The problem of artifice is that authors find it
diflicult to see embedded philosophical bias in their work. A concern exists that
artifice as a 'construction of history' inheres a problem between reality and its
representation. or 'misrepresentation'. To identify a book as 'creative', whether
fiction or non-fiction, indicates that the author revels in life's ambiguities. I believe
that a fertile imagination is greater than the sum of any problem raised. There is
'synergy' at work at the creative moment of writing. The aim of Thuyet is not
however, ambivalent. My novel recreates significant parts of my life experiences. For
the reader, I want to inject meaning into the experiences of war that shatters the
psyche and destroys lives. I also want to share with the reader what most soldiers
would admit. That "Peace should always be the prefened option."
5 Thuyet is autobiographical and biographical. Both are very subjective. A balance must be struck. I reject the formal exegesis, which relies heavily on dogma and some philosophical premise for assertions on a text. Yet I wish to use the techniques of the exegesis to explore the detail of Thuyet. The problem with the formal essay is that it doesn't lend itself to the flexibility of a poetic narrative nor easily to fìctionalised fact.
Having served in Vietnam I want to share, with the reader, that unique experience. My novel is my best 'representation' of what happened. Ambiguity and paradox are the stars in Thuyet b sky.
I do not intend to pre-empt the critic nor to offer a review of my creative work.
Four factors compelled me to write my novel:- o A motivation to compile personal memories from the Vietnam War
a I abhor 'cultural imperialism' and have juxtaposed a number of different cultural
milieu, over a long time-frame, to suggest the larger perspective, something I feel
no Vietnam war novel has previously attempted.
a Thuyel represents a best attempt to 'move inside the mind of the enemy' in the
Vietnam War and the complications that arose in its wake.
a World history is the broad canvas on which Heroic Warriors, 'Ordinary People'
otherwise lost in the mists of the past, come alive and have their BEING.
6 The Writing of Lives
ln A passionlor NaTative (llodgins 2001) the author quotes Lectures on Literature
(Nabikov). He presents his view that a writer is either: a storyteller; a teacher; or an
enchanter. It is my view that most authors are all three .,. and more.
As an avid disciple of Joseph Campbell, I prefer the title 'mythmaker'
Theory doesn't silence the writer (Kroetsch 2\. Any attempt to define the genre of a
particular narrative form in terms of existing narrative theory can obfuscate the magic
of a novel. Whether Thuyet is Narrative, Historical Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction or
an example of 'Writing Lives' is for the theorist to determine.
The characters and facts in Thuyet are true. Gury, the central character, is my
representation of an autobiographical portrait. 'Mythmaking' is a distinct narrative
form that allows me to indulge in 'acts of creative license' not generally permitted in
the autobiography nor granted to the biographer' '
predominantly, events recounted are based on fact. For instance, my physical torture
in the ,Tiger Cages' (Thuyet 315-331). This occurred in Sydney's Middle Head in
1961 and Barry Peterson, who was also there, has published his o\tvn account of this
experience (Tiger Men 1965). The torture inflicted on me by professional British
interrogators happened in Kota Tinggi, in Malaysia in 1963 (453-472).In addition, I
have made a great effort to ensure that the historical environment that surrounds my
characters evolves from actual people and real events.
7 'Shearing There is a symbiosis between the painter, sculptor and writer' Tom Robert's
yet Shed' evokes sweat and strain. In Michelangelo's hands, David lives and breathes
the Don it is cast in rigid white marble. When I read Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows
preserved in each was as a potent memorial and masterpiece. Traits and features are
medium' master's artistry, evoking feelings and understandings that reach beyond the
writing. Our concern as a writer is how to present to the reader the subject of our
.No others and, Donne wrote, man is an island'. A single life intermingles with many
ethos and to be authentic, it should reveal that individual within history and within an
that a a social complex. Yet each war novel I have read has an implicit assumption .tabula soldier is rosa'. 'Writing lives' is the 'disciplined' process for autobiographies, life' biographies and life commentaries and can never be a complete account of any
My life in vietnam from lg64 to 1967 has flowed on into history. I was not alone.
Many joined me, sharing with me their great and small moments.
How do I faithfully present this history so that it lives and breathes?
,,In our quest for the hfe-myth we tread on dnngerous speculative and inferenlial
ground, ground lhat requires all of our attention, all of our accumulated resources.
For we must read certain psychological signs that enable us to understand what
people are really saying behind the faces they are putling on, behind the utterances
they ... make beþre lhe world." @del 162)'
In Thuyet I have attempted, in my 'life myths', to get behind peoples' masks' I want
the reader to see characters 'from the inside'. I have 'read the signs' as a psychologist.
8 are collapsed representations of Some of my still-living characters are renamed. Some 'invisible' public scrutiny' I actual persons or amalgams to render that character to are truthfully have gone to great lengths however, to ensure that all characters environment' I have composed within their specifrc geographic, cultural and historical
historical characters are met each Vietnamese character. Thuyet I really loved. Factual faithfully drawn from the best available sources'
my novel, "How is Thuyethas a higher motif. My aim is to ask the question posed by North and it that people of high integrity and purpose from America, Australia and foreign field to deal a South Vietnam, frnd themselves facing each other across a
monstrous Death on each other?"
of To provide detail to this vexatious question I have juxtaposed a number Heroic Warriors from combattants representing the unique views and culture of with this issue' America, Australia then North and South Vietnam. The text wrestles
the horror, the bestiality It does not propose an answer. Instead, Thuyet grapples with heart, mind and soul of and the complex issues of war and reveals the assault on the
as it is'' each main protagonist. It is not a novel for the timid' It relates 'war
For my novel I have drawn on a number of sources'
The First source: My subjective and sensual experience of war focussed on the in Heroic Warrior from individual cultural and historical perspective . Thuyet describes War novels' detail a number of different realities not previously explored in Vietnam
9 is most often blamed' Over Cultural Imperialism is one such topic for which America chinese imperialism' a millennia ago Vietnam finally got rid of a thousand years of except in the archival This first war, experienced by Vietnamese, is rarely dealt with in Vietnam' histories of the Chinese. Yet it left a lasting 'imperialist' legacy
four-thousand-year-old Ho Chi Minh and Giap researched and exposed a remarkable adventurers' These vietnamese history. Nowhere did they record the Portuguese 'discovery' of America' they remarkable sailors did. Forty years after Columbus'
Danang in vietnam' Portuguese settled in India's Goa, in Malaya's Malacca and near
is Catholicism' enclaves still exist except in Vietnam. But their legacy there
established in Vietnam' It took three more centuries before European imperialism was especially from the Catholicism became the lasting European export to Vietnam, vietnamese catholics until seventeenth century on. The French capitalised on its
novels are examples of religion itself became a new form of cultural imperialism. war
cultural imperialism when they relate only to one culture.
They fought against Complete Catholic towns and villages became fortified bastions. Dien Bien Phu' There the French and the Communist forces then moved South after
they fell tragically foul of Southern 'Revolutionaries''
An example is the story of Binh Gia inThuyet (561)'
War and A plethora of American authors have written novels of the Second Indochina
not alone' are excellent examples of cultural imperialism' But they are
l0 and its ambiguities two French colonisation began early. In a salute to history
attacked the Imperial Palace Frenchman, are worth noting. charles Hector d'Estaing
plan seize Vietnam for France' Pigneau' at Hue in 1768 as part of an elaborate war to a treaty on 28û November architect of the French colonisation of Vietnam signed
possession keeping it vassal until 1787. In it France 'acquired' Vietnam as a prize (Karnow 65)' 7954.He was given "a funeral of unprecedented splendour"
is a quintessential part of This characteristic Vietnamese response to foreigners, an erstwhile enemy and Thuyet. Le Duc Dat's magnanimity in my novel toward often' the .foreigner,, Troy, is exemplified in 'The Hills are Alive' (213-230)'
as Hai found (503-512) and as vietnamese treatment of their own people was bestial (646). pham showed in his harsh discipline toward his own soldiers
brutal to each other' Three In early 'histories' the Vietnamese proved extraordinarily This erupted in 1772 against wealthy merchants initiated the Tayson 'insurrection''
cause' Pigneau then helped their ruler, Nguyen Anh. Pigneau rallied to Nguyen Anh's forces' Crowned Emperor in Nguyen Anh with French mercenaries defeat the Tayson
four elephants that ripped his Hue in 1802, Nguyen Anh had Tayson's son chained to
were almost 'benign' (301-308)' body apart. By comparison, Phouc's terrible toftures
The French were The First Indochina War was fought initially against the Japanese'
cadres waged war complicit in the Japanese takeover. Eventually Dat's Vietminh psyche from the first direct against the French. This war started in the Vietnamese Two warships opened fire French assault against Vietnam frred on 23'd March 1847'
forts. on Tourane, killing hundreds and destroying the harbour's
1l Bombarding foreign ports was a feature of French colonialism, repeated in Haiphong in 1945, when they killed thousands. For Vinh, one of the main North Vietnamese
Heroic Warriors, this war became 'real' to him in 1945 (148-154), when his father
and mother were tortured to death in Chapter Two.
Chapter Four leads to the debacle of Dien Bien Phu and its aftermath. This becomes a
significant life-turning-point for Troy, his friend Dat and for Dat's son, Pham'
Thuyef, takes into account varied issues of history from American, Vietnamese and
Australian perspectives. The hatreds and loves inspired by these different experiences
are the 'hidden psychological signs' that enabled me to write the lives of each
character so that they produce a life-myth for each given mask.
Intensive research into fact and fiction enabled me, the author, to breathe life into
North Vietnam's heroes. It is impossible to understand the ramifications and results of
the Second Indochina War without a knowledge of this French Indochina V/ar. My
North Vietnam warriors are instructive in this 'real' history of Vietnam and France.
Vinh remains chained to Ho Chi Minh's view of Vietnam's history. Without an
understanding of Ho Chi Minh's complex rationale as leader it is difficult to
comprehend each war's outcomes and the effect on the North Vietnamese people. The
Second Indochina War was a civil war between North and South Vietnam in which
the American and Australian governments became enmeshed. Rarely described as 'a
civil war', Thuyet provides accurate historical data that leads to this conclusion. Its
genesis in Chapter One, "Freedom Fighters", has Troy and Patti in Hanoi in 1945.
12 Its apogee can be construed from the dismay Dat and Pham experience at Dien Bien
Phu and their feelings over the treatment of Phouc in "The Land Reform" (213-314) plus Xong's atrocities and excesses following that tenible time. Dat's step-brother,
Xong, rapes Thuyet's friend (293) and drives Thuyet from the safety of Grandfather's home (332) but is finally revenged by Dat (682).
Thuyet is essentially the life-myths of Heroic Warrior's journeys to and in Vietnam.
Its main emphasis is about individuals whose war experience started in prior wars.
The Vietnam War ended for me in 1966 but continued for the Vietnamese until 1974.
By then it had become a political, not a military defeat for America and Australia.
Soldiers who were there have agonised since over a sense of 'abandonment'.
Most Vietnam War novels start and end in Vietnam. Authors write their novel of war and mateship as though a one or more year sojourn was a total life, instead of which it is merely a vignette. In Thuyet, my exposure to war, and that of most combatants, started well before 1963. Life does not exist in a vacuum nor do the actors in a war suddenly arrive on the field of combat as 'tabula rosa'. Thuyet b Heroic Warriors arrive with loves, family, expectations and often a wealth of war experience. Each brought with them the angst, philosophies and anxieties of these previous experiences.
I brought with me that 'Mind is all I Have' (259-273). Many of my military peers had
tasted Communism in Korea. Barry Peterson and I had tasted it in Malaya but for us
the experience of the 'Tiger Cages' in Sydney (315-331) had been seminal. We
learned to hate Communism. My experience in 'Beyond the Borderlands (453-472)
only reinforced this hatred.
l3 The Second source: Joseph Campbell 'master-minded', in The Hero with a Thousand
Faces (Campbell 1993), that there are significant similarities between the different
mythologies and religions of mankind. In the 'Hero's Journey' Campbell states two
themes. The first and most persistent in ancient oral tradition and recorded literature is
the myth of the hero, told and re-told throughout world cultures "endlessly in infinite
variation" (Vogler l0). The second theme, exemplified best in the Odyssey and the
Argonauts, is the hero's journey, occurring in every culture and "as infinitely varied
as the human race itself' (ibid).
The Heroic Warrior's journey, as in Thuyed is multi-dimensional and exists within the
framework of a physical journey. It starts with a 'call to adventure' from 'the ordinary
world', like Australia, to some remote, alien landscape. I draw on The lVriter's
Journey (Vogler 1999) for Thuyet and its Heroic Warriors. The 'Inmost Cave' and
'Ordeal' are dangerous places or sudden 'awakenings' for the Heroic Warrior.
When "A single rifle shot blistered the calm" (773), Gary has the dreadful experience
of the young civilian girl, her groin raped then shattered by the bullet of a careless
soldier. This is but one aspect of the Heroic Warrior's Journey. Another that I tooþ
much later, to India was a journey into the mystical recesses of Mind, which is the
doorway to the psyche. I learned there too, that the journey to the heart leads then to
the spirit. I share some of this in Karma's'dream sequence' inThuyet.
To face FEAR is considered the first Threshold, then PAIN ('Tiger Cages' 315-331).
Known as the 'rites of initiation', each is sometimes a metaphor for the inner journey
and regarded as important elements of Self-realisation in Thuyet.
t4 The dialogue between Gary and Rudi, (561-570) is a 'Threshold' for Gary. He's led by Rudi and Pham to new realities about war and the psychic price that must be paid.
Troy became my 'mentor' and 'Threshold Guardian' for the Vietnam part of my journey. We met in 'Leoppard's domain' in My Tho in 1964 (524-539), then again in
'savouring the Monkey' in 1966 (585-596) until Troy left for Saigon. He is given a large part throughout Thuyet because he was also Jaago's 'Threshold Guardian'.
Dat was Pham's 'Threshold Guardian', sending him away from danger then following him South, both to frght Communists they'd once supported. As Vinh's Uncle, Dat was his mentor then he became a 'Threshold Guardian' when he intervened and saved
Vinh's life at Hoa Binh (372). But Vinh took a separate path and remained
Communist, regardless. Phouc and Thuyet both fell under Dat's influence from time to time. For Xong, Dat was clearly a'Protagonist' as in 'Nemesis' (667-682).
The Third Source: I have an extensive personal library of Vietnam War novels and a wider circle of Vietnam veterans as peers and as friends. Many veteran clients, as I did, had to reconstruct their post-Vietnam lives. I began my life-changing experience in 1974-1975 as a Swami in an Indian monastic order and followed this to become a
Clinical Psychologist in 1982 after post-Vietnam university training. Then, armed
with fìfteen years of experience, I listened, pro-bono, to veteran's stories as a Clinical
Psychologist. Where necessary I engaged professional peers to help them recapture
their lost lives finally enabling many to obtain veteran benefits. All these significant
life-experiences have added 'passion' and potency to Thuyet.
l5 The development of Gharacters
"Characlers are those primary substances lo which everything else is attached."
William Glass in Hodgins,J. A Passionfor Nanative (100)
The descriptions of each character in Thuyet aim to create ones that 'breathe on their own' and ones that hint 'at an entire unique soul' (Hodgins 100-101). No longer can the Heroic Warrior swashbuckle åis way to a glorious victory or honourable death assisted by the Gods or by virtue of exotic birth. Since Crane wrote Red Badge of
Courage, the demand has been to write the experience of war.
I tentatively agree that, "No English novelist has explored a man's soul as deeply as
Dostoyevsky" (ibid). His ldiot, still stands as a monument to 'the far reaches of the
human psyche'. As a psychologist I have always paid homage to his insight. But I also
acknowledge D.H. Lawrence in,Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and'llomen in Love.
Each is a brilliant exposition on the human soul. Lawrence would have smiled, thirty
years after his death, during his trial for obscenity in Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960.
Good characterisation has its problems, as Lawrence found out.
Margaret Laurence writes, "Usually there are a number of people who have been
inhabiting my head for a number of years" (Hodgins 102). This is true of my main
characters, Gury, Troy, Jaago, Thuyet, Vinh and Dat. The Vietnam War became
unique as the first time in the modern war novel that the female Heroic Warrior's
voice was heard. The American and Australian female voice remains muted. Not so,
that of the Vietnamese. The novels written by Duong Thu Huong are excellent
examples to be examined later. Interestingly her 'non-heroes' are male. l6 characters from Roger McDonald believes "it can be deadly for the writer to import
"You must draw on buried real life" (103). Jessica Anderson, in contrast, believes that
convincing and fully memory,, (ibid). Hodgins himself agrees that for characters to be "fragments found realised they must be more than purely data. Memories of others are (104)' I would in oneself, people observed, emotions projected, ideas personified "'" his/her experience' also add that an author produces magic from the creative hoard of relationships patricia Grace states that she liked "to explore relationships, spiritual -
family and extended family relationships, relationships with land and the
environment, inter-cultural relationshipf ' (ibid)'
are five: birth, Forster, in Aspects of fhe Novel, posits "The main facts in human life lists, BEING and food, sleep, love and death" (57). I add to his and the preceding of war itself mysticism. These elements of personal and psychical reality and brutality where 'time slows' are all explored in Thuyet. Mysticism is explored in the sequence
is a for Dat (389) and in 'Karma' (738'770).In this and in other ways my novel history in which breakaway from the 'standard' war novel. The Vietnam War and the
deployed' it is embedded is merely the wide canvas upon which my characters are
portrayed 'as it My heroes are portrayed on a canvas in the mire and the grime of war, 20ft Century was,. No attempt is made to gloss over its horror and savagery. In the
geffe of war novels, Heroic Warriors rise above such negative images' They display
soul' coufage and endurance to overcome war's debasement of humanity and
I went to great lengths to bury the gastronomy, geography and the culture and
traditions of the people of Vietnam like huge sultanas in the cake of the novel.
t7 Many Vietnam War authors have had a political agenda. Most are strident in their condemnation of the government and people who sent young men to Vietnam. My aim was to invest in Vietnam's culture and to introduce the reader to the magic of this beautiful land and its people. At the heart of Thuyet I explore the'meaning of life'.
The larger political and historical canvasses are the splashes of bright colour that impact on my characters as much as they do Vietnam, the land and its people. More than anything else I explore the different personal and spiritual effects caused by the
Vietnam War that give life to my main characters from North and South Vietnam'
Wright Morris' character description fitted best. They can "bear a close resemblance to an actual person (as such persons resemble archetypical humors)" (Hodgins 105).
But the main characters were finally assembled, "whole cloth, from my imaginings
and the needs of the novel" (ibid). This has enabled me to create each character in
Thuyet as a finely tuned repertoire of nuance, idiosyncrasy, habit and personality.
They would have been too shallowly depicted if the novel had emerged earlier.
Hodgins (1995), reflects my deepest understanding, that "much of writing is an
attempt to get these figures off our backs". But he adds "to understand them" (ibid)' I
would not deign to understand them. I believe the aim of the novelist is to create
persons believable to a reader. This means 'poetic licence' must be applied even to
'live persons' to make them convincing and consistent. As a novelist I feel safe in
creating each of my characters, because, in daily life we never understand each other
either. Neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. "What we call
intimacy is only makeshift" (Forster 69). We can only know, even the closest person
to us ... approximately.
l8 human psychology is supposed to give the therapist a deeper understanding of the
(ibid)'" The psyche. As a psychologist I know that "perfect knowledge is an illusion skills of the good novelist, like those of a psychologist are acquired: by watching learning human behaviours and emotions; the external signs in the real world; by theory skills vicariously from other authors or therapists; and through the study of the
and philosophy that applies to human relationships'
Above all, a novelist's skills can be greatly enhanced by reading good novels and
evoked in autobiographies. A novel is a work of art, with its own laws. Characters are to novels. One of the realities about war is that these 'characteristics' are subjected
incredible strain. Transported to a strange place to kill other humans who are
markedly different in language, shape, size, colour and culture, breaks all the
boundaries that determine socialisation, behaviour, emotions and consistency.
He An example of the complexity of characterisation sought is in the figure of Troy. dislike intensely and consistently dislikes 'slopes' and "Troy made a snap decision to
pham,, (16). Later, when Gary told Troy that Pham was one of the last to drop into
Dien Bien Phu (20), Troy's attitude to Pham changed immediately. For Gury,
Communism was anathema. Yet he fell in love with Thuyet the enemy, and was
Hai, devastated when he realised that he'd killed the Viet Cong commander Vo Van
his friend and Pham's (78a). Troy's friendship with Dat exists today.
Troy and Gary experience inconsistencies in behaviour, emotions and motivation'
Other major characters also undergo similar shifts in aftitude and consciousness, but
never their place in the war.
t9 to the Dat, Phouc and Pham changed sides from the Vietminh of North Vietnam Gap's AR'\¡N of South Vietnam. Faced with the same facts and horrors about
Hai and Thuyet held fast conduct of the war and Ho chi Minh's Land Reforms, vinh,
to Communism.
as Dialogues are used to help the reader understand the changes' Troy's acceptance
Dat's 'Brother', left Troy feeling 'charmed and honoured' (105)' Rudi's explanation "They of his part in the Hungarian Revolution and his comparisons with Binh Gia, skinned him alive'" captured the village Chief and before chopping his head off they is not the (561), left Gary psychically dazed. Gary's shocked response was that "It
forced clearance of response of a professional soldier" (ibid). Rudi's ans\/er that the
'scorched earth policy' the villagers from Long Tan and Long Phouc and subsequent War' weren't much different, created problems for Gary's psyche about the Vietnam
..The psychological task we all face is to integrate these separate parts into one furnish Gary's balanced entity" (Vogler 36). The 'dramatis personae', in Thuyet,
give the reader a Journey with meaning, substance and content. Gary's function is to
window into the Hero's Journey. Each reader is invited to participate and to identify
.The Hero and his Thousand Faces'. To watch Gary's inner growth through the
learning and Hero,s many convolutions, varied aspects and initiations, to watch the
growth that takes place. The Hero, Gury, may be central but I disagree with Vogler'
Gary is He believes the Hero is the most active person in the script' Many times (37) is simplistic. absent. The assertion that the Hero "drives the story forward" too
Modern writing weaves 'others' into a more realistic representation of the world.
20 lives of vinh and Dat then Gary starts and finishes the story but the interdependent to be placed in the context and Troy and Jaago plus the impact of Thuyet, each need
as compelling as Gary's' woven into 'Round' characters, each with their own story
is sacrifice" which he says is vogler also believes that 'the true mark of the Hero' Bridge or .making holy' (38). This is only partially true. sacrifrce as Horatio on the then to keep surviving is Leonidas at Thermopilae is classical heroics. To survive all seems lost is deemed 'Hero-ic'. In Vietnamese culture, to take one's own life when sacrifice'' .Hero-ic,. My sub-Heroes, Mai, Phouc and Hai, make the 'supreme
ending to Gary and Thuyet's In Thuyet, LOVE is also a sacrifice. The inconclusive that dares all but does not love highlights the Romeo and Juliet archetype of LovE
necessarily conquer all.
mystical element KARMA's .dream' sequence is meant to extend the reader into the 'bonding' that war creates between lovers' in a real person's life and also the nature of
to Arms' inadequately expressed in Hemingway's A Farewell
'travelings in time'' As character in Thuyet acts to effect a'feeling for space' and takes three of its Tolstoy represents the waxing and waning of a generation so Thuyet
hopfields of Kent in 1940, to heroes from the hopelessness of wwII in 1939, to the Gary and Korea in 1951 and Malaya in 1963 then on to vietnam in 1964-1967' from youth into Thuyet struggle as the reader views their sequential initiations growing maturity of Troy' Jaago' adolescence then on into adulthood. We watch the
on the Journey' Dat, Vinh and Pham as they pass before us. Each story is a marker
2l .place', as backdrop for Thuyel, ranges from North to South Vietnam and describes
Hanoi and Saigon as they were and can never be again. We roam 'The Hills are Alive'
in Western Tonkin and see its incredible indigenous life through Troy and Dat's eyes.
Troy takes the reader, on the way to Liu Chau, over the horseshoe shape of the Black
river, where, with Hoa Binh as its nipple Troy passes over the 'five-thousand feet
ramparts of the Fan Si Pan' the breast at which Hoa Binh feeds (2la).
The difference between real life and the novel is that the novelist has so many
mediums by which a message can be passed to the reader. Characters are created for a
purpose, to'enact' the play of life within a story. They can be talked to or can talk at.
They can become enclosed, into the context of war for example, and live or die in that
immersion at the whim of the writer. Characters can be removed, supplanted and
changed. Also words spoken, situations and events in real life can be retrieved and
cancelled out. In manuscript, once made, the words remain for all time.
The author can engage in the contemplation or inner musings of a character that
cannot be listened to or experienced in the real world by any other.
The writer can be moralist, anarchist or whatever. There is no limit.
22 Architecture, Structure and Plot
My world started its memories on my father's shoulders in London. WWII started two years after I was born but other lives were being lived with \¡sar memories that later mingled with mine. Vietnam ended with "Fuck, I'm back in Australia (789)" Between the two lies Thuyet In its merger of real lives is the Structure and content of Thuyet.
Warfare and myths have been my constant bedfellows. Warriors are the fire and war the crucibleof Thuyel. Its alchemy is my'awakening'.
Hodgins defines Structure as'The Architecture of Fiction'(l5l). He continues that
"It's not just the framework that you hang your subject matter on... it is integral to
the emotion of the story, so if you find the right shape for your story, whatever il is, it will add to il" libid). I differentiate between Structure and Architecture.
Structure in the human body relates to the skeleton, the muscles and the support
'systems'. Its 'Architecture' is the aesthetic impression of the whole once completed.
On the way significant changes may be made to its structure to achieve the end-point.
The 'right shape' may not appear in a novel until close to completion. Its 'Totality'
requires Mind and Emotion to act in a different way to the building of the Structure.
For me Thuyet's Structure is in its many stories. Until the final submission of my
novel I still 'played' with its Afchitecture to achieve the meaning I sought.
Choices made by an author inform the reader. Others enable the reader to enter into
the world of the writer, then hopefully to lose themselves in the novel so that it
'comes alive' in the mind of the reader in a similar way to the authors intent.
23 The novelist needs to be aware, like God, of the novel's over-arching schema.
Thuyetb movement is dictated by the historical events that charge it. Its time-frame is
1939 to 1967 .I start with my second trip to Vietnam in 1966 in Chapter One and end
Chapter Seven by 'waking up in Australia'. A novel must have driving force toward the 'end-point', which the author must hold to the reader as a mirror is held under the nose of a dying person. It is they who tell us whether the story is 'alive or not'.
Thuyet starts with a pistol held to my head, for the second time in a short life, in
Vunggas aged twenty-nine (l). At Kapooka 'I was only nineteen' (272). The
'Mexican Standoff is dramatic, attention-holding and contains all the major characters, except Thuyet, in the same room all at the same time. It creates a step-off for the reader to meet Thuyel 's major characters. 'The Legend of the Uc Da Loi Bear' completes the story commenced in 'Mexican Standoff. The sections between these two introduce the reader to 'writing the lives' of Troy, Gary and Jaago and their
stories unfold. Immersed in the novel's Caucasian characters the reader reaches a
point where, what happens next is conjecture.
Chapter Two introduces the Vietnamese main characters and they move through a
chronological timeline. They are kept apart from all but Troy to maintain a dynamic
tension. From Chapter Three onward, the characters mix and merge. Here it becomes
necessary for the reader to keep re-evaluating the impressions gained for each
character. Gary and Thuyet are growing up and the reader is faced with some
identi$ing traits and characteristics that remain and others lost. Gary's fight with the
Wiley kids (71-73) is compared to adult responses to the bastardisation process at
Kapooka, his conflict with Dad then and later and Fuckyou ... Fuckyou all ... (272).
24 Thuyet is only eight when 'Hanoi Flower' opens in Chapter Three as Phouc's special princess (274). Duyen held'a mirrorto her and demanded Thuyet look at herself
(2gZ) with a'fire in your eyes... that affects everyone around you.'Her best friend
'forced her to look at her budding breasts' (ibid). Then Duyen goes missing. Mystery and anticipation deepen. When the chapter closes, Gary and Thuyet are adults.
Thuyet is the sum of the surge of my memory, dreams, nightmares and feelings of
Vietnam. In one sense 'real history' commands Thuyetb overall shape. But the insertion of what remains as text is a conscious and selective choice. The reader may see a random distribution of items throughout the text but everything is constructed.
The placement of characters and what they do is deliberate and constitutes 'Plot'
Forster says, "Let us defìne the plot ... the emphasis falls on causality" (87). He
explains 'story', 'plot' and expands the sentence structure to develop surprise and
mystery, a time sequence and the demands of memory to sustain motif. The vignettes
are the novelist's 'Structure' of a novel. Finally an intelligent reader must be moved
by the motif to complete the circle and to recognise its Architecture.
Good friends are the compost of life. They helped me to gow, to recognise good
things in life and to appreciate how short a 'time we have here on Earth'. And that a
great LOVE must sometimes end.
This overarching desire to give meaning to Thuyet, is its Architecture.
25 Part Two
Thuyet, its Genre and two Thematic issues
The modern war novel prior to Vietnam
During 2OOL,I conducted a detailed research project of the modern war novel. I found that two events had modified storytelling or the 'm¡hmaking' of ancient Heroic
Warrior epics. They changed the shape and structure of war literature from its ancient form into that of the 20ú Century modern war novel. As a result, I place Thuyet within the genre of the modern'romance' war-novel.
The ínfluence of Stephen Crane (1895)
First, Goetal's Introduction claimed that Cranei created a most realistic piece in The
Red Badge of Courage (1962,6). Yet, Crane had not experienced war. Hemingway stated in Men at War, that Crane's novel established the pattern for all the novels in modern war literature. He further emphasised that it "is one of the finest books of our great literature because it is all as much of one piece as a gteat poem is" (11).
Secondly, Crane initiated the 'romance' war-novel. Crane wrote of the effect of war on the heart and psyche within the fabric of the American Civil War. He gave his hero a single consciousness and used the psychological interplay of Mind with its variety of impressions, colour and sound, to take the reader on a journey into the confüsion that is the actual battlefield. He treated familiar themes in his culture from a traditional point of view. The theme of initiation' is most striking. Crane's 'non-hero' remains unnamed for most of the novel as he 'staggers' into war. This heightened his existential loneliness, vulnerability, contradiction and the hero's ultimate alienation.
26 WIn novels followed Crane's example. They characterised their heroes as 'non- heroes' and documented the existential nature of the war experience. Prior to Crane, three great novelists wrote the story of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. Tolstoy's lil'ar and Peace, Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parma and Hugo's Les Miseraåles represent aspects of war, as in Crane's 1895 novel, but differently. Their great novels treat war as a vast historic movement of military and social forces'
"There is no better writing on war that there is in Tolstoy''(Hemingway ll). But
Hemingway draws attention to two significant issues. llar and Peace is a "wonderful, penetrating and true description of war and of people" (ibid), but its prose could be radically cut without losing any of its impact on the reader. Also, that a writer's personal bias can damage the script. Hemingway believed that Tolstoy's bias against
Napoleon is too obvious and his admiration of Russian generalship too lauditory. He
stated that the impact of Tolstoy's novel was weakened by its subjectivity.
Icons of World War One war literature
This is short. It includes Remarque' s Atl quiet on the Western Front first published in
lg2g, telling of a nightmare world, where some consciousness of 'being human'
remains. Manning's dream in Her Privales We, shows the vagaries and freakishness
of Fate (6-10). Downing's To the Last Ridge I maintain is one of the best'
Remarque tells us that his novel is "neither an accusation nor a confession, and least
of alt an adventure, for death is not an advenlure to those who standface to face with
it. It witt try simply lo tell o! a generation of men who, even though they may have
escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war." My novel Thuyet is such a story.
27 novels' that Remarque's is the only novel, other than very recent North Vietnamese men are hanging' A speaks of the horrors of 'concussion'. "In the branches dead
the top half, the legs naked soldier... entirely unclad ... only half of him sitting there,
are missing ... "It's the concussion that does it'" (137)'
the entire Hemingway claims that that there was "no really good true war book during
and four years of the war" (8). But he states that Manning's novel is the "finest
unable to find noblest book of men in war that I have ever read" (9). I have also been
'the war to end all wars'' a novel actually written during the 1914-1918 Great War,
(in 1920)' is a Downing's To the Last Ridge, and one of the earliest to be published study of war novel by an Australian author. His experiences in wwl are a masterful picture Australian courage in war (lrg-r22). I believe no wwl novel shows a better is the of the professional soldier than his 'At:V¿ac Day l9l8'(120) and Bullecourt
bloodiest description that I have found in any war noveVautobiography'
how soldiers survive' These w\u novels focus on the horrors of war, mateship and never fathom They tell of savagery that others, without the experience of war, could ,.will because civilians not understand us" (Remarque 190).
lcons of Wortd War Two war literature
country possesses its WWII saw a burgeoning of national icons of war literature. Each
short stories, own canon. Offrcial histories, documentaries and specialised documents, literature novels, memoirs, diaries, journals make up an inexhaustible reservoir of war
imperialism' and war novels. America's 'limitless-ness' is an example of cultural
28 The Australian canon of WWII literature
These are few. Lloyd's Hidden Enemy is a little known but brilliant novel about New
Guinea, which shows conflict, moral and physical and a keen insight into courage.
Neville Shute's include Requiem for a lVren and A Town Like Alice. John Cleary's
Climate of Courage is an epic of realism, suffering and endurance inNew Guinea.
The American canon of WWII literature
America dominates the supply and demand of literature and film in English-speaking countries. The ability to produce, very quickly, a vast amount of war-related novels, films and TV features, favourably impact on a reader's choice of novel. Films reflect on soldier's issues: promote an idealised view of war; impact on national consciousness; and often inspire people to support war.
Written after the enormous success of both the novel and film, From Here lo Eternily
(1966), Jones' later war novel The Thin Red Line (1969) is excellent. It takes us on a
long existential journey and, for me, became one of the better modern war films.
Jones's heroes, as 'non-heroes', switch back and forth between the Heroic Warrior
and the non-hero. His portrait is the "internal war between the humane and bestial".
They "collide, divide, attack, shift and shatter" (from Crane l0). In another iconic
W\MI film based on an outstanding novel, The Young Lions (Shaw 1969) shows
morality is the first 'loss of innocence' in war. Each of these great WWII novels ask,
then try to answer 'What is the meaning of human existence?'.
In The Naked and the Dead, part of the canon of WWII war novels, Norman Mailer
gives his answer... "All the Army wanted you for \ilas cannon fodde/' (45).
29 Novels of the Vietnam War 1963-1975
the longest war for Australia It is impossible to review all Vietnam war literature. As
wide a sweep for one person to survey' and America in modern history it contains too Thuyef is one example' The writing of Vietnam War literature is not yet exhausted' Young (Moore 2002) and the The American novel We Were Soldiers Once ... and written more than thirty years Australian one, The Soldier's Story (1999), were also
after their recorded events.
publishing of Vietnam war A number of issues caused a burgeoning of the writing and
novels compared to WWI & WWII novels: conveyed the horror of o Education.' WWI produced few novels' Erudite veterans factors radically changed that war and wrote excellent novels. Social and political in Australia and Americaii' and subsequently, a premium was placed on education The drive to educate By W\WII novels were not restricted to a sophisticated elite' post-WWII era' 'the masses' in Vietnam had to wait for communists in a write war novels and Descendants of veterans and non-veteran authors also of war novels' academics publish 'noble' theses. This changes the form
tradition ... filled with the o Genre issues..vietnam war novels are in the "rearist
Some claim modern war boredom, blood and pain of men at war" (Jason l5). fiction and non- novels are postmodernist or have erased distinctions between on it have fiction. Jason suggests "the literature of war and the commentaries Vietnam War authors focussed and amplified" this problem. He maintains that
as novels" (4)' have created autobiographical works "very close to being offered
30 American lcons of Vietnam War literature
Jason suggests two categories of novels (15-16) and questions 'something new'. But
Remarque and Manning's novels recorded all these things in WWI. Chapman and many other British and European authors did the same in W\MI. All only thinly disguise fact. American myopism and cultural imperialism is sometimes staggering.
Fíctíon ín the 'Realíst Traditíon'
Jason deplores the predictability of this group. In its third person narration we know
"where the characters come from, what war circumstances shaped them and what they might have to return to" (Jason 16). Time, place, action and causality are conventionally handled. Also, Vietnam lVar novels create "contexts that blur moral issues" (18). They use ironic vignettes that seem to justify atrocity, murder and rape.
Examples of these are Heinemann's Close Quarters (1987), Webb's Fields of Fire
(1980), Del vecchio's The I3th Valley (1982) and Huggett's Body count (1983).
o Morality: In Fietds of Fire, an unpopular officer was 'fragged' by one of Snake's
men. It is a moral and tactical error to position men so that it's impossible for
them to return to their lines safely. The hero, Snake was forced to comply with
such an illegal order. During a mortar attack the sergeant crawled away from *That Snake's mate, Phony, who pitched a grenade beside the man, smiling was a
mortar". Before rescuing him Wild Man snorted, "Let him bleed a little first"
(158). In another example a wounded NVA hung on barbed wire after an attack
screaming in pain. Others joined in 'the turkey shoot' until the man fell silent.
o lrony: In many American novels, medals are often awarded arbitrarily and
ironically. ln Fields of Fire, the 'fragged offtcer' and the sergeant survived and
were a\ryarded a Purple Heart for what was essentially their immoral acts.
3t 'Fíctíon ín the Naturalìst Traditíon'
This is the form of Thuyel. Jason lists Hasford's The Short Timers (1979),
Heinemann's Close Quarters (1977) and O'Brien's Going after Caccialo (1978) as
'naturalist' novels. Close analysis reveals that the irrational and history are complex phenomena. Other reviewers suggest Vietnam War fiction is Postmodernistiii.
Postmodernism: This 'movement' claims its icons include the French philosophers
Foucault, Levi-Strauss and Barthes. Foucaulti" opposed conventional expectations of history, suggesting it is not a chronology of inevitable facts telling a 'sensible' story.
Levi-Strauss and Barthes wrote significant works on mythology. Barthes and Foucault were both opposed to the myths and attitudes of power brokers. Some analysts label
Postmodernism as myth, its tenets destroyed by its own ideology. Beidler detects a postmodernist current in Vietnam War fiction and the difliculty of differentiating postmodernism from 'naturalist' novels. He argues Vietnam war authors such as
Caputo, O'Brien, Heinemann and Webb have re-energized American creative writing and further claims that they have led it out of a poststucturalist impasse of terts as
'endless critiques of language, representation, and authority'. Beidler regards the journalistic literature of Briand and Fitzgerald: and war corespondents Koch, Stone,
and Herr, as "coming to terms explicitly with Vietnam" (2). Also that "Vietnam
authors in their generation have carried their crucial enactment of that mythic self-
critique into the very center of our national literature and consciousness at large"
(xiii). Finally, exact nature of postmodernism needs closer definition.
Vietnam War novels follow the tradition set by prior modern war novels. They expose
the veteran's suppressed and unconscious war and reject 'linearity' and the 'safe'.
32 They contain lyrical, surreal passages that create distortions of time, place, action; shred cause and effect assumptions; and have little backgrounding of characters
(Jason 16). My complaint is their'severely limited perspectives'. Characters are detached "from any sense of the past's relevance to what kind of people they are rìow". Unpredictable war novels "force something closer to the absurd" on the reader
(ibid). On the positive side many inject psychological reality into the novel.
There are also moral and ironic issues in Thuyet. Dat had murdered a political commissar at Vinh Yen (372). Giap personally awarded campaign medals to Dat and
Vinh after Hoa Binh (391). Ironically, the Vietminh's greatest single victory at Dien
Bien Phu turns Dat against Giap and Ho Chi Minh. Uncle Ho's Land Reforms to 'win the working classes' have already turned Phouc and Pham (293-314).
'Something new'
Veteran and non-veteran authors of Vietnam War novels, and their reviewers, claim
'something new in history' occurred about war, its effect on the soldier and on their
culture. I found they merely recorded 'a common experience of war'. Jason claims the
1960's merely "ushered in a personal journalism that employed novelist techniques"
(9). Few Vietnam War novels have produced innovations in form or technique and
none convincingly communicate a new vision of war. Nor does any author's view of
the Vietnam rWar achieve anything unique about that war compared to other modern
ones. Most hint differences exist but don't show how they are "different from its
predecessors" (ibid). 'Something new' is Moore and Galloway's ll'e Were Soldiers
Once ... and Young (1992).It is the first Vietnam War story and movie to present an
accurate portrait of command in war and a positive view of the Vietnam War.
JJ a The one thousand yard stare: lVriters and critics hail the 'one thousand yard stare'
as a characteristic of Vietnam veterans. Crane first recorded this with "his eyes
burning with the power of a stare into the unknown" (56). Jones in the The Thin
Red Line (1969) offers the best descriptions. The wounded "stared back ... with
lacklustre eyes... made curiously limpid by the dilation of deep shock, and ...
what they saw did not register" (52). "8e11... could read something more in their
faces. That spiritual numbness and sense of no longer feeling human... was
growing apace in all their faces" (270). In Thuyet, Vinh experiences 'the stare'
(371). Thuyet also recalls the terrible experiences of concussion and "I just stared
into the distance, pas dit. .." (758).
o The hotors of the Vietnam War: This also fails to convince me of 'something
new in Vietnam'. Murder, rape, massacre and brutality have been catalogued for
war's abomination since ancient times. Remarque and Downing are two of the
best examples to emerge from WWl. Heinemann's Close Quarters is a Vietnam
example but Vietnam War's horrors sit low on the following scales:-
1. The Holocaust and the colossal Russian and German losses and massacres.
2. The Praetorians (Sellers) is unique, detailing with brutality in Korea.
3. Larteguy chronicles atrocious acts in Vietnam, Algeria and the Congou.
4. Pol Pot's genocide 'exterminated' two-thirds of all Cambodians.
5. Stewart's Broken Lives ch¡onicles the rape ofKuwait.
6. Kosovo and still- emerging stories of Bosnian and Serbian'ethnic cleansing'.
7. The killing fields of East Timor.
8. Recent ethnic massacres in Africa.
9. Religiously based atrocities in India at 'Partition' and recently against Christians.
34 ÍTar Atrocifies.. War is brutal and every war has its atrocities. Soldiers commit isolated atrocities but America seems to make a fetish of 'collateral damage', meaning accidental attacks on civilians. Claims are made about American and about South Vietnam's atrocities. In Four Hours in My Zai, Bilton and Sim
(lgg2) show that American 'enraged' soldiers killed 172 civilians and received harsh sentences, like Calleyu¡, 'scapegoat' to America's conscience just twelve months after Don and Bruce were killed in mine blasts (Chap' 7)'
The CIA's most extensive assassination operation was Operation Pheonix,
despite denials by colby in Honourable Men (270).ln 1967 the CIA claimed
the scale of VC atrocities accounted for more than 500 selective assassinations
monthly, in 1964. VC murders then escalated between 1968 and l97l to2,O0O
per month. During 1967-71, the Pheonix program exterminated 20,857 VC
(The Team408). This figure has been verifïed buy a number of documentsúi.
The VC murder civilians as a centerpiece of a terrorist strategy and are lauded
by Hanoi. Lanning and Cragg estimated that between 1965-1972,the National
Liberation Front (Ì.ILF) assassinated 33,052 South Vietnamese civilians and
abducted another 56,638, an average of 12,813 per annum (Inside the VC and
the NVA 335). NLF death squads murdered village chiefs, medical personnel,
police, social workers, and teachers. The aim was to destroy the administrative
infrastructures in non-Communist controlled areas in South Vietnam.
In 1964 I witnessed the aftermath of the annihilation of Ben Tre village. Once
a peaceful village near My Tho, I revisituiiiit in Vinh's trauma (152-153).
35 Australian Icons of Vietnam War literature
These again are few. But no Australian has written a significant Vietnam war novel.
The fïrst truly Australian novel that I am aware of is Count Your Dead (Rowe 1968).
.Diggers for Dollars' is an interesting observation by Rowe. "Australia is no fortress.
'We're only twelve-million people living in... a gteat empty country as big as
America..." To Asians, our country "Looks attractive - fat, rich and empty. So we're
realists." Supporting America "in this war is sort of taking out an insurance policy'
Dead diggers are a down payment on that policy" (108). Many of the issues Rowe
raised have since been discounted but it remains an accurate index of the times and
therefore a reasonably accurate portrayal of 'how it was'. He was Chief Intelligence
offrcer to the Task Force before Long Tan, l7ú August 1966'
Most Vietnam War stories are autobiographical and as a record Australian aims, roles,
tactics and deployment it is hard to fault them. Sleeping with Your Ears Open (McKay
2001) and Behind Enemy Lines (O'Fanell 2001) are SAS stories. Møverick Soldier is
also typical. The 'story-telling' is well documented. Other Australian autobiographies
are, CrossJire (Haranand Kearney 2001), No Need For Heroes (McGregor 1993), The
Battle of Coral (McAuley 1998). Smoþ Joe's Café (Courtenay 2001) is
disappointing. His revisit of the Battle of Long Tan, misses the vitality of The
is Soldier's Story @urstall 1986), the best account of Long Tan. Nasho (Frazer 1984)
one of the rare Australian Vietnam War novels but not significant. Turner the'non-
hero' goes bush "hoping that he'd would get shot at, but for the life of him he couldn't
understand why he wanted to risk his life... He didn't know why." (192). Nasåo ends
with a tenible indictment " They had risked their lives in a foreign war, fought on
behalf of their country ... years later, they were embarrassed to talk about ir" (296).
36 The Vietnamese canon of Vietnam War literature
In 1987 the Vietnamese Communist Party asked its authors to abandon the oflicial
Marxist style and re-assert the respected Confucian scholarly style of social criticism.
Authors exposed the excesses of the Party, its ideology, offrcial comrption and its
bureaucracy. Veteran novels surprised everyone by their stark anti-war realism.
Duong Thu Huong rilas one of the first to attraû, attention with her Beyond lllusions
(1987), Paradise of the Blind (1983), Fragments of Lost LiÍe (1989) and Novel
Without a Name (1995). She is an outspoken critic of Communist Vietnam, lives in
Hanoi but her books are banned. In 1969, at the age of eighteen she volunteered as
leader of a communist youth brigade. At twenty she commanded troops at the DlúZ
where North and South Vietnam were partitioned. She "witnessed the sight of her
country being bombed back to the Stone Age", from Shadows and llind (Templer
184) and made documentaries following China's atlack on the newly confederated
Vietnam. She became disaffected with the Party when Vietnam was gripped by
political and spiritual chaos in the 1980's. In 1989 'liberalisation' was halted. Her
popular appeal and the directness of Doung Thu Huong terrified the regime (183-
189). Expelled from the Party in 1991, arrested and imprisoned without trial, Amnesty
International negotiated her release after seven months in prison at the end of 1991.
She dedicated her novel "For my friends who died, who live in me."
Recent novels talk of scapegoating: sexual abuse by senior offtcers: female struggles
with isolation: the horror of war: and female responses to these issues. These novels
assisted me to flesh out the character of Thuyet in a way I could only have guessed at
immediately after I left Vietnam for the second time in 1967.
37 "the generation that In l929,Remarque in All Quiet on the western Front had stated
push us aside" (190)' Sixty-one years has grown up after us will be strange to us and
"We are the ones who've later, in The Sorrow of War, Bao Binh echoes this with,
us' But When?" (100)' Templar's been alienated... There must be some way out for
about the war" in Vietnam (190)' Shadows and Wndstates Binh "transformed writing
international acclaim. His Binh,s novel was the first vietnamese war novel to achieve will remain novel ends with Hoa and "the psychological scars of the war [that] fought a decade to forever" (193). He joined the army in 1968 and, as a National hero is "unacknowledged the final battle of saigon, always against south vietnamese. It in Vietnam" (191). fratricide that leaves some of the greatest legacies of bitterness
to 'flashback' then to strongly anti-war, Binh's story, moves rapidly from memory war novels' Bao Ninh's only the present and is in the same geffe as modern 'Western' but finds out that she is a hero is a woman. Kien, the non-hero, intends to shoot Hoa
patrol, Hoa shoots the teenager. When Kien's patrol is almost caught by an American after her and away tracking dog then hurls empty her pistol, inciting the men to chase The patrol will "end from Kien's small group in "a magnificent portrait of courage". line up (189-192)' their patrol with the rape" and Kien watches, helpless, as they
38 Authenticity as a Gentral lssue
In literary criticism authenticity has two meanings. Popularly it assumes truth, authority and the realist tradition in fiction. "A work is 'authentic' when it accurately renders persons, places and events against a standard of frrst hand experience ... and is compellingly mimetiC' (Jason 43). The other is a philosophical premise arising out of 'the aesthetic application of existential thought' and in this application 'Authentic works produce transformations in their readers' (ibid). In the second sense they don't merely validate the past or act as copies of experience. Nor are authentic works valued as ends in themselves. Instead, they allow us to experience the world in a different way, 'to alter our experience of the world from its very foundations' (ibid).
It is sad that History is repetitive. The initiators of acts of war are single individuals or an amorphous group of politically or ideologically inspired individuals who rarely see the real 'face of war'. Though repetitive, in order to achieve a sense of the Authentic, an artistic interpretation of History includes selection and choice of emphasis. The reshaping and re-defrning of the past liberates it 'from the current, dominant interpretation and working-out'. In this act lies the genuis of any work of art (ibid).
A veteran has a unique view of combat and the 'authentic' author of war novels.
Verisimilitude is not the same as reportage. Authenticity influences my motif of the
Heroic Warrior, and of the large-scale scope of this enterprise. Initially Thuyet was
dictated by my own experiences as a warrior: in love with an enemy; in mateship and
trauma; then as a Clinical Psychologist; in addition to being a spiritual warrior.
Finally enhanced by academic scholarship and study of a wide range of war writings.
39 be the most intimate and Authenticity is critical to any novel. Autobiography may
as reveal' Tredinnick personal, but it can have its limitation. It can disguise as well art and in life' than on (Quadrant 1998) places greater value on authenticity 'in War veteran novels are conformity with doctrines oft agendas (62)' Many Vietnam
fictional representations of real persons, often 'hidden' autobiographies' Whether they are the only Unequivocally they are 'authentic voice' in one sense.
ones admissible is arguable.
written as myth' with Thuyet beginss as a Vietnam War veteran's autobiography, of individuals caught characters that are also real. Its authenticity is in its explorations of the main character's life, up in a larger conflict. Being constructed about the shape allow for 'accidents' (Lee it does gain from superiority of hindsight, which cannot '\ novel' critical opinion,297). Lee claims that there is academic distrust of the 'ar impure form relies and condescension of it to this "popular, heterogenous, [which] realist novel" (298)' heavily on the convention and traditions of the nineteenth century
perspective' He dismisses war novels as 'low genre'. This is a matter of
veteran is assuredly one The truth and integrity of experience is its Authenticity. A But veterans alone who can authentically access combat's 'determining moments'' truth from anecdotal aren't the only crucial factor. Others can surmise or reconstruct
on this later' and other records of or novels by veterans. I will expand
the same u/ar as also do war correspondents have a different view from the military of with but his its non-combat survivors. John Pilger's views I do not always agree
writings are exemplary, in the sense of vividness'
40 ln Distant Voices,Martha Gellhorn has a difference of opinion with Pilger over Israel.
She notes he was born in 1939 and maintains that this is its basis (xiii). Her argument
is flawed that "nobody can understand Israel who does not remember the Second
World War and how and why the nation came into being" (xiii). To be authentic a
person does not have to 'be there' nor even to be born in that time. It may give
immediate credibility but being a warrior in the Vietnam War is not the absolute
stamp of authenticity in a war novel. Briand's Woman at llar (1969) bears the stamp
of authenticity. Written as an autobiography it reads like a novel.
(1998). Koch, a journalist, won the Miles Franklin award with Higlnvays to a'Ilar A
his close friend of Neil Davis, who covered the Indochina conflict, Koch admits that
hero, modelled after Davis, is a "composite: mostly invented, and inspired .. ' by other
war photographers - some of them friends, others men whom I've never met. '..
Langford's... background is entirely different... all his personal relationships, the
crucial events of his life, and his eventual fate. All are essentially fictions" (ix)'
Koch's novel captures Vietnam's nuance and culture. Captain Trung is ARVN like
pham. Langford's admiration "for the small Vietnamese soldiers in their oversized
helmets increased" (136). The ARVN soldiers "smile broadly, watching him -.. He
began to burn blood-frlled leeches from his leg with a lit cigarette" (138), much as Dat
does for Troy in the hills of Tonkin (Thuyet 226).Their sweep is near My Tho, where
Gary frrst meets Troy (254). Koch immersed himself in the culture and traditions of
Vietnam and of the war culture, and his novel demonstrates his life has been enriched.
This is what I mean by 'Authenticity'
4t Jason lists a number of critics of veteran's literature, which is viewed "as a sub-genre of war literature" (41). Most are academic or journalistic reviewers, not authentic by any of the defìnitions proffered. Jason suggests that authenticity "feeds an important appeal... the vicarious experience". Authenticity "privileges those who have been there', (43). yet a skilled writer can create a vicarious experience in the mind and in
the feeling-state of the reader. In terms of the authenticity of the writer however,
Jason claims that only a veteran can authentically author the actual war experience. A
second-hand experience may offer the reader a vicarious experience, but, if the reader
knows the author 'was there' then this is another, more authentic level.
Schaeffer, an academic, wrote Buffalo Afternoon (1989) with integrity but fell prey to
two complaints. She was an'outsider', 'outrageously arrogant and inevitably doomed
to failure' (Jason 42). Second, she used stereotypes that are the Vietnam author's journalists. stock-in-trade. The literary criticism was by academics, review writers and
Few, if any, had'frrst-hand'combat experience yet assumed they could impugnher.
Schaeffer had the power of the good writer, to draw the reader into a constructed
world that the reader can then identifo with. Buffalo Afternoon raised many issues.
The following novels, are authentic because each veteran author tells an accurate story
of 'being there' in its authentic and existential sense: Dispatches (Hen 1968): Going
after Cacciato (O'Bnen 1975): A Rumour of War (Caputo 1977): Body Count
(Webb 1980). (Huggen 1973): Close Quarters (Heinemann 1974): and Fields of Fire
Jason, a non-veteran academic himself, asks "How crî a woman be authentic who
never experienced at firsthand the Vietnam War?" He doesn't seem to realise that
non-combatant women have written successfr¡l and widely acclaimed war novels'
42 The WWII novel Gone to Soldiers (19s7) written by Marge Piercy was a brilliant told best-selling novel. It showed the "battle front is not all blood and guts" and of
.back home': the love and survival of the human spirit: and the diffrculties and terrors
of the soldier-hero. Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country,like Caputo's Indian Country, in explores the effect of the Vietnam War on a family after the war had ended' Never
Vietnam, she visited the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial and "Knew then that Vietnam's in my story too" (Hertzog2}}) Frances Fitzgerald won the Pulitzer Prize with Fire
the Lake (1972). She 'was there' for most of 1966, and at a time when there was a "most paucity of American academic scholarship about Vietnam. Fitzgerald wrote a in sensitive, ambitious and most eloquent book to examine the American intervention
Vietnam against its Vietnamese historical setting" (Woodside 1976). Being a veteran
is not the single determining factor of authenticity'
Crane wrote his most iconic war novel before he'd been to war. Crane's, Schaeffer's order and the three novels above demonstrate it is not necessary to experience war in
to write about it. 'Integrity' is about probity and honesty. To jump from integrity to
authenticity as though they mean the same thing is to distort the essence of the
existential experience. Each of these 'women's novels' transform the reader.
Authenticity cannot itself be compromised. There have been many wish-fulfillers. In
recent years I have heard many claim to be Vietnam War veterans. If it is proven they
never were, then their authenticity can be totally discredited. The issue hinges on
.claims of authenticity'. When a writer is seen to be creating a hoax by claiming some
entitlement to experience, when the truth is revealed then they are totally discredited'
Helen DarvelllDemidenko is a recent Australian example'
43 Existentialism as a Key to Understanding
"If one conquers in battle a thousand times a thousand and another conquers only the Setf, there is the greater warrior." Gautama Buddha
.the When old order changeth, yielding place to new' we often become aware of a
lingering sense of dissatisfaction. To be moved from the very real dangers of London
during and after 'The Blitz' I finished up in an alien environment in language, culture
and immediate kin. The experience of Mum "with her tortured face" (Thuyet 59), due
to a diving Messerschmidt would have shaken me to the core. The image has
remained in my consciousness, with its attendant fears, for over sixty years yet at the
time it \ryas a matter of 'getting on with life'.
The Army was a good experience. I moved every two years so that any issues raised
that were diffrcult could be 'erased' by moving to another locale with different people
and different environment. It became a habit when I left the Army. If I had a problem
I could always leave and try somewhere else, hence I moved to New Zealand after my
marriage breakdown. But something dogged me. I'd given Catholicism away (265)
and found 'inner peace' as a Tantric Swami. But something was still 'wrong'.
Deep down, inside my psyche, was some 'vexation of the spirit'. I thought I had
found 'meaning in life' but something still bugged me. I had been scared shitless as a
young kid and no one had thought of the need for rehabilitation.
I'd been disowned by Dad (266): my religion (ibid); and finally by the Army in 1972
44 Initially my story had been entitled Betrayed. My ignominious return home and the negative treatment meted out to Vietnam veterans 'home' in Australia, left me with a
deep sense of betrayal, by government, friends and family. This left me alone,
.alienated' in the existential meaning of a sense-of-being-and-not-Being-in-the-world.
War causes the same existential crises in soldiers and most war novels try to project
the alienation felt. Many of my intimate circle of family and friends assumed they
.knew' me. Most would have known that whenever a person experiences some
trauma, unique event or situation then that person experiences the world differently.
Ask any policeman about the difficulties they experience with road accidents and the
like, No two people will give identical ans\¡rers yet each has viewed the same thing.
As individuals we have problems interpreting our own emotions, mindset and
attitudes yet we have the arogance to assume that we can adequately 'know' another
person. If we have meaningful contact or intimacy with the other then this assumption
is important to maintain communication. But it is still a false assumption to assume
we really know the other when we don't really 'know' ourselves.
Tantra grasps the 'nettle' of consciousness and teaches us to become AWARE, or to
live-in-Being with our Inner Self. This is achieved through purposeful meditation and
constant habit-breaking. The practices are life-long. BEING is a constant journey'
My training as a Psychologist gave me a language, or jargon, to communicate the
Tantric training I'd experienced into therapy. It also introduced me to the existential
philosophical strands permeating our Western culture since earliest times. Socrates is
one such personage. I also familiarised myself with the German philosophers.
45 They dominated the existential field of experience. I was discomforted with the
Godlessness of 'Behaviourism'. I learned that 'Dasiensanalyse' or existential analysis
"arose from a dissatisfaction" with the prevailing strands of psychoanalysis and psychotherapies. These disciplines of the mind looked primarily at 'sickness or illness' models. Heiddeger's analysis of existence looked at the whole person, not
exclusively the 'mentally ill'. Freud was the 'groundbreaker'. Jung absorbed Eastern ways of interpreting meaningfulness and disputed the illness model.
In Religious studies, I rediscovered at the same time the 'Hidden Wisdoms' contained
within the Catholic faith. I realised that my 'existentiality' experiences had a history. I
recognised Being as moment when time ceased its linearity and an opening appeared
that dispelled the'Cloud of Unknowing'. The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous
mystical treatise written in the fourteenth century and it became for me a centrepiece
in my internal journey, opening me to the beauty of Julian of Norwich, Hildergard of
Bergen and many other mystics in the Western tradition'
Tantra, learned in India, and the academic discipline of Psychology gave me the tools
to search into the Inner Self. Tantra is existential to the core. It accepts the world-as-
it-is, helped me to accept me-in-Being-as-I-am and others as centred-in-their Being.
According to Webster's Dictionary Q979) Existentialism is "a literary-philosophical
cult of nihilism and pessimism popularised ... chiefly by Jean-Paul Sartre: it holds
that each man exists as an individual in a purposeless universe, and that he must
oppose his hostile environment through the exercise of his free will" (642). This is the
typical understanding but shows only one side of the existential journey.
46 Existence itself is defined from the etymology of the word'existere', which means to
come forth, to emerge, or to exist (ibid). In Western philosophy we have created a
dichotomy between subject and object of the Self by further defining existence as an
entity, something that exists, an actuality. We dichotomize Selflrood by assuming that
the Self and the object of the Observer of the Self are two identities rather than
different states of awareness and consciousness sutrounding the 'self-in-being-with-
itself or Dasein, using the word coined by Binswanger, the German existentialist.
In the Eastern practices of SelÊrealisation, existence is the very fact of Being.
Vietnam was a traumatic disruption to my 'condition humaine'. I adopted the inner
life of a Swami of the Satyanada order in 1974. This tempered my experiences
subsequent to Vietnam. Satyanada is a Tantric master. It is actually a pure form of
pragmatic existentialism. Dasein, the closest German word to the Tantric experience
and coined by Binswanger, has as its closest English equivalent the total structure of
'being-in-the-world-ness'i*. 'Well-Being' Psychotherapies reconstruct and/or modiS
"the total structure of the person's 'being-in-the-world" (May 5).
The result of war's massivetrauma is an'existential crisis', aptly documented in the
last few pages of Remarque's W-WI novel. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder @TSD) is
its Vietnam form. The main characters in Thuyel face this 'moment of truth'. Each
answers the spiritual dilemma in a different way but not in accord with the religious
principles upon which their life had previously been grounded.
Some of the German philosophers have created the illusion that to be 'existential' is to
be alienated. Their writings are bleak. Authors like Kierkegaard suffer deep guilt.
47 They soon 'lack identity'; develop feelings of worthlessness and meaningless-ness and a conviction that society is uncaring and unjust. Heidegger, bright star in the philosophical firmanent, influenced Sartre. More phenomenologist than existentialist, these offer more hope. Crane's existential 'innocent youth' is a coming of age caused
by inner conflict. Fear, translated into cowardice then courage, rather than alienation.
Sir Frances Bacon's greatness is that he believed that Man is the servant and
interpreter of Nature: that Truth is not derived from authority: and that knowledge is
the fruit of experience. Thuyel is written in the spirit of these existential facts.
Christian and pagan issues are the basis of a morality that initially guides Gary's
behaviour in Thuyet even when exposed to the extreme of war. My novel follows the
Tao and Thuyet's emphasis on the 'sublime feminine'. Vinh is a male, empowered by
Confucianism and espousing Ho Chi Minh's brand of Vietnamese nationalism.
Exposure to Oriental philosophies led me to explore issues of morality in other belief
systems. I have marvelled at other sacred writings that vie for equally sacred
significance to the New Testament. Clristians are not sole purveyors of Spiritual
Truth. The Jews have Moses' TANAKH*, Asians mostly share Confucius and the
writings of Tao and I Ching, and the peoples of the Indian sub-continent follow the
Hindu Vedas and other sacred scriptures. Buddhist, Bah'ai and Islamist scriptures
offers spiritual direction to many. All these sacred canon are imbued with Truth.
Modern psychotherapies are distinguished by two criteria. One form takes the view
that'Man is mentally ill'. I early rejected Freud's 'illness' model and those existential
philosophies that are 'illness' ridden and despair at the human condition.
48 The second model is concerned with 'Man as such' i.e. the existential Self. An impressive list of philosophers and therapists heralded a change to 'well-being'. Carl
Jung and Binswanger are two (Existence 1958). I identify with this model.
ln Thuyet, the two Northerners, Vinh and Dat have the attributes of Vietnamese
Heroic Warriors. Gary has those of the Australian Heroic Warrior. Other sub- characters are of diverse origin. Troy, is an agnostic American CIA Training Advisor.
Phouc is Buddhist/Confucian. Pham remained Catholic. Jaago, Gary's 'shadow', is
Catholic and Polish. Rudjinczky is Orthodox. The latter three, imbued with the
Christian canon, reflect orto comment upon key'existential moments'.
Long Tan is a 'critical moment' in Thuyet.It contrasts Gary and Vinh's appreciation of an important shared battle. A pivotal point to identify the juxtaposition of two different Heroic Warrior traditions, Long Tan forms a watershed for Gary, Thuyet and
Vinh. On the battlefield they have clearly opposed cultural perspectives. Each has different understandings of the same battle. Each will face their 'moment of existential truth' on different battlefields and later when separate truths emerge.
Whereas some individuals see only degradation in war, most war literature gloriflres the Heroic Warrior even into the 21s Century. The 'non-hero' I saw as only a technique for individuals to attempt to express the meaningfulness and the meaninglessness of their valid experience of war. These are not contradictory elements of existential reality. They co-exist in each of us.
49 Summary
Any author is entitled to create any novel about any person or any thing. Many veterans do not inevitably agree with what other veterans write, even when about the
same events and personalities. Creativity and integrity are the essential ingredients.
ln Thuyet,I have drawn on the many experiences, dreams, fantasies and poetics, the
features of 'naturalistic' novels, in order to place genuine personal experience within
the larger framework of an historical perspective. My actual war experiences often
lacked clarity, sent me into spasms of reflection and dreamstates. Forty years later
some war experiences are still as real as yesterday's and their existential shock still
capable of reducing my perspective to 'NOW' as though its recall were real.
Thuyet is unapologetically coloured by existential realities, which occurred at the time
and in Vietnam. Certain smells, sounds and feelings can trigger off'flashbacks' in
which the original experience re-occurs with all its detail, sweat and Fear. Not the
fear/s of ordinary life but the bigger Fear of 'non-existence' and 'annihilation'. The
counterpoint between such 'immediacy' and the larger pattern of warfare is intended
to be faithful to both these forces in motivating the human response.
During warns that in the "culture of secular mimesis" (39) creative writing could be
forced towards 'marginalised literature' (42). If he understood my differentiation
between integrity and authenticity then I could agree with most of his later comments.
50 Part Three
lntroduction to myth and the genre of the Heroic Warrior
like all poetry, in campbell believed Myth is "a poetic, supernofÏnal image, conceived
(Primitive Mytholog,t 472)' h depth, but susceptible of interpretation on many levels"
beyond the mundane. Myth is the essence of the marvellous and represents something
modern culture' has its origin in the historical and religious traditions of every
the real heroes of My adolescent 'mythic-world' was an idealised world, flooded with that morality is w\ml I read pagan myths, legends and ancient scriptures and found My adult world the.universal, substance of the Oriental and of the Occidental texts.
changed and I entered a world where the ideal and the real clashed'
'Nobleness'carries within its Heroics, is defined as being brave, intrepid and noble.
some higher good' This is essence, the magnanimity of mind and a motivation to do
jurisprudence, politics and the the essence of morality. The moral sciences of ethics, issues of descriptive sciences of psychology, psychiatry and sociology, argue the
Good and Evil. The Bible is clear, to kill another human being is evil'
and is the stuff The hero carries the seeds of the great traditions of their culture within (Hemingway of myths and epics. "Courage above all is the first quality of a warrior"
gl), a specific kind of hero forged in the crucible of war and defined as a soldieril'
the heroúi. From The courage of the warrior combines with the virtues and qualities of Warrior' this combination of deed, myth and definition, I coined the term Heroic 5l prepared to kill Heroic Warriors are the stuffof Thuyel. Yet, Heroic Warriors must be Heroic Warrior or be killed to support the values promoted by a nation' Hence the represents paradox that is difficult, if not impossible, to decipher.
'ineffable In the great mythologies of Nations, the Heroic Warrior is portrayed as distinct icons, and models of moral and social behaviours who exemplify three survival against categories, those of love: of selÊsacrifice: and of duty' Models of the Heroic divine intervention, of natural disaster or of supreme sacrifice in warfare, of Warrior outperforms others against au/esome odds. They are extreme examples
physical, emotional and mental endurance'
The role of Mvth ,,The and can be only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, open the mind to all reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone
in Northern Canada' that is hidden to others" Igiugarjuþ Shaman of Caribou Eskimo
civilisations and At the core of myth is the meaning of life and death. Its themes "built
. . deep inner problems, inner informed religions over the millennia. .. [and deal with] '
4)' There is a mysteries, inner thresholds of passage" (Campbell, Oriental Mytholog't "there is a common consonance of ancient myth occuning in separate cultures and
tradition back of all these myths" (l l1).
Ancient examples such as Virgil's Aeneid illustrate how 'privation and suffering' Heroic Warriors opens the mind of a warrior to what 'is hidden to others'. Ancient
contain the seeds of a contemporary view of the modern Heroic Warrior'
52 Vietnam's ancient Heroic Warriors
country's origins to 2879 B'C' Ho chi Minh, Father of modern vietnam, dated his
or the United States" (Woodside l)' They are Together, "Vietnam is older than France (Warner 36)' having warred against foreign "the toughest people in South East Asia" recorded history' interventions for over twenty centuries of their
is that North and South Vietnam what is generally neither known nor understood
as two separate nations until modern times' evolved quite differently. Vietnam existed in the Orient' The extensive influenced by two of the most ancient civilisations influence in South Vietnam and Chinese maritime nation of India was the primary North' china and India were' in imperialism and colonialisation characterised the
powers in the east' ancient times, the greatest technological
from chinese sources and goes North vietnam's earliest foreign history "is known Fenn 136)' Kamow claims that china back to 181 B.C." (Naval Intelligence 164 and North Vietnam in 208 B'C' (99)' first claimed territorial acquisitions then subjugated the Central Highlands of Vietnam' In Their kingdom stretched south from China to hard won independence from china the 10ú century 4.D., the 'viets' fought for a
China made unsuccessful attempts in 1076 then retained it for the next three centuries'
A.D'torecoverNorthVietnam,sdependency.Byl164A.D.Chinesere-nameditas china' In French times and An Nam (meaning the peaceful south land) of southern Tonkin' through to l97 ,this country was known as
South Vietnam has more complex cultural strands'
53 comfortably with ancient Animist' Its dominant ancient Indian culture co-exists Funan Chinese influences' As the Kingdom of Confucian, Buddhist, then Catholic and from 300 B'C' till 600 A'D' and extended (two-thirds of modern cambodia), it existed fromsouthofChenla(centralLaos)totheMekongDelta.Champahadappearedlate
stretching just south of Saigon to a northern 2nd Century A.D. as a Hindu kingdom
Geneva accords divided Vietnam at this border in the Central Highlands. The 1954 DMZ*iii. Vinh, a major character in Thuyet' never southern border of Annam on the historical and cultural differences between acknowledges the reality of the enduring
North and South Vietnam'
Vietnamese reliqious beliefs
the origins of the race" ,,vietnam,s tnte religion is Animism ... it dntesfrom TemPler (262)
beliefs to champion vietnamese The communist Party reinforced many of these
traditionandculture.ItinsistedonauniqueVietnameseculturalidentityandprofound inherent dynamism became a useful people sense of vietnamese pre-history. This
and fervour for old traditions' control tool. It promoted a sense of nationalism Vietnam' In Thuyet' Phouc is an Anímísm: This is a major influence throughout
separate from matter' impregnated all Animist and believed that a spiritual force, to every phenomenon' creature life. He attributed human intelligence and action
everything charged with'the principle of life'' and object in nature. Animism sees given human form and invested soul is independent of matter. Natural forces are vietnamese invest shadowy beings with passions and prejudices. Superstitious and malevolent beings that inhabit with geneology and bodies. These are powerful (Ninh 40-43)' hills, streams or patches of primeval forests
54 Born in 550 B'C' and o Confucíus.' This is more a social philosophy than a religion' to guide social three hundred years after Buddha, he devised a code of ethics the right to political behaviour. Only virtue, acquired through education, gives one hierarchical order power. chinese scholars perversion of confucianism ensured a
a Mandarin elitist clique with the male as the dominant social entity. It maintained of to validate Man',s superior position and ensured the systematic suppression (Thuyet 274-292). Trinh a¡d women. Much of this is contained in 'Hanoi Flower' to men (276-278)' tu ducwere confucian precepts that kept women in submission (280)' Thuyet and her sisters railed against this but could do little tradition, Taoism is o Taoíst teachings: Thuyet revered the Tao. A more ancient
'female-friendly'. Its two main figures are Huang-Lao, who wrote the Lao-Tzu
have been and the writer of the I-Ching. These manuscripts are claimed to feminine' ,delivered, about 2,500 B.c. Taoism emphasises the importance of the
female Kuan-Yin' In The Taoist 'Queen of Heaven' corresponded to their divine were chinese legend, women who gained 'the Tao of spiritual immortality' in social, revered (Berman 1970). This reinforced a strong feminine influence
of a strong, religious and military matters in the north. This uniquely Asian brand
resilient \¡/oman imbued with erotic 'feminine mystique' motivated Thuyet.
to retain the Taoism Women,s pragmatic resistance to the Chinese and the fervour
of antiquity led to the prominence of women throughout Vietnam's history'
. Buddhisz.. In Vietnamese mytb King Tu Vo slept with a monkey exemplifying is .compassion for all sentient beings'. Mahayana Buddhism, or 'Greater Vehicle'
meaning the predominant religion of Vietnam. It had two streams, one Bac Trong,
from China, and the other Dao Trang in the South' Both are Mahayana sects
distinguished from Theradeva or'The Middle Way''
55 2nd century A.D. and is concerned with The latter came first from India in the Path of the Boddhisattva' which nirvana, or Self-Realisation. Mahayana is the of morality, wisdom, and tolerance and refers to perfecting ones self in the virtues of suffering' During Diem's regime the to serve in this world for the amelioration opening scenes of the Buddhist priest's Buddhists held tremendous power. The the impact of religion and immolation (Thuyel 474-476) are meant to convey powerful forces in their society' martyrdom on my Vietnamese Heroic warriors, was imported by the Portuguese in the Catholícísm: This last religious influence lTth Century then persecuted by the lóft Century, imposed by the French in the
pham, phouc Dat joined 2 million fleeing South to Communists in the 1950,s. and demographic profile in south avoid communism in 1954. still a significant (8%) outside of the Philippines' Vietnam, it has the largest Catholic group
Vietnamese Men as ancient Heroic Warr¡ors this ancient Animism, which My ARVN. and DRV' friends in vietnam all reflected
spheres. This complexity will be they accommodated within their intricate social and ancestor worship later' In Thuyet' revealed in the study of family relationships with the catholic refugees' as pham retained his Roman catholicism and fled south was communist' vietnamese ardent an anti-communist as his cousin vinh commitment of each brother to family' understandings of family ties meant a deep wasn't fully understood by the This important feature of Vietnamese social life the communist and Pham the Americans. phouc the Animist, Le Duc Dat initially far enough away from communism' catholic each fervently hoped that vung Tau was
ancient and modern Heroic warriors' Each had been invested with the glories of their
' AR\/N: Army of the Republic of South VieÍnm ' DRV: Democratic Republic of Vieunm 56 a magic day he cast his net into a lake and caught a Le Loi'.A simple fisherman, one he entered a quest of mystical inner sword, like Excalibur. As the Prince of Peace,
joined in the mountains and he taught his people being. Friends and relatives him
centres and stayed within them at gUenilla tactics. The Chinese clung to the urban
the roads and troop formations cleared the night. They built fortified towers along troops, using elephant-mounted units to roads. Le Loi charged chinese mounted
e in 1526, west of Hanoi' His resistance terrorize them, finally routing the chines kingdom lasted until 1673' He drove out the chinese and Le Loi's Annamite 1786' He called his capital Dong Kinh' restored a new Annamite dynasty until
nowHanoi,hencethenameTonkin,whichreferredtoNorthVietnam. vietnam into its golden age" (Karnow 104)' a Le Thanh Tong:His successor "lifted rong's administrative and poritical He was Ho chi Minh,s model. Le Thanh A.D. This great confucian scholar devoted structures lasted until the l5th century already existing university' The his energy to education and expanded the remained until 1954' owes its existence Mandarin method of examination, which
tohim.Heconscriptedanarmyofnearly200,000menandinitiatedareward
land. He devised a democratic administrative system of 'farmer soldiers' on virgin
organisation,andencouragedthearts...Hedevisedacomprehensiveand
unusually liberal legal code" (105)'
Vietnamese Women as ancient Heroic Warriors
FemaleHeroicWarriorsareendemictoVietnameseculture.Women'scontributions
than Confucianism and reached back into to Vietnamese tradition had a longer history of vietnamese women warriors' antiquity. Thuyet wanted to emulate her history that's why Thuyet finally felt forced to communism promised gender equity and
choose that Path as a wamor' 57 Vietnamese history' a The Trung Sis/ers; They are the most famous examples in most famous The rebellion of the Trung sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, is the returned with act of resistance against the Chinesefru. In 43 A.D. the Chinese
themselves ferocious attack and defeated the Vietnamese. The Trung sisters th¡ew
is revered' into the Hat Giang River rather than surrender. Their martyrdom
twenty-three-year a Ba chua or Trieu Au: The Vietnamese version of Joan of Arc,
Ba Chua old Ba Chua rallied Vietnamese rebels against the Chinesein24S A'D' favourite au dai wears golden armour and rides an elephant in her myth. Thuyet's taken prisoner, was gold. In traditional style Ba Chua killed herself rather than be Ba chua saying.,I refuse to be abused" (Karnow 100). Her husband dedicated the of Kho temple to her. It is a cultural icon near Hanoi visited by thousands
worshippers and the communists refurbished it in 1984'
the 1930's and . Madame Dinh: She took part in the uprisings against the French in 1945' 1940's. She led uprisings against the French in Ben Tre province in
Madame Dinh was Thuyet's contemporary model' religious Religious life is complex and shapes human behaviour. Vietnam's illustrious
and historical past was important to each Vietnamese character in Thuyet' F,ach from Hanoi viewed their shared world in a very different way. New novels emerging context' like Bao Binh's The softow of war (1995) retain strong elements of religious
in Vietnam and Communism has been unable to replace the belief systems embedded reinforcing ancient Heroic warriors, male and female, continue to be potent in
of a ongoing attitudes in Vietnamese culture. This is important in our understanding
very powerful belief sYstem'
58 Australia's ancient Heroic Warriors
of symbols, ineffable in import' A significant mythological canon "is an organisation
and gathered toward a there is by which the energies of aspiration are evoked focus "' (campbell, creative Mythologt 5) an experience... o! harmony with the universe."
The Hotv Biblëv and a source of ancient This is Australia's inherited significant mythological canon most read book' It actualises Heroic warriors. The Holy Bible remains Australia's ch¡istian biblical myths many icons of heroism, divine morality and human weakness.
Testament The OT is one are divided into Old Testament (OT) and the New G'{.I). Its myths were oral tradition until it core of ancient Australian Heroic warrior myths' (c'1950 B'C')' The OT's became literatured and dates 4,000 years from Abraham illustrated in campbell Heroic warriors illustrate many examples of the God-Heroes
(Maslcs of Godvols l-3, and inThe Herowith a ThousandFaces)'
Paqan mvtholoqv an authoritative source of Pagan myths remain a great source of inspiration and cultural myths and mythological canon. Connections exist between many ancient of years of mythology Judeo-Christian ones but it is impossible to plumb thousands parallel earlier Pagan traditions' because of innate patterns. The oT myths often Celto-Germanic legends Exploding outward from central Europe in 1,000 B'C' societies and stamped replaced paleolithic ones as their tribes evolved agricultural
the Greeks and the Romans' their covert mark on the indigenous tribal mythologies of heritage of many societies' The celto-Germanic myths have infiltrated the cultural This admixture of Finally Christians*ii changed pagan myths to reflect their own'
Heroic warriors has since been my 'condition humaine'.
59 The Ancient Heroic Warrior worship, religious study Many of my idealised models were imprinted daily by school
basis by Sunday school' I didn't and parental admonitions then confïrmed on a weekly and used them to realise how Christianity had absorbed relevant pagaî m¡hs*iii King Arthuril*' Ireland effectively support its own evangelical mission, for example, Once Christian theology has many examples of 'saints', originally pagan deities'
and burned excommunicated pagan became dominant it violently opposed Paganism
on Gary in Thuyet (266)' heretics at the stake. Excommunication had a great impact
requisites in the 1950's' Latin, Greek and the Roman classics were university-entry a 'classical" or pagan These studies expanded my horizons exponentially. without
understand, just as in frame, of reference, pre-20û Century literature is difficult to unfamiliar with Biblical today,s increasingly secular climate, many young readers are
released by Christian and references in literature. Embedded patterns of behaviour psyche' Vietnam freed me from Pagan symbols and motifs still reach deep into my known to me' Exposure culturally imposed restraints. India made these innate patterns into symbolic images and to Behaviourism and Clinical Psychology gave me insight social constraints I still their effects. Having broken free from religious, cultural and initiated me' have retained the sense of awe in the religious rituals that
'mythical aspects' of These factors have been central to my approach to the various part Australia's cultural Thuyet. They have formed an intrinsic and powerful of
conditioning, which is still remarkably pervasive'
60 ModernVietnameseHeroicWarriors
men anf;ilïäîi"'#:it "rhere i s no distinction between Ji:itï $:ffiï#,"i;;
HoChiMinhembarkedonaneducationprogramthatfocussedhispeople'sfeelings
waves of colonial oppression from the of the destruction of their culture by successive
the American' He promulgated the myth:- Chinese, through to the French and fïnally and months in lhe history of our (our people are living in lhe most glorious years aggression and that of decades-old thousand year old fight against foreign our Party" (Giap, Big wctory 3)' revolutionary struggle under rhe readership of
statement' remain consonant Three critical ideological foundations, laid in Giap's myth and gave Ho chi Minh with vietnamese culture, their unique Heroic warrior \¡/ere constantly reminded' by total leadership of the vietnamese revolution. Soldiers
that the revolutionary war had lasted every means available, at home and 'at the front'
fighters had been involved for decades' more than a thousand years. Current freedom
read or write' Uncle Ho became The majority of Vietnamese in the 1940's couldn't
act was to promote education' sole repository of vietnam's culture. His first
his speech explained to his people Ho Chi Minh,s Declaration of Independence and
opposed North Vietnam's unique that the Chinese were imperialist. They implacably colonisation had taken the last two traditions and had acculturated them. That French finally the Japanese had intended to hundred years to 'enslave' the Vietnamese and their culture' On that day in '2"d subvert Vietnam. All showed little respect for
j}),Ho established his leadership' seprember 7g45', (Thuyet 136-I chi Minh
6l Leadership and political comm¡tment is the squad. From Ho Chi Minh down' The lowest denominator in any army to and ethical codicils with titles restricted readership was invested in his political maintained' were subordinated to a .comfade,. Rank divisions, though often harshly to most progressed, veterans' from subordinate concept of 'brotherhood'. As the war political ideology and a tightly bonded kinship' senior, identified with communist
show Thuyet, (Patti 84-94, and Pham 171-212) The two portraits of Ho chi Minh in of him' Ho Chi Minh finally realised the American then the Vietnamese experience bettered independence' The Japanese' who'd the French wouldn't grant Vietnam's repeated' Ho chi Minh had already .white colonials" showed the process could be in battle' the vietnamese could defeat the French defeated the Japanese in battle, no\ry
Martvrdom
make in Thuyet (chapter Four), eventually The sacrifices Giap forced his troops to long history is replete with accounts of their galled Le Duc Dat, though vietnamese Martyrs meet two criteria in any culture' struggles against invaders and martyrdom. core' also guardians of a central philosophical Exemplars of national identity, they are Dien Bien Phu (392'452)' French and the concept of 'honourable death'' At there could French garrison strong points' knowing Vietnamese pafas dropped into the to win an'honourable death' in battle' be no escape. Pham was one, determined
than in western culture and the highest Martyrdom has far greater rewards in Eastern Heroic Warrior' Confucius' in Mandate of accolades are reserved for the martyred has made its choice" (Confucius, Chap' Heaven states that in martyrdom "heaven folklore (McAlister and Mus' chap' 3)' Xxii, section 4). It ensures immortality in 62 Ancestral veneration .after-life'. intrinsic value but its primary vietnamese believe strongly in an Life has 'honourable' death' To them, motif is to stoically obey the social codes and to value
ancestors' Fearlessness in Death means at last being able to join the larger family of death' Vietnam's Heroes the face of death is often mistaken as Asian unconcern for The French left a trail of choose 'death before dishonour', like the Trung sisters'
died without betraying martyrs, like Dat's wife, who, after terrible ordeals and torture,
venerable, caused irrevocable comrades (Thuyet 172). Tran's martyrdom, though ..vinh (296). enmity. ... shared with Phouc his hatred of the French"
person of lowly estate dies an Ancestral veneration is the highest form of respect. If a
becomes more significant honourable, e.g. amartyr's, death, veneration increses and Life has clear-cut than when a person of high estate dies an ordinary death. whilst nature one's dying responsibilities and form, Death has no fear' Rather, the of
lineage (Hickey 1964). enhances importance in the afterJife. Immortality confers
Familv 'uncle Ho' from the The touchstone of tradition for vietnamese society is the family'
his death in 1969, in the beginning has been modelled as patriarch of his nation until
Grandfather (206)' when Ho same way that Pham and the rest of the family revered people, Giap and choi Minh made his Declaration of Independence to the vietnamese 'Uncle' Ho the whole northern leadership were careful to extol the centrality of "can you ((Jnforgettabte Drys). When Ho asked, in the middle of his Declaration,
on Vinh, in a hear me, my fellow-countrymen?" the aflirmative "Yes" impacted
crowd..Driven to splendid madness by uncle Hlo" (Thuyel 135).
63 modern \ryar novel for overseas Bao Ninh's The sorrow of war was the first Vietnamese Army' and its non-heroic consumption. Its critical portrait of the North
voice, defrned two characteristics of families:
member of traditional vietnamese . pernússíve chítd-rearing: Training to become a her house as she was by the confucian society starts early. Thuyet, confined to
preceptsoftrinh(27s),..enviedDuyen'sfreedom''(278).Duyenroamedthelocal of neighbours and kinfolk' Rarely is a area and was cared for by a wide network for food the response is immediate child heard to cry. When a hungry child asks should a child cry the gratification. Sex play is common among youngsters' genitals' This response is abhorrent to common response is to fondle the child's
Australiansbutthenorminmanyoftheindigenousculturesllivedwithe.g. tribesmen and the mountain Traditional Australian Aborigines, Malay Sakai
people of Vietnam, the Nung and the Meo'
o,headofthefamíly,syndrome:Bami|ydefinesVietnameseidentityinthemost the extended household unit of the profound sense. The most basic social unit is
villageorcitysuburb.westernindividualisticconceptsofselÊrealisation'with the disciplinarian' their emphasis on subjectiveness are alien' Grandfather Quan' Mandarin's and held absolute authority. He "subscribed to the Confucian (287)' Punishment following Scholar's way of life, which was male-dominant" brief and with adults' often brutal' any socially inappropriate behaviour, was swift, neither remorse nor pity Vinh, visiting Phouc during the Land Reform, showed
..you (297). Phouc had to be punished because because and Father are landlords" often viewed inhuman ..You are the mortal enemy of the peasants"(ibid)' I discipline was expected' meted punishment among Vietnamese soldiers' Strong "laughed" (646)' out by Pham and received stoically. The observers
64 The'Gonfucian codicil'
"Proprieþt and righteousness are the great elements that make a person's character'
and the perishíng They promote Harmony. The ruin of states, lhe destruction of family of individuals are always preceded by abandoning these two rules"'
Confucius, by Li Ki, Book )CI, Chap I sec' I and2' of Confucianism has an ancient history and code that establishes a homegeneity
and the rest of values, life-style and of behavioural responses between the individual
set hidden rules society. Functional relationships based on such a comprehensive of
mores are are so profound as to make the individual dysfunctional if these social integrity of abrogated. Group expectations are that the individual will maintain the
the whole group' ascribed moral virtue. Transgression jeopardises the social fabric of
in one's duty Acceptance of formalised codes of personal and social conduct, a belief
and tradition to the family as a sacred trust (dharma) and total conformity with custom
are mandatory. The 'Confucian codicil' still permeates all levels and sectors of
are:- Vietnamese society @erman 1970 and Fall 1956). Its protocols
. rigourous absolutes in ínterpersonal behavìour: Grandmother taught Thuyet virtues about tam tong, the three submissions (Thuyel 276) and lu duc, the four
(Z7S). Also,the extreme forms of obedience in which respect for elders, or 'filial
piety, is central. Thuyet had to learn the 24 acts of filial devotion in Confucian
severe for a Classics from which NO variation is allowed and no humiliation too
breach. 'Politeness' is a significant feature in Vietnamese society.
No Interpersonal hostility is prohibited and the force of law governs behaviour.
overt hostility towards parents, elders, peers or siblings is allowed. Emotions
against established codes ofinterpersonal and social behaviour are taboo'
65 ideal. Conflict and O Maintenønce of Harmony: This is the primary Confucian
disharmony must be avoided even at the cost of the individual. When harmony
exists in the universal order, then only will the individual experience well-being.
When harmony exists, the social group feels favoured by Good Spirits' The
Vietnamese believe a person is intimately connected within a web of relationships
and that the nature of these relationships dictates well-being. This philosophical
cosmology of the Self is not the individual but the collective Self. The individual
.fits in' within the framework of family, both living and dead, which is
subordinate to the village or smallest local social unit outside of family.
The Liberation A¡med Forces set out to deliberately undermine Confucian social
status with its title 'comrade'. This State-sponsored irreverence for traditional
status (mandarin versus peasant) remains deeply rooted in the North's psyche. But
closer South, Mai and Thuyet treated each other as sisters (334-335) and reverted
to pre-war titles (336). Hai's 'comrade'-ly relationship with Pham in l95l in Paris
(195) remained ftrm, even though Pham became 'enemy' ARVN. His 'comrade'-
ship with Vinh started on 28ü December 1964 when they were promoted together
following the attack on Binh Gia, north ofNui Dat (597)' of a pragmatic fatalísm: Communism hasn't interfered with the social constraints
Confucianism. 'Pragmatic Fatalism' stands in opposition to a concept of 'free
will'. It directs behaviour and determines many aspects of Vietnamese culture.
Many western commentators assume that fatalism implies the impossibility of free
will. Instead, it is deeply rooted in a cosmology that confidently embraces a
paradigm of universal order, individual destiny (karma) and cosmological and
local influences that are ever changing and changeable e.g. astrology and 'signs'.
66 means of social sanction in Vietnamese . maínten(tnce of 'Face': The primary .Face,, the community has for a person of society is which means the respect
a person or to disregard a social mores moral reputation. To show disrespect for 'Face' is not merely a social pretension or puts that person beyond the community.
strikes at the very core of one's being' another word for shame. Loss of Face opromíscuíty:Thisisallowedamongyoungchildrenwhereasadultheterosexual a Duong Thu Huong's Novel Wthoul intimate relationships are not tolerated.
Nameismostpoignantonthisissue.QuanwantedtomarryHoabuthonour
demandedhewenttowarfirst.Hoasaid..I'llwaitforyou''.ThevillageParty Pregnant her child was fatherJess' Hoa committee drafted Hoa into the army. had no choice and felt forced to leave became ostracised, excommunicated. euan goodbyes' No promises'' (140-153)' in ..the middle of the night,, with..No
is to subdue one's self' At the heart of o híerarchy ønd socíøl díscíplíne: The aim
Vietnamesesocialbehaviourandofritualsofsocialinteractionistheissueofthe .superior,and.inferior,Man.Theinstantrecognitionofstatusisessentialbutthis
shouldnotbeconfusedwithclassstructure.Inferiorityisnotanegativefeaturein upward and respect downward' Vietnamese culture. Deference is demonstrated Everyone'fïts in' and feels comfortable' Status confers respect and recognition.
translated good fortune as upward . upwørd mobílíty and the scholør: Destiny improve' especially through mobility and stasis 'bad fortune'. Motivation to
childrenisreflectedin..Grandfather'sheirarchyofaffectiof,(Thuyet274). wealth, land and property' Scholars are Literacy bestows upward mobility, above this but "as his fortune slipped away most superior. Grandfather Quan epitomised perceptions changed and he focussed "his during the First Indochina war" his
attentiononhissonsandgrandsons',.His..lovecouldn'textendtoThuyet''(ibid).
67 Thuvet - The Asian female Heroic Warrior
,,They wrote, they sang, they loved life and their own natíonal history. If women got married or pregnont [in the fieldJ we had lo send them back home. Il they were pregnant and nor married, sometimes we forged birth cerlificates that made lhe
babies legitimate, because we didn't want the children to suffer and we lcnew how
much disapproval the motherswouldface, especially in the countryside'"
In Even the \lomen Must Fighl (Turner & Hoa 120)'
The title 'comrade' implied a gender'free society in which women would be freer in
revolutionary forces than under Confucian restraints. This didn't happen. A male elite
commanded Giap's Army and his field-commanders exercised ultimate authority.
Thuyet's characterisation in my novel is the compilation not just of her culture and
traditions but also of a deep desire to be independent of the repressive Confucianism,
which was not the spirit of the Tao. She yearned for the more ancient of her country's
traditions that had given birth to the Trung Sisters. Thuyet felt 'un-natural' when she
fell within the ambit of her brother's Confucianism and hated Xong, who exemplified
the stories of tenible things 'done to women' (332).
But gender was never a criterion for the distribution of workloads. Women like
Thuyet trained hard, political work was essential and secrecy all-important. Female
craters, sappers [engineers] worked at dynamiting rocks for road making, filling
building and re-building bridges and all the heavy work was done by hand. In a
typical day they would rise at 5 a.m. and sometimes work through the night. Women's
menstrual periods often stopped because of bad diet and stress (339-340). Survival
depended on good teamwork, each respecting the other.
68 the front' women wafrlors Although no hardship could replicate conditions 'at deprivation and isolation than men' The claimed that they were more suited to endure time of the vietnam war in Thuyet' fiercest fighting was from 1966 into 1968, the years old' Yet at the front' Most, like Thuyet, were between sixteen and nineteen soldiers or volunteers vvas rare' only some claim the rape or harassment of female whenwomensteppedoutsidea.peersanctuary,didwomenbecomevulnerable.
The imPact of the Media Royal Laotian Army' Press From 1954 to 1958 the French MAAG trained the May 1959' UPI claimed 'Vietminh coverage of its'Battle for Laos' started on l1ù Reuters stated that 'the RLA is troops advanced to within 13 miles of samneua'. Post blazed that a 'full-scale' preparing to defend the capital, Vientiene'. Washington vietnam' is happening. Bemard artillery-backed invasion from communist North
just so much nonsense" (Street llithout Fall, on the ground, stated that'All this was of a 1969 TeT 'Offensive" which Joy 303),sadly predictive of biassed press coverage
was a communist military catastrophe'
The Land Reforms Minh's Land Reforms' Based on Luong's Revolution inthe village researched Ho chi Catholicism in the 1930's in the Son-Duong, this village had converted wholesale to
its community, (1992)' Phouc' a lesser hope of alleviating French political pressure on
1952 (293-314)' Its violence hero in Thuyel, was caught up in the Land Reforms of Vinh' After two decades of war' and horror escaped the notice of his eldest brother committees'' Luong records that Phouc experienced the terror of gUerrilla 'security
forced labour camps (189)' 30% of the population were sentenced to punishment and
69 Summary
framework, is contrary to any concept The Vietnamese characteristic 'rational choice'
the response of Vietnam's rich of Western economic 'rationalism'. By those standards of Ho chi Minh would be and poor to the 'war effort' and 'class restructuring'
on a matrix of material 'costs and deemed 'irrational'. Their response doesn't depend their philosophical and religious benefits,. Instead they placed greater emphasis on North vietnam accepted the focus and the need for a socio-economic revolution. Land Reforms with an Asian tenible personal trauma and pain of the war and the
tolerance hard to understand.
Land Reform had led to two In the spring of 1954 Ho's leadership of the war and the period of the vietnam war' million peasants starving to death. From 7965'75, the party resulted in "diminishing high inputs of labour caused by communist policies further hardship' returns to cooperative members" (Luong 221) and
been exemplified through a The ongoing tradition of modern Heroic Warriors has
exemplars with more recent remarkably pervasive adoption of ancient traditions and has emerged' I have political and social directives, so that a complex metaphysic chief elements in the dynamics suggested, even if in a simplified form, some of the
life and service' and complexity of modern Australian and Vietnamese
70 Modern Australian Heroic Warriors you've got to protect lhe ,,IUar is manß work... When you get right down to it,
of U'S' Marines' General Barlow' 1980' manliness of war." Commandant
from the private soldier to the Various issues affect Australian and American soldiers down through centuries and highest echelons of leadership. 'courage" reaches Many hold courage as a key factor' remains implicit in any underlying theme of war' history of the shared characteristics Additional ones have also been consistent in the
These are described' of the Heroic warrior in western war literature'
Gouraqe in ancient times
philosophy and in the artso' Ancient courage has a long and honourable history in Plutarch and Tacitus' It Heroic Warriors appeared in the histories of Herodotus, Xerxes: the Greek' Alexander the burnished the fame of leaders from the Persian, seeks to justifu war using a Great: and the Roman, Julius Caesar. Man constantly sets up an internal conflict' religious, ideological or metaphysical rationale' This
novels' which is at the core of many of the successful war
Ages and the Muhajaddhin of The Zealots of Judaism, the Crusaders of the Middle die for their ideology' The Islam all share one characteristic. Each is willing to Vietnam are each characterised by American Civil War, W-WI, WWII, Korea and
huge scale' Veterans can sometimes be their senseless butchery of innocent lives on a Heroic warriors are often possessed by a fury that makes them capable of anything'
possessed by a demon: temporarily lose suddenly precipitated into action, almost as if
control: then achieve superhuman things'
7l Couraqe in World War One lV\fWlì Heroic Warr¡ors
"War province o Hemingway: In his anthology of Heroic Warriors he wrote:- is the
of danger, and thereþre coura7e above all things is the first quality of the
,warrior,, (81). His icons in Men al War (1969) do not flinch or despair in the face
war' (7) but of hopeless odds. They are exemplars of courage. Hemingway'hated
..once be (ibid). added, we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must won"
o Lord Moran: In The Anatomy of Courage (1968), Moran analysed "how courage a WWI is born and how it is sustained" in combat, based on his experiences as
medical offtcer. He compared 'democratic' preparation for war to fascist
.seasoning for war' and deduced that in Fascist Germany "the minds of its
people,.. \¡/ere prepared in peace for war" (la). No such discipline motivates in democracies. He agreed with Hemingway that war was "a special occasion is not which courage is essential and stated, 'fearlessness', the essence ofcourage,
a hero to be the absence of fear. Rather it is bravery in the face of fear. This allows Warrior equal to the task demanded. Fear passes through all minds, but the Heroic
rises above Mind and manages to control it ...then is respected as a model.
o Colleen McCullough: In Rhoden Cutler V.C. she states that WWI Heroic ..are Warriors no longer fashionable". They "tend to be dismissed as dinosaurs".
remains She is however, hopeful that heroism "will endure as long as the soul
untainted" (5). McCullough portrays Cutler as a humble hero, and 'one who keeps
true the eternal values that have to do with human experience'.
His citation reads:-
"For most conspicuous gallantry during the Syria Campaign andlor outstanding
bravery during the bitter fighting at Merdiayoun when this artillery fficer (157-158)' became a byword amongst forward troops with whom he worked"
72 WWI, war involved millions' willing ln Anatomy of CourageMoran stated that "until (28)' fought by picked men, soldiers of fortune" and unwilling, [and] our battles were wwlandWWllchangedthiswithuniversalconscriptionandeachArmy'sevolution in WWII' Heroio of the professional. Courage again is a primary characteristic what must be done as if there is no fear Warriors are able, because of courage, to do remarkably resilient in the African' of pain or death. Australian soldiers have proven
EuropeanandAsianwartheatresandinmultipleenvironmentsonland'seaandair' self-sacrifice and courage o Brickhill's The Dam Busters.' Their devotion to duty, Australian aircrewd, which' is humbling. 615 Squadron RAF included a large
were destroyed (102-1gg)oiii' drew heavily on Australian pilots-'t. All three dams
.Ruhen,sTheBrokenWng:ForrestisadifferentcalibretoBader'Forresttakes from the stricken plane part in a thousand bomber raid (122'130): parachutes
gruesome (205), death is indiscriminate (150): and joins the'maquis'(193). vfar is
(209):andoftenitallowscowardstoposeasheroes0Sge'220). many heroesdn in the jungle o Raymo ndrs Retreat from Kokoda: There were battalions*' McCullum battles between three Australian and five Japanese Tommy-gun on his left (DCM) under intensive attack gave covering fire with"the killed forty Japanese in action shoulder ...[and] ... Bren on his right hip". He pouches on his chest'" (135)'. one Japanese soldier "wrenched away the utility
.Maughan,sTobrukøndElAlemeín..Thisprotracteddefencetopreventthis of Heroic warriors in the North African port falling into German hands is a classic originally seized Tobruk annals of military history. The 6ù Australian Division Rommel lasted from April to from the Italians and its subsequent desert siege by
'Those damned Australians'' December 1941. Even Rommel acknowledged
73 Gouraqe in the Vietnam War have demonstrated the The Victoria Cross is the 'golden grail' Its recipients and Payne .superhuman power' often called courage. wheatley, Simpson, Badcoe
and Smith join the legion of Heroic each won a Victoria Cross in Vietnam. These
Vietnam War' Warriors listed for 'extreme bravery' in the
wheatley fought the vc in 'extreme a .I)asher, wheatley v.c. : At Tra Bong
and Swanton' "There' in a bravery, ending in the death of two heroes, wheatley the head" (McNeill' The hollow... They were lying together, both shot through refused to leave him' He pulled Team323). Swanton had been shot and Wheatley Then I heard two grenades explode the safety pins from two grenades he had. ...
every attempt to sell his life dearly' and several bursts of fire" (322).He made in the genre of the ancient Heroic a Keith Payne V.C. : Kieth Payne lives on in Korea' His heroism and Warrior. Like Ray Simpsonr, he had also fought moved back to stem the panic example slowed the enemy attack and he heroic personal efforls"' were withdrawal. His citation reùd "His sustained and his indigenous soldiers and outstanding and undoubredly saved the lives of 31 survived out of 89' several of hisfellow advisors" (The Team 350-355)'
Presidential citation is the highest a Harry smith M.C. : The united States Harry Smith, as offtcer commanding accolade that can be given to any unit' Major
received the honour in 1968' Delta Company at Long Tan on l7ll8th August 1966, their Australian story is told The only other such honour had gone to 3RA\ and Tan Vietminh story is in .Fucking chinese Bastards' (Thuyet 242'258)- The Long
in 'to PaY any Price' (597'626)'
Morotai, Tarakan, and Rabaul. Later killed' I Awa¡ded a VC, Simpson had fought in WWII at
74 Leadership and the Professional Warrior
Heroic Warriors' are found in the Australian ofÏicer veterans, modelled on ancient history (Macdougall l99l)' The annals of each war in Australia's modern war political or ideological enables mysterious power of a leader, whether religious, offtcers and NCO'S were people to embrace self-sacrifice and in 1918 Australian
..superior to ...British regimental cadres" (Laffrn 209)' This hasn't changed' tolerate their offrcers: . Manningrs Her hívates wez ww soldiers "barely i'o' their leaders and demonstrate little patriotism: and have no faith in'T[IEM"', (155)' government, because "they don't face it as us'ns do"
hero-worshipped vern o Neville shute,s A Town Líke AIíce.. \rywrl Aussie soldiers His men lacked respect for ill which is equivocal and probably closer to the truth. .,If in the mud" (182)' WWII Caulfield. he asked me for an Aspro ...I'd drop it Dead rarely depict good American war novels like Mailet's The Naked and the (61-65)' Red comments combat offtcers, and is a feature of their war films as well (91), Minetta "I wouldn't spit "They ain't a general in the world is any good" and (51l)"' on the best of them'. ' They're all bastards
Moralitv war' In The Broken Wing Most modern war novels wrestle with the immorality of
(205): death is indiscriminate (209): Forrest witnesses frrst hand that war is gruesome
pose as heroes e' 220)' and war,s disillusion is that often it allows cowards to Q39 find a definition Good and bad cannot be neatly defined. It is difficult to from ethos, it must pertain distinguishing morality and ethics. Since ethics is derived war its rules are broken and to character. Morality suggests rules of conduct. In
character, i.e. ethical fïbre, can become de-moral-ised'
75 Mateship and Self-Sacrifice
mateship among ordinary soldiers in a Crane and Remarque were the first to write of intimacy and is only surpassed by modern war novel. Mateship is the closest type of often means a readiness to lay the licentiousness of the lover. Such friendship in war
love or 'mateship'' This is the mark or down one's life which, in an ultimate sense, is love' Thuyel's characters express measure of 'special friendship' and especially of things to the reader' "The this, tell of it and allow their actions to demonstrate these little room for other kinds of strength of male bonding in the combat zone has left
relationships" (Jason 37).
that are individual and specific' Each culture has attitudes, beliefs and customs of war things the love of Manning in Her Privates we talks of the "rich and sacramental -
has "a mysterious quality of the comrades (188)." Jones in The Thin Red Line states it
between men who shared pain and deepest, most manly friendship which could exist too'" He continues "There death, the fear and sadness of combat- and the happiness than he had ever felt to his were times when Band felt closer to the men in his outfit
wife" (102). The loss of a wartime buddy is a profound trauma'
Sex and Love that polarized gender The military is the bastion of a 'blood-and-guts' masculinity Americans I met in Vietnam attributes seeing the female as the weaker sex' Many
females. were abusive, hostile and had derogatory attitudes to Asian
pictures of whores or 'transitional' Jason points to Vietnam war novels that contain
to his normal environment' lovers and at best a surrogate wife until the soldier returns
he promotes (29-a0)' I don,t agree with the identification between sexism and racism
76 their women (30)' I Sex: Jason suggests that 'killing gooks is the same as fucking' (1977) is more visceral, fïnd such expressions obscene. Heinemann's close Quarters
and sexist' and overtly revealing the obscenity of war. The language is 'vulgar, racist
(Herzog 1992)' is a Vietnam version of Conrad's Heart of Darhtess
me that some . My experience in Mamasan's Vung Tau brothel convinced Veteran Western American soldiers behaved like Heinemann's (Thuyet 689-691)' in war' More authors rarely explore a complete picture of Vietnamese women
(Jason 29)' often they portray women as 'vdives, mothers, angels or whores'
.blood dominance and o The and guts' masculine ideology is held in question. Male (1973). In the female submission are stark and realistic in Huggett's Body Count
can bang'em, pop' latter, Hawkins thinks "that's what I like about whores"' You gross detail by and roll right off' (178). chief on R&R in Tokyo is satiated in toothless Suyu, a Japanese whore (330-337). Dosier's claymore Face, the
the role of a Vietnamese prostitute and 'the platoon punchboard', is reduced to
performing animal, going "from cock to cock. '. by the time she got to Deadeye (261)' again... I was hard again so I told her to go around one more time"
changed' stereotypes These honifying visions of dehumanized Asian women must be
in Duong Thi Huong's obsolete even as they were written. They have been laid to rest rendering of and Lan Cao's novels. From my experience it gives an accurate
prevailing attitudes of American and of some Australian sexist attitudes'
start of My real experience of this behaviour is documented in Thuyet' At the
'Mexican Standoff, Frank, the sergeant seems to share Dosier's attitudes' The
'fucking and screwing' of the young prostitute in Vunggas (689-691) is a shocking
indictment of ' maleness'.
77 love stories have a long o Love: This is a feature of good Vietnam novels' Wartime love story tradition. Hemingway's Farewell ro Armi (tgSl) is a wartime (1952) is a powerful seemingly modelled on an actual affair. A town tike Alice a story W\y¡I Australian novel of Japanese Army civilian atrocities in Malaya and love' Heinemann's Close of martyrdom. Impoftantly it is also a story of undaunted
It is written in the first person from the Quarters (1977) is appallingly different.
perspective of "Serg'n' Deadeye"'
and killing reveals an Jason concludes that "the equating of women with weaponry
patriarchial culture" (40)' This even more perverse and dangerous strand of America's
is the Freudian theme ultimate conflict between love and death (i.e' thanatos and eros) by Australian of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1957). I was often appalled quality, which "if I crudeness in Vietnam. The sensuality of a woman is a special may happen" press even deeper into the arms that embrace me, perhaps a miracle
clear exception" (Remarque 97-101). For Jason, "respectfulness and tenderness, is the
(32). Not true. veteran authors attempt to show how sex and love are valid
experiences that compensate for the horrors of war'
Nothing changes' From earliest times war has been portrayed tal and horrific'
makes the reader o Remarque,s All euíet on the Western Front: His fatalism*i of the gasp. Having survived "annihilation" then finally reaching the sanctuary (78-79)' lines "instead we have to turn around again and plunge into the horror"
face with a The description of a 'torn and blasted earth': cleaving 'through his
dehumanising' spade': and Kat 'smashing to pulp' another face: is brutal and
2 Written in 1929 78 a Downing's In To the Last Rìilge (199S): He records the "stench of the stagnant
blood of heroes is in our nostrils" (13). Bullecourt cost Australia "a greater sum of
sorrow and of honour than any other place in the world" (62). Each day "the worn
and white-faced ghosts of men dragged themselves" out from destroyed trenches
to wipe the "shattered flesh of comrades from their faces" (64). In savage hand-to-
hand killing, "A man with both eyeballs hanging like poached eggs on his cheeks
[sits] in the bottom of the trench groaning (67). Ypres, a place where "the
trudging feet of heavy-eyed battalions" are seen leaving "that bulging semi-circle
of death" (71). Men "lay in lethargy, eyes sunken, faces drawn and old and
smeared with blood" and the "most awful sound" was "the muffled voice of a man
buried", invariably "dead when finally disinterred" (82).
o Huong's Novel Whout a Name: Eighty years after Remarque and Downing she
conveys the same savagery. Allied soldiers had raped six girls then cut off their
breasts and genitals, strewing them on the grass. "The corpses were bruised
violet" (3). "No words will ever describe the stench" of battle. Bodies "truncated,
missing a head or leg, others had their stomachs ripped open, their intestines
dangling" (2lS). Vengeful Kiem wanted enemy bodies "to tumble, the blood spurt
forth, the brains scatter" (219).
Summary Modern Australian Heroic warriors still have the power to command admiration and
respect. Horrors of warfare, and the polarisation of social and sexual activities both
within and outside the worlds of real conflict have not lost their capacity to shock and
appal. In writing about such things however, the author must balance the value of
'impact' against the deadening effect of 'repetitiveness'.
79 Part Four - Gonclusion
Reflections on the novel, ThuYet
The Civil Rights Movement, the 'Peace' movement, 'Flower people' and Femininism were only a few of the great social upheavals that swept through the 1960's then the
1970's. They coincided with the longest war Australia and America had fought in the twentieth century. The murkiness of the Vietnam War is shrouded by political mysteries on both sides. Veteran authors like Duong Thu Huong and Bao Ninh have looked long and hard at the human cost of Vietnam's longest war, much as the
American veterans like O'Brien, Caputo and Heinemann have. I explore, through my characters, their's and my own disillusion with the nature of war.
I also explore heroism. Vietnam's 'new breed' of Heroic Warrior, stands sometimes
in stark contrast to the ancient fornU and at others consonant with it. War is complex.
Tlruyet is essentially a myth of the Vietnam War and its author is a Vietnam war-
veteran. The aim is to juxtapose Heroic Warriors of North and South Vietnam to
contrast the Australian and Vietnamese cultures and also to contrast the influence of
political myth on both countries during the Vietnam War. My novel is essentially a
wartime love story written in the 'naturalist tradition' as defïned by Jason in Acts and
Shadows. Its narrative form is heavily influenced by Remarque's All Quiet on the
ll¿stern Front: Downing's To The Lost Ridge.' and Jones' The Thin Red Line. These
stories tell of the positive values of courage, selÊsacrifice and survival against
incredible odds. They also unashamedly give the reader the 'flip-side'. They contain
vignettes of fear, cowardice, sometimes terrible and unconscionable deaths and of the
horror and obscenity ofwar that drives men to and into psychic self-destruction.
80 contemporary world' Individuals The legacy of thevietnam war still impacts on the incredibly sad indictment of humanity experience war as trauma and conflict. It is an high purpose should seek battle as a that human beings of integrity, morality and of
issue in my novel' The questions posed means to end another's life. This is the central or women are motivated to by Thuyetare significant and still relevant whenever men religion' Thuyet's war canvas kill for perceived differences in politics, philosophy or novel does not produce answers to is interpersonal conflict on a massive scale. My
questions that have relevance to current this universal dilemma. Instead it poses many
conflicts in Israel, Iraq and indeed anywhere on the planet'
huge sweep of history to the Thuyetb broad canvas moves continually from the
and civilians' It aims not particular impact of strategic decisions on individual soldiers Thuyetb method is to to judge the 'rightness' or 'wrongness' of each side in it' and Australia against juxtapose the heroes of three unique cultures' France, America, First and second Indochina wars' the heroes of North and of south vietnam in the of war and to draw the Then to describe, as authentically as possible, the horrors
the gUise of this 'Righteous' war' reader into the experience of murder performed in
term often to me' The veteran Priests, prophets and ordinary people have used this
learns however, that no war is justifiable
is from my direct subjective and I have drawn heavily on th¡ee sources. The first Campbell and his The Hero with a sensual experience of war. My second is Joseph and biographical fact' Thousand Faces (1993). My third source is from historical
are therefore, multi-dimensional' autobiography and fictional experience. My sources
8l Two 'real-life' heroes open the Chapter One opens in Vung Tau in South Vietnam' World War Two's 'war to end all novel. Each had emerged from the chaos following happened in 1966' It .wars', The first incident is Gary's 'Mexican Standoff, which remained,.stuck,inmyconsciousnessasunresolvedtrauma,until2002.Its 'The Legend of the Uc Da unravelling is recorded in the last section in the chapter,
on Hungary in 1956. Loi Bear,. Rudjinczky, its hero, survived Russia,s war
I introduce the In .Freedom Fighters', connecting Gary's and Rudjinczky's stories' 'journeys'. Each are initiated long main Caucasian characters and their respective for 'peace'' The first two names' before they became immersed in vietnam's struggle men 'laughed as they yelled .Jaago and Rudjin czky ...' appear on page one. The two hurled them over their Nostrovia' then 'skolled their glasses and automatically two distinctively European cultures' shoulders' into the fïre grate. Representative of heroes' The instant their party behaviour was beheld 'normal' by the Caucasian head by a Vietnamese old man' outcome is that a pistol is thrust against Gary's his property' This incident in 'Mexican incensed at the unacceptable destruction of
evoked throughout Thuyet' Standoffl reveals severe cultural conflict, an issue
fìrst the Germans then the In 'Jaago and Enigma' we find Poland's Jaago fought journey starts in December 1939 with the Russians in 194I. His Heroic warrior to fight the Chinese in Korea in capture of the German's secret Enigma. He survived part in theFirst and Second 1951. Troy is a main character who takes a significant the OSS and its demise Indochina Wars. Through him we learn the history of impacted heavily on followed by the origins of the cIA. Both American organisations
Vietnam's affairs and on the conduct of its war'
82 vietnam. often the Each Heroic Hero has a collage of prior experiences brought to situations, are events surrounding these 'ordinary people" thrust into extraordinary fraught in political and personal conflict at a very high level of State'
'colonial imperialism' Most modern \ /ar novels are myopic and compound errors of cultural context of in their war literatures. Most war stories are framed in the specific
'victor' or 'vanquished'. Few venture into the mind of the 'enemy', asin Thuyet'
as freedom chapter Two chronicles Asian 'Revolutionaries' who have evolved Under Ho Chi Minh' fighters from ancient traditions much older than European ones'
between themselves the Vietnamese view all their modern Wars as colonial conflicts
is introducedto Thuyet's as an Asian people and European-based cultures. The reader It informs the Asian Heroic Warrior characters, their landscape, history and traditions' with 'The Hills reader of cultural differences between East and West and concludes invited into the Asian are Alive'. In this section, Troy, an American CIA agent, is or North world of his friend Le Duc Dat, in a remote part of western Tonkin, .wisdom b Heroic Warriors Vietnam. These two warriors' become mentors for Thuyet
drawing two different cultures into the substance of the novel'
My Infantry oflicer experience ended as a disabled veteran in 1972' As a Clinical traumas Psychologist in 1982 I listened and empathised with Vietnam veterans' 'Authentic' chronicler' enabling a number to recapture lost lives. I am therefore an
enabled me My subjective experience and my personal odyssey into the mystical have that are the to construct a complex web of characters, situations and events
.Existential' fabric of Thuyet. Authenticity and Existentialism are important issues.
83 historical Chapter Three is ominous, with deeper insights into the charismatic and
then fïgure of Ho Chi Minh and his ability to mesmerise and motivate people who are
and prepared to die for his ideology of 'Freedom'. This chapter is the first to mix merge the Asian characters with their Caucasian counterparts. All appear in separate .The vignettes. Clouds Gather' serves to identify the sweep and swirl of Thuyet's in grand design of interpersonal conflict and the Heroic Warrior's motivation to be
Vietnam. The reader is taken on a journey from the Sorbonne to the gates of Hell'
Korea and its subsequent impact on Vietnam and world affairs has been little studied.
In 'Fucking Chinese Bastards', Jaago and Gary's Dad meet the Chinese hordes and
stop them in Kapyong. This small village is as important to modern Australian
soldiers as Kokoda and Long Tan.
introduces Chapter Three also engages us in watching Thuyet become a \iloman then
'Even Must the reader to the Asian form of the female Heroic Warrior. l¡ The'\il'omen
Fight'three Asian heroines begin their unique 'heroic journeys'.
the Chapter Four leads into the terrible and decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu' Always
larger and external historical and political environment dictates what seems to be a
.spontaneous' event. Like the people in it, no major war or genocide operates 'in
vacuo'. Its origins can be traced. While heads were diverted toward Vietnam, three
million pakistanis were massacred from 25ú March 1971. As Nixon wound down
American support in Vietnam, the Pol Pot massacred two million Cambodians. These
were not two isolated events. Their brutal outcomes are a legacy of over four million
Vietnamese dead resulting from the Vietnam conflict'
84 France was The outcome of Dien Bien phu still echoes in modern strategic thinking. Asian power' As the first great modern colonial power to lose, in battle, against an
France's Nemesis, Dien Bien Phu still impairs its relations with America'
my personal The final three Chapters of Thuyet are creative non-fîction accounts of
scenarios in odyssey in Vietnam. Each title speaks for itself. The first two dreadful portray the quandary of Chapter Five are causal to the tragedies that later unfold. Each war' lovers caught inexorably between mighty and opposed forces in a devastating
Thuyet and Hemingway's spectre of 'Thanatos and Eros'is awakened inthe love of
Troy and Dat' Gary, two primary characters who hover under the 'Eagle's Wings' of
a transmutatton In the genre of war literature, combat has been shown to be, for some,
from the mundane to the mystical and to the divine. Initially I felt confused and combat gave unable to 'write my life'. I hadn't fully realised that my experience of reality that me insight into both the mundane and the divine expressions of existential me'' have become significant sections of the Thuyettext. Writing'liberated
the areas of I had written the first two chapters when I decided I needed to research
and interest in detail and to this end wrote twenty thousand words on aim, objectives
concepts as though it were a research paper. This provided the research-based fortunate' reflection needed to work out the important elements of my novel. This was
Had I not done this I would have written Thuyet differently.
85 END NOTES - PART T\ryO
i tasted war when he wrote Red Stephen Crane,b. 1871. d. 1900: He was only 22 and had 1ot Badge of Courage, published in 1895. He died of 'long hardships' and tuberculosis after .ou*iog the Greco-Turkish \War in 1897 and then the Spanish-American war.
,, Act, ønd Shadows.. "...many of those who went to Vietnam had the [educational] equipment to turn their experiences into literary documents". Many others "would, upon r.to;, gain the skills needed to shape and reshape their memories. (Jason 9)"
äi postmodernísm: ABritish artist, John Watkins Chapman, first used this term in the 1870's- .Modernity', its anathema, grew from the Enlightenment then moved into the Industrial Revolution to finally rp"*tt Communism before collapsing, After the French post- structu¡alists became acðeptable in American academic circles in the 1970's the term 'deconstructive postmodernism' took shape. Posünodernist terms are defined in Appignanesi and Garraü (1995), which also contains a bibliography.
i" Føucault (died in 1980), is the theorist concerned \Mith power and 'legitimation through knowledge' and greatly influenced Postmodernism.
" Jean Larteguy: is a French journalist turned novelist who wrote of Vietnam in The pretorians,of-the Algerian crisis in The Centurions and of his experiences in the Congo in The Hounds ofHell.
ú Líeutenant Calley: On 17ù Ma¡ch 1968 Cha¡lie Company of lt20h Infantry assaulted My of 109 Lai. Eightern rnotthr later Calley was charged at Fort Benning rlith fhg_murder 'Orientãl human beings'. ln March 1970 this increased to 175. On 9'November 1974, Calley's twenty- year ientence 'with hard labour' was first reduced then he was freed. This .incident' fonõwe¿ Vietminh TeT atrocities on Quang Ngai City in January 1968 involving hund¡eds of VC murders. On 25ù February, twelve months after the death of Don and Bruce, calley suffered two dead and thirteen wounded on mines and booby-traps.
t' Strirr, J (lgg¿) AMurder in Wartime.Manning, R. (l9SS) ll'ar in the Shadows. Frazier, H (197S) Uncloañng the CIA.Powers, T. (1979) The Manwho Kept the Seclerc- Colby, W. ilonourable Men (tqZg) &, Lost Victory (1939) [Colby was CIA Station Head in Vietnam).
äi Ben Tre: lt\ilas a village inhabited only by the smell of the 'roasted dead' and smouldering remains of homes being slowly picked over by dogs like the scenes in Thuyet of Vinh's village of Tien Doan (152-153).
ú Bínswanger: He is concerned with 'anth¡opos' in its strict et1'rnological sense of the study of Man ì.". the essential meaning and characteristics of being human, hence 'daseinanalytische'.
* The TANAKH: is an acronym for the three sets of scriptures considered holy by the Jews. It developed from the TORAH or 'TA' (i.e 5 books of Moses), the NEVI'IM or 'NA' (i.e. bools òf tn" Prophets) and the KETHWIM or 'KH' (Writings i.e. Psalms, Proverbs, through to Chronicles).
86 END NOTES - PART THREE
ant or experienced man one whose occupati 'i Warrior: 1. uncivilised peoples' 2' of war as applied to the fighting m OccasionallY aPPlied to a woman' îï ïi Ì;;.î'J' iff,::ff: :ïHì or outstanding qualities" (Webster's
.,r,, sons Ben Ha xi DMz or Demiritari zedT0ne,on *" rr,ru.lT,,;::î:ïrT;:il" (river). executed a feudal lord' His widow and her Itribal chieftains and lords, raised a big army oclaimed themselves the queens of the newly uthern China'
the 16th Century A'D' The Christian * As Christian canon: the proscription OT took until lt is dominated by Jesus of Nazareth and canon, or NT was early established auout t so AD' HeroicWarriors' ñ¡r o¡lä¡p¡"t, but its heioes were martyrs not
ities with her resunected son' the executed equently rises from the dead to become the an¿ mãOe exclusive to Christian mythology' mYth-changing. is a pagan saga' devoid of n'iii The Great Captaíns (1959): This epic story of King Arthur Geoffrey of Monmouth, Mallory and Christian tampering and in stunning Oetailttrat óntradict! Tennyson.
87 of Philosophy of Counge: This differs between among lhe Dialogues of Plato, the Ïoprbs " Aristotle, that "he will Aristotle and in the Dr,scourses of Epidetus' Courage is best defined by man endures be called brave who is fearless in the face of a noble death" and that Ihe brave and Richard and acts as courage directs.' Courage in ShakesPeare's plays, Henry the Fifth the Third and Hamlet have been quoted in war by generals and politicians alike. Courage (EssaYs), sustains the honour of the hero Don Quriofe' lt is a key subjed of Montaigne, Spinoza (Ethics) and Kant (Metaphysîcs of Morals)' oi Legendary Austnlían pilots: Martin and Shannon - Air Marshall Sir Ralph Cochrane Force wrotelbout Martin, "l consiber him greater than Gibson and indeed the greatest the Air has produced. given the 'go ahead' by Churchill. 'Cocky' two days before been given Air Officer n for the mission. Guy Gibson, author of mander with Leonard Cheshire, V.C' DSO (2 orthe operation.
gh the Ruhr valleYs and for 50 bridges, coal mines and 125 ded. Canal banks had washed ans were killed. Thousands of rrect the fadories.
o" pte Maidment won a DCM: He'd been wounded in the chest by a burst of machine-gun fire at the same t¡me n¡s corporal had been killed. Grabbing his corporal's Tommy-gun he grenades that he ripped ãmpt¡ed everything into the Japanese machine-gun position including from his dead corPoral's belt. days * fhe Japanese commander Major-General Horii had anticipated a march of.,seven all costs'. to get to pïrt Moresby from Kokoda. His orders were to 'annihilate opposition at
though if will be weary, broken' burnt out, rootless us" even ¡f w y more' And men will not understand will a few will e others will merely submit' and most years wil e end we willfall into ruin'(190)'
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New Victoria: Penguin' 1999' Templer, k Shadows andWind: Aview ofModernVietnam' Warbey, W. Ho Chi Minh. London: Merlin, 1972' 1964' Warner, D.The Inst Confucian' NewYork: Penguin' rilebb, l. Fields of Fire. New York: Granada, 1980' Pub' co', 1979' webster,s Dictionary of the Engtish Language. chicago: Ferguson 1985' Wright, S. Meditations in Green London: Sphere, Woodside, A'. Community and Revolution in Modern'"T#;on Houghton Mifflin, 1926. Wouk, H. The Winds of War. New York: Pocket Books' l97l' 9l Australian Literature Leonards, NSW: Icon Books, 1995. Appignaesi, R. and Garrat, C. Postmodernism. St. *AllzAC and Empire,,. Sydney: Angus&Robertson, 1990 Bean, C' The Story ofAnzac.(Vol.l) Bennett, J. Galtipoli- Sydney: Angus&Robertson' I 98 l' St Lucia: univ' of Qld' 2001 ' Bird, D. Dixon, R. & læe, c. eds. Authority and InJluence' Melbourne: Phuong-Hoang, 1969. Briand, R. No tears toflow: l|'oman at War' universþ of Queensland' 1999' Burstall, T. The soldier'story. stlucia, Queensland: llords' Adelaide: Wakefield' 1999' Cameron-Jackson, Karl. 'The Bridge' inPainted Carver, M.Tobruk. London: Batsford, 1964' Fontana' 1968' Cleary, J. Climate of Courage' Great Britain: 1994' Clune, F. Wild Colonial Boys' Victoria: Hinkler' Craven,P.TheBestAustralianEssays,2003.Melbourne:BlackInc''2003. Courtenay,B.SmoþJoe'sCafé'RingwoodVictoria:Penguin'2001' sydney: Allen & unwin' 1998' coulthard-clark, c. Encyclopaedia of Ausftalia's Battles' & Unwin' 1999' Crowe, A. The Battle after the'l{ar' Sydney: Allan 1992' Dennis, D.J. One Day at a Time' St Lucia: Univ' of Queensland' Robertson' 1943' Devine, !. Rats ofTobruk. Sydney: Angus & Essex-Clarke,J.Mavericksoldier.Melboume:MelboumeUniversity,l99l. Frazer, M.Nasho' Melbourne: Aries, 1984' New Holland' 2001' Harran, P. and Kearney, R. Crossfire' Australia: 1997' Hennessy, B. The Sharp End' Sydney: Allen and Unwin' Horner,D.M.&4,S;PhantomsoftheJungle'sydney:AllenandUnwin'1989' 1983' King, P. Australia's Vietnam' Sydney: Allen & Unwin' Koch, C.!. Highways to lflar' Sydney: Vintage' 1998' Lloyd,Y.H.TheHiddenEnemy'Melbourne:Angus&Robertson'1957' Lunn,H.Vietnam:AReportersWar'Stlucia:Univ'ofQueensland'1986' 92 Australìsn Líleralure (Contul) McAuley, L. The Battle of Coral. Sydney, Australia: Arrow, 1989' MacDougall, A.K. ANZACS: Australians at War' St. Leonards: Currawong,1994' MacGregor, S. No needþr Heroes. Sydney: Calm, 1993' Random, 2001' McCullough , C. Roden Cutler, Z C. Sydney: McKay, G.Vienam Fragments. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992' MacKay, l. Australians in Vietnan. Adelaide: Rigby, 1968' nsrand, l e 84 McNie,r, r G r,;"# : rl#;: 3î'#"íåiiK¡å1, îî:î HïH,Tffi Murphy, !. Harvest of Fear. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993' Palmos, F. Ridding the Devils' Sydney: BantaÍL 1990' Pilger, J. Distant Voices. Sydney: Vintage, 1994' 1988' Þó,'n The Exile: BurchLtt: Reporter in Conflict' Victoria: Heinemann, Peterson, B. Tiger Men. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988' Pilger, J. Heroes.London: Pan, 1987. Pritchard, K.S. Winged Seeds. London: Virago, 1984' Rabe, P. Tobruk. Great Brotain: Corgi, 1967' Raymond,P.RetreatfromKokoda,Victoria:Heinemanrl1958' Rienits, R. Eurelen Stockade. L¡ndon: Convoy, 1949' Ruhen, O. The Broken Wing.l-ondon: Hodder & Stoughton, 1964' Shute, N. A Town like Alice. Sydney: Pan,1974' Syme, N. The Barbarians' Victoria: Brian Zouch, 1980' Terry, S. House of Love' Melbourne: Landsdowne,1966' Towers, M. A Jungle Circus. Sydney: Allen & Unwin' 1999' Tumer, G.k YoungMan ofTalenf. London: Cassell, 1959' wannan, B. Modern Australian Humour. Melbourne: Landsdowne,1962- 'Warner, D. The Inst Confucian. Yictona: Penguin, 1964' 93 North Vietnamese Literature Binh, Bao. The Soruow ofll'ar. NewYork: Riverhead, 1996' Bui, Diem. In the Jaws of History.lndrana: lndiana Uni., 1999' Burchett, W. - North of the l7'h Parallel. Flanoi: People's Pub' House, 1955' - Thefurtive wøy' New York: lnternational, 1963' - Vietnam North. New York: lnternational, 1966. - Vietnam: GuerrillaWar. New York: International, 1965' - Vietnam. Inside story of the Guerrilla l/ar. New York: lnternational, 1968. - Grasshoppers and Elephants. Outback: Victoria: 1977' Cao, l,an Monkey Bridge.New York: Penguin, 1997. Confucius. The Book ofHistory' Book IV. Giap,'- Vo Nguyen. p"oplás War, peoples Army. ÉIanoi: Foreign languages Publishing House, 1960. - BigVictory, Great Iøs&. New York: Praeger, 1968. - Dlen Bien phu. Flanoi: Foreign languages Publishing House, 1964. - Unforgettable Days. Hanoi: Foreign languages Publishing.House, 1978. - Nânonal Liberaion l{ar. lfanoi: Foreign languages Publishing House, 1971. Hao, Pham Thanh. Even the women mustfight. New York: Wiley, 1998' Huong, Thu Duong . Novel - without a name. Victoria: Penguin, 1996. Paradise of the Blind. Victoria: Penguin, 1993' Kue, Le Minh. The Stars, The Earth, The River. Willimantic: Curbstone,1997. Luong, Hy, V. Revoltion in the village. Honolulu: univ. of Hawaii, 1992. Ngo Van. Revolutionaries they could not break. London: Index. 1995. Ninh, Bao. The Sorrow ofWar. New York: Riverhead, 1993' Thai, Ho Anh. Behind the RedMisf. Willimantic, USA: Curbstone, 1998. Troung Nhu Tang. A Vi etcong Merzoir. New York: Random House, I 986. 94 Other relevant Literature Brickhill,P'-TheDamBusters.London:ReadersBookClub,1953. Club' 1955' -n"ain¡or the SIçy' London: Companion Book Chesneaux,!'DayswithHoChiMinh.Hanoi:ForeignLanguagesPress,1965' (undated)' Crawford, J. Obiective Alamein' London: Badger' Norton' 1984' Edel, L. Il'riting Lives. Principia Biographica' London: Forster,E.M.AspectsoftheNovel'Middlesex,England:Penguin'1978' & Stewart, 2001. Hodgins, J' A Passionþr Narrative. Toronto: McClelland Jung,E',andvonFranz,Ma¡ieLouise.TheGrailLegend.London:Sigo,1986. Lacnutre, J.Ho Chi Minl¡' London: Penguin, 1968' York: Abingdon, 1971. Laymon, C.M. Interpreters Commentary on the Bible.New (l't published as The Centurions) Larteguy, J. -The Lost Command.London: Arrow, 1966. -The Hounds of Hetl' London: Mayflower' 1969' -The Pretoriør¡s' London: Arrow' 1965' 1968' Moran, I-ord. The Anatomy of Courage' London: Sphere' volume 2 1940-1943' orwell, G. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters '.' London: Penguin, 1968. Rabe, P. Tobruk. London: Corgi, 1967' London: Deutsch' 1956' Schellenberg ,W . The Schellenberg Memoirs' ScholþLatour,P. Death in the Rice-felds.|-ondon: orbis, 1981. Penguin' 1976' Stendahal. The Charterhouse of Parma'Yi*oira: Stewart,B.BrokpnLives.Suffolk:Harper&Collins,1993' 1988' Tamir, A- Soldier in Search of Peace' Weidenfeld: London' Britain: Triad/Mayflower,1977 ' Spencer-chapman, F. The Jumgle is Neutral' Great 1976' Stevenson, W. AMan Called Intrepid' London: McMillan' Engliså. London: oxford, 1976' sykes, l.B. The concise oxford Dictionary of current 'Warner, P. TheSz4S. London: Sphere, 1984' West, D. (trans.) The Aeneid. Victoria: Penguin, 1990' 95 Unpublished Thesis/dissertation of a Map Brady, Marilyn Nelson, (Tess), 'An exegesis concerning the novel' in Fragments ptrD. Univeriity of rùfestern Australia, Perth W.A', 1998' ArticlesÆssays Clark, M. 'Remembering Vietnam,' in The Vietnam l(ar and Mass Media: Vietnam Generation 4 (Nov. 1992): Number 34. .Literary During, S. Subjectivity': A Review of English Literature. University of Calgary: Ariel 3 1: l&2 (Jan-APr 2002) on Literature Gilman, O.W. Jr. and Smith, L. Eds. 'America Rediscovered': Critical Essays and Film of the Vietnam War. New York: Garland, 1990' ,Estimating Houk, Dr. the Number of suicides Among Vietnam Veterans ',. Am. J. Psychiatry 147 (June 1990): 772-776' Lee, H. 'Critical Opinion'. Essays in Criticism' l:297-303' Journals Australian Book Review (1997), 197, Dec./Jan.:l Essays in Criticism (Oct 2000) l:297-303 Pa¡ade. (August 1996): 10' Vietnam Generation 4 (Nov. 1992): Number 34' Data Base Material Nqval Intelligence Division.lndochina. London: British Govt. Press, 1943' Internet Material Re "Operation Pheonix" assassination program in Vietnam:- lrlto./@lisb/fr ulpLeelt-lsç-g.Ignl:February1996 96