Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War. John A. Wood
Vietnamese living during what they called the “American War.”
. . .
Memoirists regularly explain that their conception of combat before Vietnam was largely based on the staged battles they saw played out in war movies, especially those about World War II. Such films often inspired future soldiers to mimic the exploits of John Wayne and other celluloid warriors in the woods, backyards, and vacant lots of their hometowns. Ron Kovic, who cheered on Wayne in the The Sands of Iwo Jima,13 and W.D. Ehrhart, who killed imaginary “Krauts and Japs”14 as a boy, realized early in their tours that their boyhoods had ill prepared them for actual warfare. GIs should have learned during training that mimicking the flashy maneuvers they saw in movies usually led to death or injury, not glory. But some soldiers apparently did not get the message. A young, inexperienced marine in Lewis Puller’s platoon, for instance, was immediately hit by Vietcong gunfire when he “suddenly stood up and began firing his rifle John Wayne fashion from the hip” during a firefight.15 Larry Heinemann explains that the term “John Wayne” was a “flat-out insult” in Vietnam, used to refer to “hot-dog, hero wannabes” not smart enough to realize the foolishness of performing cinematic-style stunts in real-life combat.16
Many GIs also discovered that movies and training had not prepared them for the most gruesome and unavoidable aspects of warfare: wounds and corpses. Real battlefield deaths and injuries were far removed from movie scenes of soldiers who grimaced and fought on with bloodstained shirts after getting shot, or doomed men who let out a final yell or an inspiring slogan before they slumped to the ground and died. Philip Caputo observes that the devastating gunshot wounds suffered by a Vietcong soldier killed by US troops were nothing like “the tidy holes as in the movies.”17 Charles R. Anderson soberly relates that “what happens to human beings in mechanized warfare has absolutely no poetic or theatrical possibilities.”18
After commenting on the falseness of movie war wounds, Caputo goes on to describe the dead Vietcong’s injuries, noting that his body lay in “a crimson puddle in which floated bits of skin and white cartilage.”19 Two pages earlier he writes of another dead Vietcong with “brains spilling out of the huge hole in its head like grey pudding from a cracked bowl.”20 Such hideously realistic descriptions are one of the defining elements of Vietnam veteran memoirs. In stark contrast to the war movies veterans watched as children, their narratives are full of descriptions of battlefield gore that are graphic, disgusting, and difficult to read. The purpose of this technique is clearly not exploitative, but a symptom of memoirists’ desire to “tell like it was” in their narratives; to do so necessitates authentic descriptions of even the most horrible aspects of warfare.
Using World War II (either in its film or real-life incarnations) as a basis for understanding warfare led GIs to hold other preconceptions about combat that did not apply to the war in Vietnam. The Second World War featured, for the most part, battles waged by conventional armies for control of territory, but America’s Vietnamese adversaries, in contrast, frequently employed guerrilla tactics. The Americans tried to draw their elusive enemies into fighting traditional battles that the US military, with its vastly superior firepower, was sure to win. This approach was taken by General William Westmoreland, the commander of US forces during the opening phases of major American military operations in Vietnam.21 He devised a strategy in which US patrols conducting “search and destroy” operations in the countryside “would . . . locate the enemy and then call in artillery and airpower to eliminate him.”22 In theory, such operations would eventually drive “large enemy units . . . from populated areas,” giving US troops the opportunity to secure and “pacify” these locales by rooting out remaining “local guerillas” and Vietcong political leaders.23 These tactics were also part of a “war of attrition” strategy that entailed using the massive resources of the American military to kill as many enemy troops as possible.24
Westmoreland’s tactics, however, often failed to produce the desired results, and many memoirs feature stories that confirm this. Former infantrymen who took part in search and destroy patrols often describe these operations as bewildering, exasperating affairs. Some recall long stretches with no enemy activity, and when contact was finally made it was usually in the form of a Vietcong ambush. These accounts represent the experience of most US infantrymen. Studies show that US small-unit patrols infrequently made contact with the enemy,25 and that when they did it was usually initiated by the Vietcong.26 A common theme in the description of these actions is the idea that Americans in Vietnam, from privates to generals, did not really know what they were doing. Anderson consistently uses words like “blunder,” “idiocy,” and “chaos” in his memoir, The Grunts, to portray the infantry operations in which he participated.27 Rod Kane describes his own unit’s patrols as follows: “we wander around, bumping into things. Things bump into us.”28
Another symbol of the futility of US tactics was the fact that GIs, no matter how many enemy soldiers they killed, did not permanently take control of territory. Nathaniel Tripp says that because US forces did not “hold” the land they struggled over, it “didn’t take long to figure out that [the Vietnam conflict] was a hopeless war.”29 The ostensible irrationality of this strategy was compounded by the fact that regions deemed officially “pacified” did not always live up to that designation. This phenomenon infamously occurred following Operation Cedar Falls, a 1967 US attempt to clear out a Vietcong enclave near Saigon dubbed the “Iron Triangle.” American troops evacuated all the civilians in the area, destroyed all the villages contained within it, and supposedly cleared it of enemy fighters. Six months later the Vietcong was again operating there.30
The best depiction of the hopelessness of American tactics is found in a chapter of A Rumor of War called “Officer in Charge of the Dead.” For part of Caputo’s tour in Vietnam he was put in charge of tallying casualties.31 This task put him right in the middle of the war of attrition, a war in which the performance of an American unit was evaluated “by the number of enemy soldiers it had killed (the body count) and the proportion between that number and the number of its own dead (the kill ratio).”32 Caputo kept track of these statistics on a “scoreboard” that the commander of his battalion consulted in order to determine which companies needed to increase their body counts.33 GIs, under pressure to perform, were not scrupulous in the identification of enemy remains, going by the maxim: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.”34
GIs were infuriated by many Vietcong tactics, but the use of booby traps, especially landmines, was perhaps the most maddening enemy tactic of all. It was bad enough to fight an enemy who attacked and then fled before any revenge could be exacted, but it was even worse when casualties were inflicted by inanimate objects. The most vivid account of the demoralizing effect that booby traps could have on US soldiers is found in Puller’s Fortunate Son. Puller, maimed by a booby trap himself, describes the weeks before his wounding as a “living hell” in which his men were constantly being taken out by landmines. The platoon felt that every step they took might be their last, and their morale was sapped by not being able to retaliate for such attacks.35 Puller and his men struggled to answer a question posed by a veteran in another narrative: “How do you fight back against a booby trap?”36
Though a cynical attitude predominates in memoirists’ depictions of combat, a number of authors express pride in their service. Such veterans do not suggest that their tours were a waste of time, or that American efforts in Vietnam were ridiculously futile. Virtually no memoirs, however, even those that present a generally positive view of the war, depict their authors’ tours as having achieved much of anything. The majority of veterans portray the months they spent in Vietnam as one long series of firefights interrupted by brief periods of rest and inactivity. Almost never is the impression given that the actions of the authors and their comrades, including killing scores of “VC” and NVA, somehow contributed to an ultimate victory. At the end of most memoirs, the author leaves Vietnam and the war continues on without him, as if nothing changed at all since he arrived a year earlier.
Added to this sense of low achievement is the admission of some veterans that they eventually gave up caring