Reading the Wind: The Literature of the Vietnam War

by Timothy J. Lomperis, John Clark Pratt (Contribution by)

Overview

The decade following the American defeat in Vietnam has been filled with doubts about American politics and values, confusion over the lessons of the war, and anger about the physical and psychological suffering that occurred during the war as well as thereafter. In the years since the U.S. withdrawal, our need to make sense of Vietnam has prompted an outpouring of thinking and writing, from scholarly reappraisals of American foreign policy to highly personal accounts of participants. On the tenth anniversary of the final U. S. withdrawal, the Asia Society sponsored a conference on the Vietnam experience in American literature at which leading writers, critics, publishers, commentators, and academics wrestled with this phenomenon. Drawing on the synergy of this conference, Timothy J. Lomperis has produced an original work that focuses on the growing body of literature—including novels, personal accounts, and oral histories—which describes the experiences of American soldiers in Vietnam as well as the experience of veterans upon their return home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822382966
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/29/1986
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	187
File size:	413 KB

Read an Excerpt

"Reading the Wind"

The Literature of the Vietnam War

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By Timothy J. Lomperis

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1987 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-0749-5

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CHAPTER 1

The Keynote: "Artistic Resolution, Societal Resolution"

An issue that quickly came to the forefront at the conference was the separability of art and politics. During the war itself—in America and in Asia—nothing seemed separable from Vietnam. The war penetrated all. One man caught up in this "preoccupation" was the keynote speaker, James Webb. Like some others at the conference, Mr. Webb experienced heavy combat, in his case as a Marine captain in "I Corps," for which he was awarded a Navy Cross, a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts. Since the war he has found himself gripped by the tensions of translating his wartime experiences into the two contradictory worlds he now inhabits: the academy of the artist who writes novels and the orbit of the government official who makes policy. As an artist, Mr. Webb wrote the widely acclaimed Fields of Fire (1978), as well as A Sense of Honor (1981), a novel about a West Point cheating scandal. As a bureaucrat, he has, in his own words, served "three tours in government," currently as President Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense, Reserve Affairs. In his speech, quoted here in its entirety, the secretary underscored the tensions involved in interpreting the war from the conflicting perspectives of art and politics.

James Webb: I am not sure The Asia Society really comprehends what it has in this room: the tremendous brainpower, the diversity in experience and of opinions. I expect this to be a very lively few days.

It is a testament to the sensitivity over the divisions we still have on Vietnam that I have been asked to give a nonpolitical speech. This is almost an impossibility when one considers Vietnam and the mandate of the conference itself, but I'm going to try. I can't help but recall a conversation I had with one Mr. Hoan who runs the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok. I was in Bangkok three years ago trying to get into Vietnam to do a magazine story. I told Mr. Hoan I wanted to do a nonpolitical piece on the area where I had served. His answer in denying me my visa was that, "All events in life are political." I am also mindful of Plato's observation that "Art is politics." Given such agreement among members of one of the first free societies and one of the most recent closed systems, I can only demur, and promise you, in any event, I will try not to refight the Vietnam War.

The objective of this conference, according to the materials sent to me, is to explore some of the ways that literature has impacted on American perceptions of the Vietnam War, and to assess the longer-term impact on American perceptions of Asia as a whole, as well as the implication, and I think this is most important, for our country's future relations with Asia. The overriding desire of the conference, according to The Asia Society, is to sponsor a creative, forward-looking assessment of the long-term impact of this literature on our Asian relations. I congratulate The Asia Society for this creative approach to the pursuit of policy questions through the perspective of literature.

I've had an unusual career pattern for one whose principal occupation is that of a novelist in that I've spent three different tours in government. Government is, in many ways, directly opposed to art. In government it is necessary to boil down ambiguities, to make them "votable." It is essential that one make a concrete decision and take a tangible stand. If a government official believes that an issue is 51 percent correct, he must pull the lever or talk to the reporter, and justify his position. He is then on record. As the game is played, in many cases he must end up hardening his feelings about the other 49 percent that fell away when he made his decision.

This is a necessary way to run a government, but it is not the way to address problems rooted in the complexities of pain, lament, and tragedy. I learned quickly when I became the first Vietnam veteran to serve as counsel on the House Veterans Committee that we were not going to legislate away the problems of the veterans who served in the Vietnam War. The problems were too deep, too complex, and too filled with ambiguity—just as were the problems of our country as a whole when we were attempting to pick the scabs and examine the wounds from our decade of civil war known as the "Vietnam Era." It was for this reason that I wrote in the Washington Post in 1979, after covering the premiere of Apocalypse Now:

Only the arts will provide resolution to our national angst over Vietnam. Only a good book or painting or play or movie can conjure the emotions and ambiguities of an experience, and through such exorcism affect attitudes that shape consciousness. We're seeing a good deal of art with respect to Vietnam, but very little of it has allowed us such emotional growth.

Essence is a chemistry, a texture provided by sympathetically, or at least accurately, drawn characters in a state of mental conflict reaching for artistic resolution. If artistic resolution is reached, it can be allegorized into societal resolution. If it is false, the art form fails, along with the allegory.

So the good news is that through literature we can explore ambiguities and work toward synthesizing an enormously complex and painful experience. The bad news, at least from my perspective, is that our literature at this point gives us precious little grist for that particular mill. If anything, current American literature regarding the Vietnam era is too self-absorbed. It demonstrates how woefully little we understood the regional and global implications of our endeavor. American society is too often narcissistic and riddled with vicious domestic debate. At the same time, during the war it was romantic about the Vietnamese communists and completely ignorant, for the most part, about the implications of a North Vietnamese victory. In short, our writers, particularly those engaged in nonfiction, in many cases failed to prepare our society for the horrible results that followed the fall of Saigon. Nor have they yet given context for the changes in the region that followed the North Vietnamese victory.

I do not say this with malice, but rather to state my reservations at the outset of this conference regarding the effectiveness of our literature to date in meeting the mandate of this conference. We have a number of very good combat narratives which testify in many cases to a policy gone awry, to the difficulty of fighting an enemy in populated areas, and to the lack of understanding generated by our nineteen-year-old warriors toward an Asian culture. A discussion of these narratives and of their themes will be helpful, and I expect may even mitigate many of the negative perceptions that still exist.

In a conference dedicated to the future in Asia—and I must say that the future of America is very much in Asia: our balance of trade shows this as does the productivity in those countries that have been able to remain free—I would ask participants to consider the situation in Southeast Asia today, and compare it against the contents of the many major award-winning works published during and immediately after the war.

First, as we all know, the pure flame of the revolution did not burn after 1975 in Vietnam. South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were conquered. Two million Cambodians are dead. No South Vietnamese were brought into high positions in the new government. At least one million Vietnamese have fled. Sixty-five thousand South Vietnamese soldiers, mostly officers, the leadership of the South Vietnamese army, are estimated to have died in reeducation camps. Vietnam now has the fourth largest army in the world with one million men under arms. Fifty thousand Vietnamese soldiers occupy Laos. One hundred sixty thousand occupy Cambodia.

Just as importantly, the Russians for the first time in their history have warm water ports in the Pacific. The Soviet Pacific fleet is twice as large as our own Pacific fleet, numbering more than 450 vessels. These vessels are new and very capable ships, many geared for offensive operations, including helicopter carriers and amphibious landing craft. On any given day, twenty-two Soviet ships operate out of Cam Ranh Bay, as do Badger and Backfire bombers, Bear reconnaissance aircraft, and MIG-23 fighters. This is not a political observation; it is a factual one.

Additionally, we have seen our war veterans depicted repeatedly as aberrants—as men without values dragged into the war zone against their will, later as losers, finally as victims—while the facts have too often demonstrated otherwise. Every unit had its problem children, its "Phonies" if I may extract from Fields of Fire. But too often our literature has made them the norm. Statistics show that:

• two-thirds of our Vietnam era veterans were volunteers,

• three-fourths of the combat dead were, in fact, volunteers,

• 91 percent were glad they served their country, and 74 percent enjoyed their time in the military.

They also indicate that a Vietnam veteran is:

• less likely to be in jail than his nonveteran counterpart,

• no more likely to use drugs,

• more likely to have gone to college,

• more likely to be married, and

• more likely to own a home.

Furthermore, according to a recent Washington Post–ABC News survey, Vietnam veterans felt they benefited from their service in Vietnam by a margin of two-to-one, 88 percent supported the bombing of North Vietnam, two-thirds support the use of napalm, and a two-to-one plurality agreed with Westmoreland's handling of the war.

Too often a character embodying these qualities in our literature —volunteer, the usual aspirations, supportive of the basic policy if not of the craziness that is apparent in all wars—is the foil, the fall guy, the one who "does not understand."

I do not wish to criticize any work merely because it disagreed with government policy. Nor do I wish to imply that our writers should have been prophets as well as commentators. Although I personally agree with the validity of our effort in Vietnam, I also believe it was our flawed government policy that made the war unwinnable, and therein pierced us through our national soul. Moreover, we are the most self-critical society on earth, and this is our greatest strength. We are multicultural; we have varying moral references on any important issue; we are incurably idealistic; and most importantly, we have the luxury, through our system of government, to engage in what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once termed, "the open air of free debate."

But the sad reality is that the debate, even given the improvement in publishing over the past two years or so, has neither been full, nor, to be honest, completely fair about what we were attempting to do in Vietnam. There are a number of reasons for this. One is the overall volatility of the Vietnam era in areas larger than the war. Another is the nature of what we might call the artistic soul. A third is the chemistry of the arts and journalistic community as it relates to our government.

With respect to the first, if we are to draw conclusions about the impact of the war on Asia and on its future, our friends in Asia deserve an effort on our part to separate out the dynamics of the many domestic issues that dovetailed into the Vietnam protest years. As we all well remember, the '60s and the '70s in this country were volatile in more areas than merely Vietnam, and a good deal of the turmoil attributed to the war actually carried spillover from these other areas. We should not forget, for instance, that the Civil Rights Act and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution were both signed in the summer of 1964, and that the war's peak during Tet '68 and the bitter rioting following Martin Luther King's assassination were only about two months apart. In fact, the Students for a Democratic Society was formed before there even was a Vietnam War, with the notion that race, not war, would provide the basis for revolution in this country. The implications of this thinking were clear in many leaders of the antiwar movement. Jerry Rubin did not say he was going to end the war when he led the march on the Pentagon in October 1967. He said, "We are now in the business of wholesale and widespread resistance, and the dislocation of American society." As another example, there was a direct nexus between the collapse of the Nixon administration from Watergate and the sudden collapse of the South Vietnamese nation. Where appropriate, such issues need to be removed from our analysis. Where relevant, and when they indicate a sea change in American political views, they should be included.

Second, consider the artist himself. He or she is dedicated to analyzing the human condition. He reacts to pain and tragedy. He seeks what we call the truth, which normally transcends politics and yet is riddled with ambiguities. It is the glory of art that it does not have to boil down these ambiguities, that it can leave the 51 percent as it stands, and not be required to justify the lack of consensus. On occasion, art has profound political impact as, for instance, Arthur Koestler's masterpiece, Darkness at Noon. But more often than not, the artist sets himself against the agents of suffering and on the side of those who are now its victims. This sometimes takes on a romantic view that does not consider long-term impacts, and even greater potential suffering.

Finally, take into account the writer's community. Perhaps the most precious freedom in our society is the right to question government authority. Our intellectual community is by its very nature the adversary of government. Eisenhower warned of the "Military-Industrial Complex," but did not consider that its counter was, for lack of a better term, the "Academic-Intellectual Complex."

In media and publishing circles, supporting government policy of almost any sort in this country becomes akin to selling out. Such a writer is quite often viewed by his peers and by critics to be either stupid or a pawn. Awards are lavished on those who discover new ways to question or attack government policy, to tell us where our government is failing us. In many cases, this is why we are so politically dynamic. This is good. In others, however, it amounts to false bravado, and a wrongheaded intimidation of those who believe government policy has been misunderstood. The end result is that we need more openness, and a more varied literature. Sometimes it takes more courage to confront the hostility of one's peers than it does to attack that amorphous dragon called government policy. The arts will provide us our much needed societal resolution only if the forum is open so that the debate is real.

Vietnam was many things. It varied year by year, place by place, unit by unit. No one reporting it or remembering it is without predisposition. We as artists are like blind men stroking the elephant, calling out our impressions to our readers so that they can compile them and come up with a larger picture. But it would do no good to deny one man the right, for instance, to report that the elephant had tusks. If one position is filtered, or diluted, or denied legitimacy before it reaches the public, then not only is the debate false but the damage is greater than if the debate had not occurred at all, since we will have provided a false illusion that the debate did take place.

As you discuss the body of works that are available for analysis, compare it against the facts that have been slowly emerging over the last decade. And ask yourselves about the literature that is still waiting in the wings for its proper recognition. The present literature is in many cases memorable. But consider whether it fully represents the dynamics of this complex and painful experience.

Our future is indeed in Asia. It does us no good to distort the past, or to block the realities of the present, as we reach for greater harmony in that vital region.

Discussion

It can be safely said that following Mr. Webb's address people did not simply push back their chairs, chew betel nut, and languidly prepare their stomachs for rest. Mr. Webb, instead, was quickly beset by "fields of fire" that triggered an energetic discussion encapsulating and setting the stage for all the themes that were pursued subsequently in the conference: politics, facts and statistics, who was hurt more by the vagaries of publishing, the forgotten Asians, and the role of the literature.

It was Jim Webb's politics that drew first fire. Accompanied by applause, Bill Ehrhart opened up with, "I am sorry your speech was so political. What I saw and did in Asia in thirteen months was unspeakably evil and immoral. What is happening there now does not change that. And what the Vietnamese are doing now; well, they are not doing it in my name or with my tax dollar. They are not asking me to pull the trigger."

Pursuing this theme of the war as evil, Bob Butler contended, "The writers in this room are prophets in that they see things that the majority of the people do not. What these writers have seen [in Vietnam] is the true evil." The evil, however, may spread beyond the United States. Bill Broyles, a moderator for one of the panels, made a recent return journey to Vietnam. Writing in the April 1985 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, he related a discussion with a group of European diplomats in Hanoi quibbling over the foibles of the new socialist regime. One of them suddenly turned to Broyles, "All this is just bureaucracy. What matters is that they are evil, truly evil."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from "Reading the Wind" by Timothy J. Lomperis. Copyright © 1987 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Interpretative Critique: “Reading the Wind” Lomperis Timothy J.
Introduction: The Shoals of Yin and Yang
1 The Keynote: “Artistic Resolution, Societal Resolution”
2 The High Tide of Passion: The Impact of the Literature
Essay: The Crybaby Veterans
3 Down the Slippery Slope: Tensions Between Fact and Fiction
Essay: What Are Facts?
4 The Great Lost Fact: The Asians
Essay: Reading the Asian Wind
5 Truth—Whither Goest Thou? The Role of the Literature in Understanding the War
Essay: The Iliad and the Kieu: Building Understanding
Conclusion: America’s Future in Asia (and at Home)
Bibliographic Commentary: “From the Fiction, Some Truths” Pratt John Clark
Author/Title List for the Bibliographic Commentary
Bibliography of the Interpretative Critique
List of Named Participants
Conference Program
Index