Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War. John A. Wood
the Vietnam books have been written by [veterans] who had lots of education and came from relatively sophisticated backgrounds, guys who had been to college and were officers. Rod Kane really represents the disenfranchised, the people who came out of the high schools, the drifters, the kids who had no one to speak for them. They were the ones who paid the price, they were blown to pieces.88
The executive’s assessment is accurate. The fifty-one most prominent Vietnam veteran-memoirists had, as a whole, strikingly dissimilar backgrounds from the average American combat soldier. Whereas the typical infantryman was a teenage enlisted man with a high school education, veteran-authors were generally former officers who served in Vietnam after graduating from college. Most GIs in Vietnam came from low-income families and were primarily draftees or draft-motivated volunteers, but most memoirists were middle class and often volunteered for idealistic reasons. Finally, although combat infantry units in Vietnam were disproportionately composed of African Americans and other minorities, all but six memoirists were white.
The unsettling fact that the nation’s poorest citizens bore the heaviest burden in Vietnam is one of the most important aspects of the war. It is subsequently unfortunate that this facet of the conflict’s history is largely absent from the most popular veterans’ memoirs. The authors of these narratives had uncommonly privileged backgrounds, and most did not mention that their pre-Vietnam lives were any different than those of average combat soldiers. This hole in the depiction of the war is partially compensated for by the existence of several popular oral histories that feature numerous interviews with apparently ordinary combat veterans, but because these titles are small in number compared to veteran memoirs, their influence has been limited.89
Although the backgrounds of the memoirists were different from average combat troops in many respects, the two groups were similar in one crucial aspect: wartime experiences. Most memoirists were either junior officers or enlisted men who spent a year in Vietnam and then returned to civilian life. About half were former infantrymen who took part in conventional combat operations, and most were actively involved in combat due to low rank. The publishing executive was correct in stating that most memoirists came from exceptional backgrounds. But the majority of authors, former junior officers and enlisted men alike, still “paid the price” and risked getting “blown to pieces.”
2
Combat Conditions and the Vietnamese People
Of the hundreds of memoirs written by American veterans of the Vietnam War, And a Hard Rain Fell: A GI’s True Story of the War in Vietnam is perhaps the most bitter, unromantic, and depressing. Its author, John Ketwig, developed an apolitical, instinctual abhorrence of the growing war in Southeast Asia as he approached draft age. It was only because of a lack of options that he enlisted in the army in late 1966. A recruiter assured Ketwig that volunteering would keep him out of Vietnam, but he was shipped off to Southeast Asia not long after basic training anyway. He worked mostly as a mechanic on an army base in Vietnam, but had several combat experiences that left deep psychological scars. While driving a truck that was part of a convoy tasked with resupplying combat troops, Ketwig was nearly killed when the vehicle in front of him was destroyed by a landmine.1 When his convoy finally reached the battlefield, he was met with the nightmarish scene of dispirited GIs “kneeling in the mud, peering into the shadows and awaiting death.”2 The soldiers were under constant enemy harassment and, owing to sniper fire, the only way they could retrieve their slain comrades was to chain their corpses to the back of an armored vehicle and drag them out of the line of fire.3
For days after his stint with the convoy, Ketwig “shook,” went into rages, and “shivered,” haunted by the memory of the “string” of American bodies being dragged through the mud.4 The most damaging experience of his tour, however, did not come on the battlefield, but at an encampment of US Army Special Forces soldiers, the famous “Green Berets.” Ketwig went to the camp hoping to barter for black market goods, but when he got there the Green Berets and their Vietnamese allies were torturing a woman they suspected had played some part in the death of a comrade. He describes the torture and the woman’s eventual murder in sickening detail, and recalls the crushing guilt he felt afterward at not having done something to stop it.5 Ketwig even questioned at the time whether he would “ever be able to return to everyday life in” the United States after witnessing such a horrible episode.6
Ketwig openly denounces the war in And a Hard Rain Fell. Additionally, the despairing tone of the book and its graphic descriptions of combat and atrocities amount to an implicit indictment of the war. It therefore seems odd that another reoccurring theme in the book is his contempt for the war’s greatest victims: Vietnamese civilians. Ketwig perceived the Vietnamese to be greedy, untrustworthy, and ungrateful. He disdainfully describes Vietnamese cities as dangerous, trash-strewn centers of vice,7 and South Vietnam in general as “a society of murderers, thieves, [and] carnival hucksters.”8 Ketwig was shocked that civilians, such as children who pelted US Army buses with garbage, were openly contemptuous of Americans.9 During his last day “in country” his wallet was stolen and he saw an old woman brazenly selling a US military rifle in the marketplace.10 After these events it suddenly became clear to him that “the Vietnamese people didn’t care about our noble mission, and until they cared it was hopeless.”11
The portrayal of the Vietnam experience in And a Hard Rain Fell may seem peculiar, but it is actually typical. Most memoirists, like Ketwig, describe combat as terrifying and exhausting rather than glorious, and they render battlefield wounds and deaths in graphic detail. Veteran-authors also accurately depict the great difficulty American forces experienced in their attempts to counter the Vietcong’s unconventional tactics. Veterans make it clear that the war was fought among civilians who were indistinguishable from the enemy, a situation that led to death and injury for countless innocent bystanders, including women and children. Memoirs also show that a profound anti-Vietnamese racism existed among American troops; the use of racial slurs such as “gook,” “dink,” and “slope” was commonplace. Such racial hatred was obviously the driving force behind some of the most heinous atrocities chronicled by veterans, including the practice of keeping enemy body parts, chiefly ears and skulls, as souvenirs.
Most authors, also like Ketwig, portray the Vietnamese as covetous of American dollars, yet unappreciative of American sacrifices. Such depictions lead to the formation of an unlikely theme in veteran narratives: Vietnamese civilians as the victimizers of US troops. Sharing the role of victimizer with civilians in narratives are Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers, America’s chief military allies in Vietnam.12 These “ARVNs” are portrayed as lazy cowards who were inexplicably disdainful of the GIs who fought to defend South Vietnam’s freedom. All Vietnamese—friends and enemies, civilians and combatants—usually appear in narratives as racist caricatures.
If most veteran-memoirists explicitly or implicitly condemn the war, why do most also depict Vietnamese civilians in unsympathetic ways? The reason for the coexistence of these two seemingly incompatible themes is directly related to the fundamental weakness of personal narratives: limited and biased perspective. Veteran narratives provide valuable information about how American troops experienced combat in Vietnam. But since veteran memoirs represent the experiences of only one specific group of people, they are inherently limited in their outlook on the war. American soldiers generally arrived in Vietnam with little knowledge of the country’s language, culture, or history. They likewise lacked a nuanced understanding of the conflict in which they fought, knowing only the US government’s oversimplified conception of the war as a battle between Communist aggression and the forces of democracy. Most American soldiers, moreover, largely due to communications problems, had no meaningful contact with local people during their tours. No wonder few veterans knew the real reasons for Vietnamese actions that they despised.
This chapter compares memoirist representations of warfare and the Vietnamese to what other sources, chiefly historical scholarship and nonveteran narratives, say about these topics. Using this approach shows that veterans’ representations of combat often correspond to how historians and other writers depict Vietnam War combat. Outside sources also provide