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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. This limited exploration of memoirist demographics, however, still goes beyond what historians have written about the topic. In keeping with their tendency to only see veteran narratives as unequivocal sources of information, historians have placed little importance on the backgrounds of authors who provided such information.

      This chapter takes a different approach by analyzing the available demographic data of fifty-one authors of the fifty-eight memoirs that serve as the basis of this book. The authors’ background information, gleaned from the memoirs and other sources, has been organized into eleven categories: year born, race, premilitary education level, method of induction into the armed forces, highest rank achieved while in Vietnam, method of acquiring officer commission, military branch, age upon arrival in Vietnam, number of years served in Vietnam, military occupational specialty (MOS), and total number of years served in the military. In addition to the data organized under these headings, other less quantifiable pieces of information, such as reasons for joining the military and social-class level, are also factored into the analysis.

      Examination of the compiled data indicates that the authors fall into three distinct rank-based groups. The first group consists of ten individuals who served in Vietnam as high-ranking officers: nine “field-grade” or “general-grade” commissioned officers, and one senior enlisted noncommissioned officer, or “NCO.” These men were white career soldiers who joined the military well before the start of the war, went to Vietnam at the average age of thirty-eight, and served in the military for many years, sometimes decades, after the war. The second group consists of fifteen memoirists who were low-ranking enlisted men and junior NCOs in Vietnam. These authors’ backgrounds, in many ways, represent those of ordinary combat soldiers: only one had a college degree, they served in Vietnam at the average age of twenty, and none spent more than a few years in the military. Although nonwhites are underrepresented among memoirists no matter how they are divided up, four of six nonwhite authors fell into this second cohort.

      The third and largest group is composed of twenty-six veterans who went to war as low-ranking “junior” commissioned officers. These lieutenants and captains were only slightly older than the enlisted men they oversaw in Vietnam, but most other aspects of their backgrounds set them apart from enlisted grunts. Over half the authors in this group earned college degrees before entering the military, most appear to be from middle-class households, and all but two were white. Though not as career-minded as the senior officers in group one, nearly half of the authors who served as junior officers in Vietnam pursued military careers after their combat tours ended.

      Splitting up the memoirists into these groups does nothing to mitigate their overall dissimilarity to regular combat troops. In fact, it demonstrates that only fifteen of the fifty-one authors had backgrounds that closely resembled those of the soldiers who did most of the fighting and dying in Vietnam. Taking this approach, however, indicates that a majority of the veteran-authors were similar to average combat soldiers with regard to one crucial category: type of Vietnam experience. Most senior US officers, like the ten authors in group one, were personally and geographically distant from enlisted men in Vietnam. While American infantrymen searched for the Vietcong in the countryside, the generals and colonels who had ordered such patrols usually stayed out of harm’s way. Junior officers, on the other hand, as Ron Milam has shown, worked, fought, and sometimes died alongside the enlisted men under their command.¹⁹ This means that most of the fifty-eight memoirs were written by former low-ranking enlisted personnel and junior officers who, whatever their social or educational backgrounds, experienced the grunts’ war.

      The possible effects of the memoirists’ demographics on how they portray the war are, therefore, both positive and negative. Readers may be misled about what types of Americans actually fought in Vietnam because authors normally have dissimilar backgrounds from average combat soldiers. Memoirists sporadically mention that large numbers of people unlike themselves, poor whites and minorities, fought in Vietnam. But most do not. Consequently, the common story of the poor teenager from the inner-city ghetto or Appalachia who was drafted and became a foot soldier because he could not afford college is rare in these accounts. On the positive side, most of these books were written by combat veterans who were ex-enlisted men or, more likely, authors who fought alongside such men as low-ranking officers.

      . . .

      The government and military leaders who planned and managed America’s long conflict in Vietnam were men in or around middle age, most of them members of the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II. In contrast, the great majority of American soldiers who fought in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s belonged to the generation born after World War II, the Baby Boom Generation.²⁰ The birth year statistics for the memoirists as a group do not reflect this reality. The average birth year for the authors is 1941, and well over half were born before 1945, the final year of World War II. These unrepresentative results mostly reflect the presence of the former senior officers among the fifty-one authors. The average birth year for the senior officers in group one was 1927, with most of their birth dates falling in the 1920s and 30s.²¹ Whereas most soldiers who served in Vietnam were born after the United States defeated Germany and Japan, all the former senior officers were alive during that conflict, and three actually fought in it. The average birth year for the enlisted men in group two was 1946, and only three were born before 1945, which corresponds to their status as generally average combat veterans. Although only eight of the twenty-six junior officers were true Baby Boomers, most, with an average birth year of 1944, were only slightly older than typical enlisted GIs.

      More important than when a veteran was born is at what age he or she served in Vietnam. The average age for an American soldier in this “teenage war” was nineteen, which is young compared to their Second World War predecessors, who marched off to battle at a median age of twenty-six.²² Almost 44 percent of all US servicemen killed in Southeast Asia were less than twenty-one years old when they died.²³ The average age of veteran-authors during their Vietnam tours, however, was twenty-seven. This outcome was, again, partly the result of the presence of the former senior officers in group one, who served in Vietnam at an average age of thirty-eight.

      In contrast to the senior officers, the fifteen ex-enlisted men in group two were sent to Vietnam at around twenty years of age, the former junior officers at twenty-four. This means that the great majority of memoirs were written by two groups of writers who СКАЧАТЬ