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

x. Conclusions

       Chapter Thirteen Ordinary People: Oral Memoirs

       i. War Stories & Oral History

       ii. Al Santoli, Everything We Had: an Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-Three Soldiers Who Fought It (1981)

       iii. Mark Baker, Nam—The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (1987)

       iv. Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-Six American Women Who Served in Vietnam (1985)

       v. Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984)

       vi. Conclusion

       Chapter Fourteen Vets: The Return of the Repressed

       i. A.R. Flowers, De Mojo Blues (1985)

       ii. Jack Fuller, Fragments (1984)

       iii. Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (1985)

       iv. Larry Heineman, Paco’s Story (1986)

       v. Stephen Wright, Meditations in Green (1983)

       vi. Michael H. Cooper, Dues: a Novel of War and After (1994)

       vii. Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1994)

       viii. Conclusion

       Bibliography

       Primary Works

       Secondary Works

Acknowledgments

      Parts of this book in modified form have appeared elsewhere:

      A shorter version of Chapter Six: “Combat Memoirs of the Vietnam War,” in: VIA LITTERAE. Vol. 5, N o. 1, jan/jun 2013. Universidade de Goiás. Anápolis, Goias, PP. 257-280.

      A shorter version of Chapter Seven: “Allegorical Narratives of the Vietnam War,” in: REVISTA ESTUDOS ANGLO-AMERICANOS. Abrapui, S. Paulo. Edição 35, 2012.

      A modified and expanded version of Section ii, Chapter Eleven: “Deviations from Realism in the Vietnam War Novel,” VERTENTES São João del-Rei, MG, Brazil, no. 34, July-December 2009, pp. 42-52.

      A shorter version of Chapter One: “Art Imitates Life: Edward G. Landsdale and the Fiction of Vietnam,” in: ACTA SCIENTARUM—Language and Culture. Vol. 31, No. 1, Jan-June 2009, pp. 95-102

      A modified version of Section ii, Chapter One, “American Interference: A Political-Cultural Reading of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. VERTENTES. São João del-Rei, MG, no. 30, July-December 2007, pp. 129-137.

      I would like to give thanks to several people who were helpful in the research and writing of this book: to Prof. John Clarke Pratt, with his unmatched knowledge of the literature of the war, my advisor who guided me in the planning and writing of the first half of the book during my stay as visiting scholar at Colorado State University, and to the college, which lent me an office and computer, and the library and staff of special collections at CSU; to the Department of English and Corresponding Literatures at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and Prof. Eliana Àvila, my advisor there; to the College of Letters (FALE), of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), which granted me six months sabbatical leave on those two occasions; to my colleagues of the Center for Study of War, Literature and the Arts (NEGUE), especially José Otaviano Mata Machado, Marcela Gontijo, Elcio Cornelsen, and Volker Jaeckel, for their help and many useful discussions.

      My special thanks to my former student and co-founder of NEGUE, Luiz Gustavo Vieira, who spent many hours with me discussing war, literature, and other aspects of life, and who read the entire manuscript, correcting mistakes and offering valuable criticisms at every point.

       Luiz Gustavo—a valuable friend, student, colleague, and often teacher—to whom I gratefully dedicate this book.

      There it is…The phrase was much used by stoic grunts everywhere.

      Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

      There it is, they‘d say. Over and over—there it is, my friend, there it is—as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can´t change what can´t be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.

      Tim O‘Brien, The Things They Carried

      Introduction

      “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time,

      and your government when it deserves it”

      (Mark Twain)

i. The Vietnam War

With the end of World War II, the economically developed and politically stable democracies, the so-called First World nations, led by the United States, engaged in the global struggle known as the Cold War with the Second World or socialist states in Eastern Europe, which were unified and controlled by the Soviet Union. The conflict had actually begun before the war was over, with the “Big Three”—the US, the USSR, and Great Britain—planning to divide up the globe among them, but the opening salvo of the Cold War, at least symbolically, was fired by Winston Churchill in a speech of March 1946 in the United States, when he declared that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” a warning about what he regarded as the danger to the “Free World” of Soviet expansionism and the lack of the necessary western military strength to counteract it. While President Truman apparently approved of the content of this speech, which took place in his home state of Missouri and pointedly referred to the “special relationship” of the US and Great Britain, US officials feared that what Churchill really wanted was to enlist their country in propping up the crumbling British Empire. For his part, Josef Stalin predictably referred to the speech as imperialistic “war mongering.”1

The Cold War was waged for the hearts and minds, as well as the material wealth, of the rest of the planet, inevitably grouped together as the “Third World.” This was a geographically, politically, and culturally diverse group of countries that could only be perceived as a cluster of states by their common condition of instability, because, as Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, they formed what was, in effect, “a worldwide zone of revolution—whether just achieved, impending or possible.”