Between the Lines of Fire: The Vietnam War in Literature for Young Readers

Although the war in Vietnam has been over for several years now, it lives on in its own particular historical and cultural infamy. Yet to look at the fiction written for young people on the subject, one would hardly guess that the works have been inspired by a conflict that divided the country for years and helped to propel the rebelliousness of the 1960's. The Vietnam War was a peculiar phenomenon —undeclared, unpopular, and unique among this country's experiences. But rather than finding a collection of provocative novels outlining the singularity of the war and the issues and emotions that it aroused, we find, for the most part, more of the same old bloody battle stories.

The philosophy among the teenage book marketers about Vietnam appears to be: forget about it. Virtually nothing has been published since the war ended, so perspective is out of the question. This is both disburbing and surprising. It is possible that the industry is subscribing to the adage "if you can't say something nice, say nothing," since it is unlikely that many pro-Vietnam War books would come from retrospection. If any vehement anti-war treatises were written for youngsters during the war years, they too have been weeded out of circulation. Librarians and book store-keepers seem taken aback by requests for literature on Vietnam today. And judging from the lack of selection available, books of that type were never particularly in demand or in vogue to begin with.

Fictional treatments of the Vietnamese conflict might be seen as falling into two categories. The first treats the war as a social phenomenon and deals with it in the context of the debate at home and the effect of such debate on the politics and culture of the sixties. But after much searching, I was able to find only one novel for adolescents, Nat Hentoff's I'm Really Dragged But Nothing Gets Me Down, that falls into the first category. This is odd, considering the fact that much of the substance of the conflict took place off the battlefield, and right here "at home"—the demonstrations, the draft controversies, Cronkite et al. and the living room brigade. There is much to be said about the war as it affected this country; there are many potentially powerful stories from all sides of the affair. But the fictional treatments were not there to stir the teenagers living through it, nor are they around to remind today's young people of what they missed by being born a decade later. More abundant are books about the war in which Vietnam is the actual setting. Of the four books reviewed, three are of this type. Unfortunately, most of them have very little to do with Vietnam in particular. Because the setting is out of the ordinary, the authors apparently feel that that in itself is enough to make their works interesting. They are, however, uninsightful and unoriginal. Simply change "gook" to the ethnic slur of your choice, and almost any of the books could be about any other war.

The Last Bridge by Brian Garfield typifies this. More of a "war story" than a "Vietnam story," it comments on Vietnam only in the most general sense. It is an adventure novel with lots of slinking through the jungles. The story follows a "kamikaze" mission and though it briefly analyzes the motives of the characters involved, the thrust is suspense and not psychology or analysis.

Garfield is definitely sympathetic to the crew-cut set. Unfortunately, his prose is not so closely cropped, and it gets in the way of the story. In an attempt to give the work a particularly "intense" tone, he has gone way overboard. Describing a man eating peanuts as chewing "with bovine deliberation"¹ carries metaphor too far. These spurts of "poetry" intrude themselves upon the work frequently: "Tyreen examined the girl like a man studying the entrails of an oracular goat" (p. 141). Garfield's own form of turture, perhaps? He becomes so caught in the word play that potentially interesting...