"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

veterans as examples of Vietnam War novels.104 Evidently, this category, like that of the larger category of the “war novel” within which the Vietnam War novel may be placed, has in turn become part of the “loose, baggy monster” that Henry James saw as the essence of the novelistic genre.

iv. The Present Study

The list of narrative works on the Vietnam War continues to grow (one bibliographer lists 3,500 titles since 1977 to his time of writing, although only a fraction of these are imaginative works),105 It is therefore obvious that every work, perhaps even quite a number of deserving ones, cannot be discussed by a single writer. Starting from a list compiled by Pratt, as well as his bibliographic commentary and personal suggestions, I have tried to include a much larger number of works than usual in the critical commentaries of previous books and articles. Such commentaries proliferated during an earlier period, but they seemed to me to constantly recycle criticism of a half-dozen of the same works. In the present study, I have therefore tried to discuss a much greater number of works than are usually discussed, including a few that have to my knowledge never been discussed. To do this required providing extensive plot-summaries, although these have been intertwined with the criticism of the novels in question. It is unlikely that any reader (except perhaps one writing a book like the present one) would read all these novels in their entirety; retelling their stories at length has the function of informing the reader of several works on the same subject or theme that he/she may not wish to read while helping him select one he/she might like to read. I myself have never particularly enjoyed reading articles or hearing lectures on works that I had not read but that seemed to presuppose that I had. At the same time, to appeal to non-academic readers, I have tried to keep Lit-Crit jargon to a minimum, introducing such terms only when it seemed useful for the discussion at hand. Finally, as Tobey C. Herzog did with his study of the combat literature, I have also tried to establish parallels with earlier works of war literature.

As for the organization of discussing these works, I have generally followed Pratt’s proposed bibliographical chronology, which has two axes: in reading Vietnam fiction, he writes, one “should establish two frames of reference...first, the approximate place and time period of the book’s internal action; and second, an external frame of reference that includes a knowledge of the basic historical events plus the book’s date of writing and publication.”106 The only difficulty to this admirable plan is that while the basic historical events ground the fiction in history, the date of writing (an indeterminate time after the events depicted) cannot always be established.

      The early narratives on Vietnam discussed in Part I, “Partisans” (cf. Table of Contents), are more easily arranged chronologically. These works are particularly interesting for their varied political attitudes and perspectives, which are often missing in later narratives that take the war for granted and concentrate mainly on action and events. To begin the study of narratives of the Vietnam War, four novels are discussed in the first chapter. They are distinguished by their diverse national points of view—British, American, French, Vietnamese—and will be examined in the order of their historical chronology as determined by the time of their internal action. Three of these novels are said to have been based on the exploits of the quintessential American adventurer, Edward G. Landsdale. The first section, accordingly, focuses on his life and activity within the historical context of the early American participation in Vietnam during the 1950s and early 1960s.

      Graham Greene’s seminal novel of 1955, The Quiet American, whose context is the French struggle with the Viet Minh during the years 1951-52, seems to have inspired both Lederer and Burdick’s Cold War tract, The Ugly American (1958), and a more recent response, Ward Just’s A Dangerous Friend (1999), a “rewriting” of Greene’s novel but about events that occur over a decade later. Both M. J. Bosse’s The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (1959) and Jean Lartéguy’s Yellow Fever (1962) give an imaginative glimpse into the historical events of the French colonial war in the mid-Fifties, albeit from opposite sides.

      Chapter Two is devoted to five novels that have varied political stances on the Diem regime, its demise, and related military events in the year 1963. Chapters Three and Four discuss a fairly large number of novels that represent the fighting during the period of American advisors after Diem’s fall: the years 1963-64. Certain themes and character types are introduced in these two chapters as being pervasive in the works discussed, even while the individual novels vary widely both in literary value and political attitudes. The fictions examined in Chapter Three, mostly published in the pre-Tet mid-1960s, I have defined as “pro-war” (e.g. the best-selling The Green Berets, by Robin Moore, 1965). These novels are more optimistic and naïve about motivations and possible outcomes. By contrast, those discussed in Chapter Four, which were published in the late 1960s or even later, exhibit greater sophistication in handling the political and moral ambivalence of their characters, and, probably not coincidentally, seem to me to be more accomplished literary works.

      Finally, Chapter Five discusses works written by civilians that view the war from the “outside,” whether through the character of a journalist standing apart from it (Pamela Sanders, in Miranda, 1978) or involuntarily immersed in the fighting (Takeshi Kaiko, in Into a Black Sun, 1980). The war in these works is portrayed on a larger canvas—both in space (Miranda) and time (Thomas Fleming’s The Officers’ Wives, 1981). Kaiko’s work, as well as the earliest example analyzed in this chapter, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night (1968), take a step further by problematizing the status of the narrator-observer, and in so doing become good examples of the blurred line between fiction and non-fiction present in so many of the more interesting works to come out of the war. The Kalbs’ The Last Ambassador (1981) is included here to give closure to the historical sequence that began with Morris West’s The Ambassador (1965), discussed in Chapter Two.

      Part II, “Modes and Genres,” as the title suggests, is less concerned with the historical sequence and more focused on types of narrative. It discusses novels and autobiographical works published mostly in the late 1960s or the 1970s. Written by combat veterans about events that took place starting with the intervention of American combat units from 1965 onward, these works—with the important exception of the numerous combat novels in the mode of realism—tend to be critical of the war. As suggested above, what makes the narrative literature of the Vietnam War interesting, as compared to that of World War II, is the great variety of types of fictions, the narrative strategies employed in fictional and non-fictional works, and the blurring of dividing lines between the two. The chapters in this part have accordingly been organized according to narrative strategies, both traditional and innovative.

      Autobiographical memoirs are a traditional form of war writing. The Vietnam versions discussed in Chapter Six illustrate the traditional (Philip Caputo’s Rumors of War, 1977), the polemical (Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, 1976), the comic (Tobias Wolf’s In Pharaoh’s Army, 1994), and the unorthodox (Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone, 1975), as well as other examples. Chapter Seven discusses half a dozen allegorical novels, which is an unusual type of narrative for war novels but a traditional form of older literature. The extremes here may be illustrated by Norman Mailer´s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), a hunting tale that recalls classic American fictions, and Joe Haldeman´s The Forever War (1975), a science-fiction novel about an intergalactic war.

      In terms of quantity, most fictional works about the war are combat novels written by soldier-authors that are also in the mode of traditional realism. These novels show the greatest continuity with the fictions of previous wars and the least variation in narrative structure. I have chosen nine examples of these for Chapter Eight, perhaps a greater number than is needed, in the hope that their common narrative themes and strategies, and their nearly interchangeable characters, become that more apparent. Chapter Nine discusses two examples of lengthy and more explicitly ideological combat novels that have been more highly praised in the press than the examples in Chapter Eight, as well as