Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War. John A. Wood
and even hallucinated.5 Mason made it back to the United States in one piece, but his psychological problems persisted. He left the army and frantically searched for peace of mind, fulfillment, and a means to support his family. He studied photography, worked as a car salesman, traveled around Europe, and devised several get-rich-quick schemes, but nothing panned out. To make matters worse, Mason was drinking heavily, popping pills, and smoking marijuana in a futile effort to control his anxiety. One day he confided in an acquaintance who worked as a literary agent that he was thinking about writing a novel based on his Vietnam experiences. The agent was encouraging, but suggested Mason write a memoir instead. He took the advice, and after completing the first seventy pages felt real satisfaction for the first time since returning from Southeast Asia.
Mason finished his memoir in 1980.6 His agent friend agreed to shop the manuscript around to publishers, but was not optimistic about its chances because “nobody wanted to publish books about the Vietnam War.”7 A few Vietnam memoirs were released in the 1970s, and one of these books, Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977), was a great critical and commercial success.8 Mason discovered that his agent’s pessimism was well founded, however, as his manuscript was rejected again and again over the next few years. Publishers “liked the writing . . . but none of them thought people wanted to read about Vietnam.”9 They were wrong. Mason’s memoir, Chickenhawk, was finally published by Viking Press in 1983. Critics loved it and thousands of copies were eventually sold.10 And Mason was not the only successful Vietnam book author that year. In December 1983, the New York Times announced that titles “about Vietnam [were] rolling off the presses in record numbers.”11 The Times reported in 1987 that the “Vietnam-Book Boom” was still in full swing, and it asked several veteran-authors to give their thoughts on this “latest artistic trend.”12 One of the authors, Caputo, dismissed it all as “Vietnam chic.” Another, Tim O’Brien, speculated that interest in Vietnam would soon fade, and readers would move on to books about other wars.13
Caputo and O’Brien were wrong in thinking that Vietnam War books were only a passing fad. Hundreds of titles about the conflict appeared in the years following the 1987 Times article, many of them written by veterans. Some well-known war novels have been produced by ex-soldiers, such as Paco’s Story by Larry Heinemann, Fields of Fire by James Webb, and O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Other veteran-writers, such as Bruce Weigl and W. D. Ehrhart, are known for their war-related poetry. Nonetheless, far more nonfiction veteran narratives, namely memoirs and oral histories, have been published since the war ended. And a number of these books, like A Rumor of War and Chickenhawk, were best sellers, lauded by reviewers, or both. Writing a memoir, moreover, has become a seemingly mandatory milestone for famous Vietnam veterans. Heinemann, Weigl, and other writers who were first recognized for their Vietnam War fiction later penned nonfiction accounts of their tours. Veteran-authors who gained recognition by writing books unrelated to Vietnam, such as Tracy Kidder and Tobias Wolff, later became war memoirists. Colin Powell, John McCain, Bob Kerrey, and other politicians have written about their Vietnam experiences as well.
Owing to their longtime prevalence and popularity, veteran memoirs have undoubtedly influenced America’s collective memory of the Vietnam conflict for decades. The same can be said for films, news media reports, political rhetoric, and other cultural products. But war narratives produced by “those who were there” have long held a special authority for people, Americans included.14 Paul Fussell observes in The Great War and Modern Memory that British veterans of the First World War saw recalling their battlefield experiences as a duty or “moral obligation.” A war memoirist himself, he adds that all ex-soldiers share this “obsession to some degree.”15 Samuel Hynes, another veteran-scholar, explains that this preoccupation with remembering has long been colored by the assertion that former warriors are the absolute authorities on the conflicts in which they have fought.16 A veteran maintains that what he says about war “is true because he was on the field,” and “if you don’t know that, you don’t know anything.”17 Many Vietnam veterans similarly assert that “the ‘Nam” was so surreal and unlike other conflicts that only they can truly comprehend it. Phil Klay, a former marine who served in Iraq, pokes fun at this attitude in Redeployment, his award-winning short-story collection. A character in one story tells this old joke: “How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a light bulb? You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there.”18
Some Vietnam veterans, then, have claimed a special, infallible knowledge of the war. Equally important is the fact that the rest of the country has been primed to believe this assertion. When A Rumor of War and other early veteran memoirs were published in the late 1970s, Americans were angry and disillusioned by the recent failure in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.19 In this atmosphere of distrust “the veteran was admirably placed to proclaim . . . his knowledge of events and perception of the truth.”20 Feeling that their leaders had lied to them about the war, people turned to the ordinary ex-soldier, someone “who spoke at a worm’s-eye level”21 and “had witnessed the hypocrisy of power first hand.”22 The veteran memoirist consequently came to be seen as an “investigative writer”23 who was better equipped than anyone else “to solve the mystery surrounding Vietnam.”24
The late 1970s also saw the emergence of the belief that GIs in Vietnam were denied victory by the actions of antiwar protesters and then literally spat on when they came home. This narrative gained strength in the 1980s, and proponents of America’s first war with Iraq used it to silence peace activists in 1991. The populace was warned that if they did not “support the troops” in the Middle East, they would be just as cruel as the radicals who allegedly victimized GIs in the sixties and seventies.25 The idea that US forces in Vietnam were “stabbed in the back” by malevolent antiwar activists persists in the twenty-first century. This is unsurprising considering that “uncritically hagiographic Support Our Troops rhetoric,”26 which unquestionably celebrates soldiers, has flourished since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.27 Tales of abused Vietnam veterans, however, as chapter 5 explains, are of questionable validity. But such stories nevertheless affect public perception and are part of the Vietnam veteran “mystique.”28 Readers, surely wary of repeating the supposed mistakes made by the protesters of yesteryear, are disposed to believe veterans’ claims that they alone know what really happened in Vietnam.
Despite their importance, Vietnam veteran memoirs have hitherto received inadequate treatment by scholars. Many literary scholars have analyzed veteran narratives, and some thoughtfully postulated on how these works may have influenced how Americans think about the war. Some contended that veteran narratives offered hard-hitting truths about Vietnam that might prevent future military quagmires.29 Susan Jeffords, conversely, argued that some memoirs, along with movies and novels, actually contributed to Reagan-era jingoism.30 Other scholars focused more narrowly on how veteran-writers illustrated certain aspects of the war, such as race relations among GIs31 and the treatment of Vietnamese women.32 These writers, however, each covered only a small number of memoirs. Plus, they usually made little distinction between nonfiction narratives, veteran-authored novels, films, and other Vietnam-themed pop-culture products.
Many renowned Vietnam War historians have used veteran memoirs in their scholarship, including Christian G. Appy, Marilyn B. Young, and George C. Herring.33 Unlike scholars working in other fields, however, historians have not seriously explored how these books might have affected collective memory.34 Most historians take just a few quotations from veteran-authored books to bolster various arguments, but a few others, Peter S. Kindsvatter being a notable example, rely heavily on these sources.35 Few historians, in any case, scrutinize veteran memoirs any more than they would an unimpeachable primary source retrieved from an archive. This is a problem, since memory, according to historian David Thelen, “private and individual as much as collective and cultural, is constructed, not reproduced.”36 “This construction,” he adds, “is not made in isolation but in conversations with others that occur in the contexts of community, broader politics,