War stories aren't always about war, per se. They aren't about bombs and bullets and military maneuvers. They aren't about tactics, they aren't about foxholes and canteens. A war story, like any good story, is finally about the human heart.
    --Tim O'Brien

    America has experienced an outpouring of Vietnam War literature in the twenty-five years since the fall of Saigon. While not many works examing the war appeared in the first few years following America's withdrawal from Vietnam, in the late 70's and early 80's, the dam burst. The trickle of works turned to a torrent. The bulk of these early accounts are personal narratives which focus on the experiences of the combat infantryman--the grunt or foot soldier. Most come from people who were actually there--soldiers, reporters, medics. The best-known of these works include Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977), an account of the war from an Esquire magazine reporter which many critics credit as the first book to capture the real feel of the war, as well as Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War (1977) and Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July (1976), both eyewitness accounts of the life-altering experiences of men who enlisted, expecting a heroic experience, but who were forever changed by the war's realities.

    These first-person narratives usually tell anti-heroic stories which assert the moral ambiguity of America's involvement in Vietnam and deflate notions of patriotism or glory sometimes associated with war. In fact, many of these accounts emphasize the difference between Vietnam and wars such as WWII. Not only did America's involvement in WWII--sometimes even called "the good war"-- seem more morally justified than our involvement in Vietnam, but the War in Vietnam was fought differently as well. A guerilla war, American soldiers found themselves in unfamiliar, jungle terrain. There were no clear arenas of battle; many were killed in ambushes, sniper attacks, and by bombs connected to trip wires. In addition, American soldiers had difficulty in distinguishing the enemy--the Viet Cong--from South Vietnamese loyalists, a predicament adding tension and fear to everyday life. These eyewitness accounts often attempt to grapple honestly with the horror that many Americans experienced in Vietnam. The stories they convey are frequently brutally graphic and shocking, relating atrocities committed both by the Viet Cong and by American soldiers themselves. For the most part, however, these accounts do not blame ordinary soldiers for sometimes horrific behavior. The ordinary soldier is usually presented, instead, as someone at the mercy of forces greater than himself, as the victim of a bungled American policy in Vietnam, of uncaring or glory-seeking officers and politicians, or of the natural and tragic hardening that would take place in anyone exposed to brutality on a daily basis.

    While many veterans wrote straightforward narrative accounts of their time spent "in-country," some chose to shape their Vietnam experiences into fiction or poetry. Among the most acclaimed imaginative treatments of the war is the work of Tim O'Brien. Asking whether the human imagination is strong enough to overcome atrocity, O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book Award, tells the story of a platoon's pursuit of a soldier who has simple-mindedly decided to walk to Paris, to simply leave the war behind him. The Things They Carried (1990) blends fact and fiction and probes literary form as it presents a related series of stories set not only in Vietnam but also before and after the war. Insisting that it is a love story as much as a war story, this book seeks to move readers emotionally, to "make the stomach believe" along with the mind. O'Brien continues to explore the connections between love and war in his next novel, In the Lake of the Woods (1994), which follows a dual mystery: the murder of politician John Wade's wife as well as Wade's concealed involvement in the My Lai massacre. Other notable fiction writers of the Vietnam War include Larry Heinemann, whose Paco's Story won the 1987 National Book Award and Stephen Wright, whose novel Meditations in Green (1983) surrealistically explores the life of a heroin addicted ex-soldier who can't leave the war behind him. While several collections of poetry about the Vietnam War have been published, Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau (1988) stands out as one of the most beautiful and moving.

    In these imaginative shapings of war experience, the authors search for literary forms to adequately express their experiences. These writers must grapple with a question underlying much literature of the later twentieth century: how does one write about atrocity? As Kurt Vonnegut puts it in his Slaughterhouse-Five, a World War II novel actually written and published during the height of the Vietnam War: "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." That's why his book is so "short and jumbled and jangled," Vonnegut explains to his editor. Similarly, Vietnam War writers often use forms that may at first appear confusing, ambiguous, or chaotic to readers. Often, such formal experimentation is designed to represent the disorder and confusion experienced by soldiers in Vietnam. Critic Lloyd Lewis argues that it is the duty of the Vietnam War writer to incoporate the seeming illogic of the war into the structure of his work. The reader, according to Lewis, should be "obliged to live the soldier, adrift in an alien universe in which the familiar. . . landmarks [have] disappeared."

    Because of the difficulty in understanding or making sense of the war (again, we're most often witnessing events from the point-of-view of the ordinary, uninformed foot soldier), Vietnam writers often focus on the surface details of daily existence--the everyday routines of war, the jokes, conversations, superstitious rituals--rather than on larger historical or political questions about the war. The everyday experience of soldiering, then, becomes the basis for "understanding" the war. This leads to what has almost become a cliche of Vietnam literature: if you weren't there, you can't possibly understand what it was like. Vietnam literature, though, has been criticized at times for presenting just such a view. Critic James C. Wilson, for instance, believes most American fiction about the war insists that the reader is powerless to understand Vietnam. Wilson objects strongly to this notion, arguing that, while making sense of Vietnam is difficult (as so many Vietnam writers indicate), by implying that the war is impossible to understand, these writers simply play into the hands of all those who wanted (and still want) to keep the war a mystery. The very best Vietnam literature often probes this problem, raising questions about the potential for art to communicate or even transform the trauma of war experience into something meaningful.

    Vietnam War literature is also criticized quite often for presenting the conflict primarily as an internal war: for depicting Vietnam as a war in which the U.S. battled the U.S. The literature, for instance, often depicts disagreements between "doves" and "hawks," or between those who supported U.S. involvement in Vietnam and those who opposed it. We see many instances of turmoil within platoons, of men disobeying orders and even "fragging" (using hand grenades to murder) superior officers. But what contributes to this critique more than anything else is the absence in the literature of any significant or fully developed Vietnamese perspective. Feminist critics have also argued that much Vietnam War literature is quite sexist, that the literature reinforces a view of war in which men are the tragic victims and women are objectified or silenced. Brutal rape scenes of Viet Cong women by American soldiers are not unusual in the literature, while American women back home are often depicted as unable to understand the war in any meaningful way or to empathize with the suffering male soldiers experienced.

    Many more recent accounts of Vietnam, both eyewitness narratives and imaginative treatments of the war, have begun to address some of the omissions in the earlier literature. Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country, for instance, follows seventeen-year-old Samantha Hughes as she tries to learn as much as she can about the war and about her father who died in the war before she was born. This novel questions the war's effect on a later generation as well as the relationship between gender and war. Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a group of collected short stories which explores the war's aftermath on Vietnamese expatriots in Louisiana, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In addition, many autobiographical accounts and novels by North Vietnamese writers have appeared in the U.S. in the last decade. Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War : a Novel of North Vietnam (translated into English in 1995) has been compared to Erich Maria Remarque's classic World War I novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. But probably best known of the Vietnamese accounts of the war is When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Le Ly Hayslip's story of her experiences as a young girl growing up in a central Vietnam village in the late 60's and early 70's,which was made into a film by Oliver Stone in 1993.

    Whether eyewitness accounts by American infantryman, postmodern literary explorations, or the personal narratives of Vietnamese nationals, the literature of the Vietnam War is an emotionally powerful and increasingly popular category of contemporary literature. It's a literature that, as Tim O'Brien says, speaks to the human heart.

Susan Farrell
Professor, Department of English
College of Charleston