Bridgewater Review

Volume 3 | Issue 1 Article 5

Dec-1984

Who Owns The Night? Vietnam: Personal andFictional NarrativesCharles F. AngellBridgewater State College, cangell@bridgew.edu

This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Recommended CitationAngell, Charles F. (1984). Who Owns The Night? Vietnam: Personal and Fictional Narratives. Bridgewater Review, 3(1), 3-7.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol3/iss1/5

ovels and reminiscences written byVietnam combat veterans are beingpublished with increasing frequency. Dustjackets and end papers proclaim that eachnew narrative is for Vietnam what All Quieton the Western Front was for World War Iand The Naked and the Dead or Catch 22were for World War II. Unfortunately, if itcan be said that generals fight current warsusing the tactics of earlier wars, so VietnamWar authors structure their narratives usingthe frameworks of earlier writers. Too many--Winston Groom's Better Times ThanThese or Steven Phillips Smith's AmericanBoys are typical -- place contemporarysoldiers on the battlefields of an earlierliterature where young men encounterironies, absurdities, and paradoxes. Mostattempts to write about what young menexperienced in Vietnam reveal that theconventions of war fiction, as we have cometo know them, cannot adequately shape theexperience of that war. Authors have not yetfound a narrative form articulating theVietnam combat experience.

Articulation has always been the majorproblem in America's experience withVietnam. During the war, our leaders, fromthe President on down, were unable toarticulate precisely what it was Americahoped to accomplish by fightingcommunism in a small, poor, agriculturalcountry. Protesters verbal as many of themwere, could not articulate through reasonedargument what about the war was morally,politically, and militarily wrong. Manywords, too many words, were written andspoken on each side. They revealed, in theiraccumulation, a nation's infected will.

Until recently, the men who fought thewar have remained virtually silent. Americahas wanted it that way; the military haswanted it that way; and the men themselves­- it seems -- have not wanted to add to theirrelevance, inaccuracy, and untruthfulnessthat characterize too much of what has beenwritten about the fighting in Vietnam. Theirattitude was (and may to an extent still be)that of the soldier described in Fred Reed's"A Veteran Writes:" "Once, after GIs hadleft Saigon, I came out of a bar on CachMang and saw a veteran with a sign on hisjacket: VIETNAM: IF YOU HAVE 'TBEEN THERE: SHUT THE FUCK UP.Maybe, just maybe, he had something."Unlike the more articulate, most veteransdid not render their Vietnam experience insophisticated literary tropes and motifs thatprevious generations had appropriated todescribe their war experience. Unlike theBritish soldiers in the Flanders' trencheswhom Paul Fussell depicted in The GreatWar and Modern Memory. American

Who Owns

The

Night?Vietnam:

Personal andFictional Narratives

By Charles F. Angell

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soldiers in the rice paddies did not feel theyhad come through battle to be reborn or thatthe myth of their destiny lay in trial by fire.

Their destinies are perhaps suggested bythe images retained of Vietnam. Vietnam'slegacy is remembered pictures of screamingchildren burned and disfigured by napalm,an anguished Kent State coed bent over thebody of her college classmate, Buddhistmonks immolated before horrifiedonlookers. In his essay, "Photographs ofAgony," John Berger writes: "Confronta­tion with a photographed moment of agonycan mask a far more extensive and urgentconfrontation." Berger tells us that the mosthonest response we can have to the horror ofagony is to understand how we have beentransformed and to continue a conscioustransformation of ourselves.

The American soldiers who landed inVietnam had previously confronted waronly through a succession and accumulationof movie and television images. In A Rumorof War, Philip Caputo recalls the briefinggiven prior to his Marine company'sdeparture for Danang and remembers thecommanding officer saying: "I don't wantanyone going in there thinking he's going toplay John Wayne." Despite the admonition,a reader of the Vietnam narrlltives discoversreal and fictional soldiers alike enteringcombat with images of themselves as JohnWayne, Sergeant Rock, and The HighPlains Drifter. And yet, if initially theyviewed themselves as the traditionalAmerican hero, the more perceptive beganto recognize an inevitable transformation.One soldier (interviewed by Mark Baker forNAM) writes of his actions: "calmly andmethodically, but disconnected, like you'rewatching yourself do it -- Clint Eastwoodwould have been proud of me -- I moved myM-16 so that eventually the muzzle flashesfrom the graveyard lined up through mysight." The heroic albeit innocent soldierbecomes a killer -- detached, methodical,and fascinated by an image of himself.Another soldier (also interviewed by Baker)carries this fascination further: "I loved tojust sit in the ditch and watch people die. Asbad as that sounds, I just like to watch nomatter what happened, sitting back with ahomemade cup of hot chocolate. It was likea big movie." War becomes spectacle which,no matter how agonizing to others, one cansit back and enjoy. Curiously, when thesesoldiers came home, the transformation ofimages of war into war came full circle.

But Deer Hunter was a different story ....I'm in Vietnam again, I said to myself. I'mback in Vietnam. All of a sudden they are in afirefight on the screen and if I had had a gun onme I would have started shooting. Can youimagine if I had really opened up on a crowd ina theater? ... I'm serious, I came apart. I

crouched down behind the seat and crawled upthe aisle of the theater and out into the light onmy hands and knees. I didn't know that it wasa movie anymore. I was back in the war andthat was what I had to do. (Baker, NAM)

The military was aware from the start ofthis interplay between war and images ofwar in the minds of the teenagers it recruitedto fight the North Vietnamese soldiers."They told us in training," Mike Beamonrecalls in Al Santoli's Everything We Had,"that you could become a master of illusionif you believe enough in the illusion. And itworks. I couldn't believe it. Also, the powerof your eyes, not to look directly atsomething but to look off to the side of it.You wouldn't concentrate your focusbecause if you look at something too long,it'll look back at you, and you don't wantthem to turn around and see you there."

Boston Globe Photograph

Illusion and reality became furtherintermingled as the recruit penetrateddeeper into his military experience. Most ofthe young men who served in Vietnam (theiraverage age was twenty-three) had formedno strong concept of self-identity; theirconfusion of movie wars and soldiers withreal soldiering implies that much. Most ofthem had not observed firsthand the sort ofall encompassing violence they were towitness in Vietnam. The army and themarines were aware of the young recruit'sambivalence toward violence and werepartially aware of the degree to whichexposure to cinematic and fictionalpresentations of violence underlay theambivalence. In novel after novel, soldiers­turned-authors describe their basic trainingexperiences in identical terms; the characters

are the same; the racial and ethnic insults arethe same; the outcome is the same. Older,combat experienced soldiers would warntrainees or buck privates and lieutenants toavoid the John Wayne postures, yet theydeveloped a training process that compelledboys to prove their willingness to risk injuryor death in order to be considered fightingmen. Told at one moment they wouldencounter unimaginable violence, at thenext they were trained to inflict violenceprecisely as they'd imagined it. The soldiersquoted earlier reveal the training'seffectiveness in ways both anticipated andunanticipated by the military.

When finally confronted with the battle­field and its horrors, most soldiers could onlyexclaim -- and novel after novel echoes theoutburst: "Jesus Christ, this is for real!"

Listen to Ron Kovic describe men beingwounded in Born on the Fourth of July:

Men are screaming all around me. Oh Godget me out of here! 'Please help!' they scream.Oh Jesus, like little children now, not likemarines, not like the posters, not like that dayin the high school, this is for real ...

But even real horror had to be transformedas the dimmest 'grunts' grew aware of thediscontinuity between the movie andrecruiting posters and the real thing. Here isa soldier's recollection (again from Santoli'sEverything We Had) of the aftermath from anightlong firefight at Fire Base Burt:

General Westmoreland flew in. All the newsoutfits and everything. It was the mosthilarious thing. As these sons of bitches cameout there, the GI's started lying. The newsmen

Boston Globe Photograph

would walk up to just anybody and say, "Whatdid you do?" "I singlehandedly killed threehundred thousand with my Bowie knife." Andman, they'd write it up.

The horror becomes transformed into tall­tale swagger for those at home watching thenightly news images of war. But there came apoint for those who had been bloodied whenthere was no language adequate to tell thetale because there was no audience adequateto understand it. Michael Herr, in an oft­quoted passage from Dispatches, suggests towhat narrative terms fighting in Vietnamreduced itself:

But what a story he told me, as one-pointedand resonant as any war story I ever heard, ittook me a year to understand it:

"Patrol went up the mountain. One mancame back. He died before he could tell uswhat happened."

I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to bethat kind of story; when I asked him what hadhappened he looked like he felt sorry for me...

What was the lasting effect of all this? InNAM, Mark Baker quotes a veteran who(like numerous others) admits:

I miss the sound of the nights in Vietnam, withthe choppers landing and the outgoing -- notthe incoming fire. Although, even theincoming was exciting. The sounds areparticularly vivid. The force after a large gunfires or a round lands, the feel of the gas from iton your face. Thinking about Vietnam once ina while, in a crazy kind of way, I just wish foran hour I could be there. And then be

The A merican soldierswho landed in Vietnam

had previouslyconfronted waronly through asuccession and

accumulation of movieand television

images

transported back. Maybe just to be there so I'dwish I was back here again.

On the plane home after his year in Vietnam,Tim O'Brien (in If I Die in a Combat Zone)comments: "The stewardess serves a mealand passes out magazines. The plane landsin Japan and takes on fuel. Then you flystraight on to Seattle. What kind of a war isit that begins and ends that way, with apretty girl, cushioned seats, and magazines?"

The answer I am suggesting is thatAmerican soldiers went to Vietnam to fightthe sort of war they had already conceived intheir minds.

I keep thinking (Herr writes in Dispatches)about all the kids who get wiped out byseventeen years of war movies before comingto Vietnam to get wiped out for good. Youdon't know what a media freak is until you'veseen the way a few of those grunts would runaround during a fight when they knew thatthere was a television crew nearby; they wereactually making war movies in their heads,doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tapdances under fire, getting their pimples shotoff for the networks. They were insane, but thewar hadn't done'that to them.

If one can claim that this is so of theteenage "grupts" who did the fighting, onecan also say it is so of the generals whoconducted the fighting. While GeneralWestmoreland's strategy for winning thewar was undoubtedly shaped by diplomaticand political concerns, it also was shaped byan Americanized conception of the enemy."During the invasion of Cambodia in 1970,"Frances Fitzgerald notes in Fire in the Lake,"American officials spoke of plans tocapture the enemy's command headquartersfor the south as if there existed a reversePentagon in the jungle complete withMarine guards, generals, and green baizetables." Stanley Karnow's recent history ofthe Vietnam War reports that early in thewar General Westmoreland and his staffundertook to discover and capture this

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jungle command center which they viewedas a network of tunnels and bunkers deep inthe Vietnamese moun'tains. This strategy,based on a conception of the enemy as areflected image of oneself, had disastrousresults, though General Westmoreland con­tinued to insist that with a few more men, abit more material and somewhat more time,he would be able to see "the light at the endof the tunnel."

To be sure, the troops found tunnels andbunkers, occasionally extensive complexes,which discoveries validated the command'scertainty that an even more extensivenetwork .must exist. Every narrative includesat least one account of finding anddestroying tunnel complexes. Individualsoldiers speak of their fear, even terror, athaving to search tunnels for weapons andsupplies. Too frequently the tunnels arebooby-trapped or occupied by Viet Congprepared to kill a few Americans before theyin turn are killed. Frequently enough, thetunnels are hiding places for village womenand children whom the terrified soldiersshoot. Consequently the tunnels come topossess for the soldiers a double horror ofthe tomb and the slaughterhouse, of butcherand butchered. Many of the novels employthe tunnels solely for suspense and horror.The cumulative effect of these novels findsthe tunnels holding an ambivalent positionin the soldier's mind. They become placeswhere he might become either the victim orthe perpetrator of an atrocity. Crawling intothe tunnels and bunkers, the soldier wascompelled to confront the terror andviolence Vietnam had imposed on his life.

Two of the best Vietnam novels use thetunnels as central motif. John DelVecchio'sThe Thirteenth Valley and Tim O'Brien'sGoing After Cacciato both accept themilitary's premise that the tunnels andbunkers represented an important strategicobjective. Both novels carry the premise toits l(xtreme conclusion, DelVecchio throughapparent realism. O'Brien through fan­tasy. DelVecchio's troopers are required tooperate in a harsh jungle terrain ofridges and valleys searching for an NV Acommand center. The novel provides thereader with detailed maps and frequentofficial situation reports which, much likeMelville's Moby Dick chapters on whaling,provide a realistic foundation for anincreasingly symbolic action. As they movefrom valley to valley, the soldiers discovertunnels and bunkers, some well-lit andequipped, others leading deep into unknownregions. Though none are occupied, theyprovide concrete evidence of the enemy'scomfortable underground existence. Thisjungle comfort contrasts with the miserableheat, humidity, insects and vegetation theAmerican soldiers must endure. Moreover,

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.. ,.... ~

.. ' ,(.

Boston Globe Photograph

the tunnels appear to have purpose anddirection which will become apparent to theAmericans if only they can unearth thecommand headquarters. The Americans seeevidence of a society, but they are blind to itsstructure; they see tunnels and bunkerswithout perceiving their place in the overallscheme. The soldiers become increasinglyaware of their own torment and of the factthat their survival depends on whim. InDelVecchio's novel, Lieutenant Brookcomposes notes for an academic monographon the inter-relatedness of military andpersonal conflict while the action aroundhim forces questions about the inter­relatedness of anything. The soldiers finallyforce their way into the 13th valley wheresuddenly the enemy emerges in strength,organized and determined, appearing as it

were out of the ground. The Americans ardefeated; the principal characters shot downperforming individual, though futile, acts 0

heroism.

O'Brien carries the idea of the tunnelsfurther. His Going After Cacciatodeliberately fashions the tunnel motif incinematic terms familiar to most readers.Cacciato goes AWOL and a platoon, whichincludes the novel's narrator Paul Berlin, isordered to find him and bring him back.Cacciato has headed out of Vietnam in adirection whose terminus is ultimately Paris.His pursuers eventually discover and enter"a tunnel complex lighted by torches everyfifty meters, an interlocking series ofpassageways" which "curved, widened, andemptied into a large lighted chamber." In thechamber they find ...

Men who traveled to Vietnam tojightpoliticalinsurgency have come to live in a societythat treats them as potential insurgents.

along the far wall, his back to them, sat a smallman, dressed in a green uniform and sandals, apith hat on his head. He was peering into agiant chrome telescope mounted on a consoleequipped with meters and dials and blinkinglights.

O'Brien skillfully plays this underground Oz(and its wizard) off against the surfacelandscape. The small man, Li Van Hgoc(Leeuwenhoek, inventor of themicroscope?), tells the Americans that theunderground "was a literal summary of theland, and of mysteries contained in it; astatement of greater truth could not bemade" and adds some pages later" 'So yousee,' said Li Van Hgoc as he brought downthe periscope and locked it with a silver key,'things may be viewed from many angles.From down below, or from inside out, youoften discover entirely new understandings.'" Finally, when asked by the Lieutenantheading the search party "Which way out?"Li Van Hgoc answers: "'Don't you see that'sthe whole point? No way out. That is thepuzzle. We are prisoners, all of us. POW's'."

The novel continues, pursuer and pursued,hunters and hunted, joined in a combatneither can escape. They follow a path thatmoves back and forth between the real andthe imagined until the narrative enters alandscape of complete ambiguity wherenothing is certain. "What about Cacciato?"Paul Berlin asks of the Lieutenant near thenovel's end.

"We had him," Stark said,"Did we?"

"Sure, we had him good.""Who knows?" The lieutenant was smiling

broadly now. He looked happy. "Maybe so,maybe not."

The novel ends a page later with theLieutenant repeating "Yes.... Maybe so."

In a way the veterans came home to evengreater ambiguity and discontinuity thanthey had experienced in Vietnam. Per­haps it is more accurate to say that theam biguity of their war experiencetransferred itself to their experience back inthe World. Americans greeted the returningsoldiers in terms that reflected the imagesthey had formed of them from magazine andtelevision reporting. "How many babies didyou murder?" How many women did yourape?" were questions that confrontedsoldiers Who made the mistake of travellingin uniform. In NAM, Mark Baker reports

one soldier's story of going into the airportlounge for a drink:

"Home on leave, are you," the guy says tome.

" ope, just got discharged.""You just got back from where," one of the

kids says."Vietnam.""How do you feel about killing all those

innocent people?" the women asks me out ofnowhere.I didn't know what to say. The bartender got alittle uptight. But I didn't say anything. Theytold me when I got discharged that I was goingto get this shit. But, I didn't believe them.

"Excuse me," I called the bartender over.

"Could I buy them all a drink?" I felt guilty.I did kill. I tried to make amends somehow.

"We don't accept any drinks from killers," thegirl says to me...

Veterans provided evidence that real menwere committing the violence shown on TV.The American public treated the veteranmuch as the soldiers had treated theVietnamese. They were invisible. WhatFrances Fitzgerald wrote about theAmericans in Vietnam could as easily beapplied to the veteran back in America:

The effort of trying to hold reality and theofficial version of reality finally took its toll onthe Americans in Vietnam. When added to theother strains of the war, it produced an almostintolerable tension that expressed itself not ina criticism of American policy so much as in afierce resentment against the Vietnamese. Thelogic of that answer was a simple one,combined of guilt and illusions destroyed.

One has only to substitute the Americanpublic for the military and the veteran forthe Vietnamese to see that a perilouslysimilar condition' existed and has continuedto exist in the United States regarding theveteran. Men who traveled.to Vietnam tofight political insurgency have come to livein a society that treats them as potentialinsurgents.

Today, we have at least agreed to see theveteran, though our politicians insist onimagining him in irrelevent terms. JohnKerry was quoted last May in Newsweek assaying:"People have confused the war withthe warriors. I'm proud of having been awarrior. As a whole, this country should notbe proud of what we did as a nation. Wehave never adequately distinguishedbetween the two." Very few veterans, in their

fictional or personal narratives, finally viewthemselves as warriors, nor do they separatethemselves from the war they fought, sincefor so many the war came home inside theirheads. Yet, in a way, Kerry is sadly right, forthe recently unveiled Vietnam Memorial isconstructed of polished black graniteengraved with only the names of those menwho, year by year, died. Names are cut loosefrom deeds and the only image the viewerhas is of his blurred reflection in the polishedstone.

It was said during the war that theAmerican military possessed Vietnam byday, but the Viet Cong repossessed it atnight. "I know a guy," Michael Herr writes,"who had been a combat medic in theCentral Highlands, and two years later hewas still sleeping with the lights on. We werewalking across 57th Street one afternoonand passed a blind man carrying a sign thatread, MY DAYS ARE DARKER THANYOUR N1GHTS. 'Don't bet on it, man,'theex-medic said.

The Viet Cong now live for us only inimages on which Vietnam novelists aretrying to concentrate their focus. Theirnarratives tell us that ownership of-the nightis still very much in doubt.

Charles Angell has taught in Bridge­water's English Department since 1969. Heearned a doctorate in English Literaturefrom the University of Massachusetts. Hisinterest in Vietnamjiction developedfrom aconcern about the war's place in currentthought. Angell has never served in themilitary.

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