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

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СКАЧАТЬ a civilian outlook on life.⁸³ The career soldier chooses instead to become, as Samuel P. Huntington puts it, a specialist in “the management of violence.”⁸⁴ In many ways, military men and women are like professionals in other fields, but their focus on warfare sets them apart from the civilian world. Military personnel follow particular codes of honor and traditions, usually live and work only with other soldiers, and often see their career as a “calling” or a “special mission.”⁸⁵

      Someone who enlisted in the armed forces during the Vietnam era generally signed up for a two- to four-year commitment; draftees had to serve at least two years. Most enlisted men did not choose to stay in the military beyond their first enlistment, which is no surprise since the ranks were filled with draftees and draft-motivated volunteers at that time.⁸⁶ Officers were nearly as unwilling to pursue military careers as enlisted men. From 1966 to 1970, the number of army OCS officers who stayed on beyond their initial years of obligated service fell from 56 to 22 percent. In 1970, only 11 percent of ROTC officers signed up for additional years. At the beginning of the war, almost 100 percent of West Point graduates remained in the army after fulfilling their mandatory term of service. This figure dropped to 72 percent by war’s end.⁸⁷

      As usual, the fifteen enlisted memoirists resemble ordinary GIs, for none of them served any longer than four years in the military. The former senior officers joined the armed forces well before the war started and, in most cases, continued their military careers after coming home from Southeast Asia. Eleven (43 percent) of the junior officer memoirists stayed in the military after completing their combat tours. Taken as a whole, then, the authors consist of thirty veterans who were short-term soldiers and twenty-one who were career officers. This proportion of career soldiers is high since most GIs returned to civilian life shortly after finishing their Vietnam tours. Half of the veterans, nevertheless, no matter how long their military careers lasted, were low-ranking officers in Vietnam and shared the hardships of the enlisted men they commanded.

      . . .

      A publishing company executive quoted in a Washington Post review of Kane’s 1990 memoir, Veteran’s Day, asserted that the book was important because it “filled a void that was societal as much as literary”:

      It’s a curious thing that many of 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.”

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ