Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War. John A. Wood

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      Who Were the Vietnam Veteran-Memoirists?

      Lewis Puller Jr., author of the memoir Fortunate Son, always knew he would join the marines someday and, with luck, command troops against America’s enemies. This eagerness for combat was a product of his upbringing. Puller’s father was Marine Corps legend Lewis “Chesty” Puller Sr., and he raised his son to see fighting for one’s country as a duty and an honor. The younger Puller entered marine officer training immediately after college graduation and, a few months later, volunteered to lead an infantry platoon in Vietnam. He had, however, many disillusioning experiences during his combat tour, chief among them the day he realized he was very much unlike the enlisted men under his command. Whereas Puller was a college graduate who grew up in comfortable economic circumstances, half of his men were high school dropouts, and all came from “lower-middle-class backgrounds.” He also learned that, at age twenty-three, he was an “old man” compared to the “teenage misfits” who composed the bulk of the platoon.¹

      Puller, as the son of a famous general, grew up in exceptional circumstances, but he was not the only former-officer-turned-memoirist who discovered that his own background differed greatly from those of his men. William Broyles Jr., who had already earned an MA degree from prestigious Oxford University when he joined the marines in 1968,² wrote this entry in his journal after meeting his troops in Vietnam for the first time:

      I have fifty-eight men. Only twenty have high school diplomas. About ten of them are over twenty-one. Reading through their record books almost made me cry. Over and over they read—address of father: unknown; education: one or two years of high school; occupation: laborer, pecan sheller, gas station attendant, Job Corps. Kids with no place to go. No place but here.³

      Both Puller and Broyles served their combat tours relatively late in the war, a period when many GIs in Vietnam were only there because they lacked the money, connections, and know-how needed to procure a draft deferment. Philip Caputo, however, who led an infantry platoon in the opening stages of the war, was also struck by the generally disadvantaged backgrounds of his troops. Many in his platoon had not finished high school, and most, he writes in A Rumor of War, came “from city slums and dirt farms and Appalachian mining towns.”⁴ Everyone in the platoon was a volunteer, but Caputo speculated that many enlisted to avoid the draft, or because the military offered “a guaranteed annual income, free medical care, [and] free clothing.”⁵ Caputo was not the son of a war hero or the graduate of a famed European university, but as a college graduate from a middle-class family, his upbringing was nevertheless privileged compared to those of his men.

      It is no coincidence that the platoons of all three of these memoirists were composed predominantly of economically and educationally disadvantaged men in their late teens or early twenties. Christian G. Appy argues that most enlisted men who served in Vietnam came from poor or working-class backgrounds; were, on average, nineteen years old when they went to war; and had not gone to college. Most middle- and upper-class young men were able to skip military service in the Vietnam era, primarily through college deferments. Less privileged men generally could not afford higher education in this era, which left them at the mercy of their draft boards. Most disadvantaged men who turned eighteen during the war had only two real choices when it came to the draft: await the arrival of their draft notice, or submit to the inevitable and volunteer for military service.⁶

      Over two million American soldiers served in Vietnam, but only a small percentage were consistently involved in combat. As Meredith Lair has shown, most GIs in Vietnam filled a myriad of noncombat roles that a large, modern military force requires to function, from mess-hall cook to intelligence analyst.⁷ There is debate over exactly how many American military personnel in Vietnam were combat soldiers, but the ratio of support troops to combat troops was, according to Appy, “at least 5 to 1.”⁸ It is significant, therefore, that Puller, Broyles, and Caputo were all in charge of infantry platoons. These were the US Army and Marine Corps grunts who carried out the bulk of American ground combat operations during the war.⁹ Due to military procedures of the period, recruits with poor educational backgrounds were frequently assigned to the infantry.¹⁰ Since education level was a strong indicator of social-class level in the Vietnam era, these policies ensured that poor and working-class troops filled the infantry’s ranks.¹¹

      The enlisted men commanded by Puller, Caputo, and Broyles represented average combat soldiers. These three authors, like most veteran-authors, were combat veterans too, but they, also like most memoirists, did not resemble ordinary combat troops for several reasons. The majority of memoirists were middle-class college graduates and, on average, twenty-seven years old when they served in Southeast Asia. While most veteran-authors served as officers, nearly 90 percent of the troops in Vietnam were enlisted men.¹² Although underprivileged men of all races and ethnicities were more likely to see combat than their more fortunate counterparts, infantry units were disproportionately staffed by African Americans and other nonwhites.¹³ The fact that America’s fighting force was heavily populated by the least fortunate segments of its population is a significant facet of Vietnam War history. It is worrisome that people may not have been exposed to this important historical reality if they read books written by veterans who were primarily middle class, college educated, and white.

      Despite the importance of the memoirists’ socioeconomic characteristics, this topic has garnered little attention from scholars or popular writers. A handful of literary critics and scholars have written about the demographics of Vietnam veteran-authors. C. D. B. Bryan speculated in his 1976 New York Times review of Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July that few Vietnam veterans had produced memoirs or war novels by that point because those most “capable of writing the Vietnam-era’s equivalent to a Naked and the Dead . . . were also capable of avoiding the draft.”¹⁴ Merritt Clifton, the editor of Those Who Were There, a 1984 bibliography of firsthand accounts of the war, theorized that the existence of so many capable Vietnam-era veteran-writers was explained by the relatively high recruiting standards of the Marine Corps, which “drew heavily from those achieving a medium level of education: at least a high school diploma, perhaps a year of college.”¹⁵ Philip K. Jason speculated that many Vietnam veterans “had the equipment to turn their experiences into literary documents” because of the post–World War II expansion of educational opportunities in the United States.¹⁶

      Bryan, Clifton, or Jason, however, did not discuss author demographics beyond these few statements. Crucially, these writers also did not speculate on the possible influence of veteran-author backgrounds over readers’ conceptions of Vietnam War history. A few other literary scholars, however, touched on this subject. Philip Beidler writes about how the distinctive backgrounds of the veteran-authors affected the portrayal of the war in cheap paperback memoirs and novels.¹⁷ Two other scholars, Herman Beavers and Perry Luckett, speculate about how a lack of African American veteran-writers affected the depiction of racial issues in Vietnam War literature.¹⁸ These literary critics, however, only focus on how a single demographic veteran-author characteristic, such as race or military occupation, influenced readers’ conceptions of Vietnam.