It's Our Military Too: Women and the U.S Military

11. Telling the War Story

Susan Jeffords " Telling the War Story I listened once to Tim O'Brien, author of several prizewinning novels about the Vietnam War and himself a veteran of that war, as he sat and told stories to an audience of West Point cadets. After riveting their attention with tales of his first night "in country," of his base being mortared, of his sergeant, and of his friends being killed, he turned casually to his audience and said, "You know, of course, that none of what I've been telling you is true. These are all war stories." War stories are some of the oldest recorded narratives in many cultures, from the Greek Iliad to the Vietnamese Tale of Kieu. War stories have been a fundamental part of American culture, too, whether in Mary Rowlandson's account of her captivity by Indians in the King Phillip Wars of 1676-77, Stephen Crane's classic tale of the Civil War in The Red Badge of Courage, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls about World War I, or the numerous Hollywood films about World War II for which John Wayne became the quintessential star. But it is the Vietnam War that stands in most people's mind today as the war that showed, more than any other, that understandings of war are not rooted in indisputable historical facts but are instead a collage, a collection of experiences, emotions, understandings, misunderstandings, and memories . In other words, war stories are a collection of stories people tell about wars. What the Vietnam War showed as well was that many different people told war stories, and that who told them and who they told them to mattered . The publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times in 1971, for example, showed how the government's public story about the war was Copyrighted Material Telling the War Story 221 far different from that revealed in internal discussions and documents. Conflict erupted between citizens who accepted the government's interpretation of "what the Vietnamese wanted" and citizens who had acquired a different understanding. And, of course, whatever American stories were told, they were sure to be different from the war stories being told by the Vietnamese (both North and South). For several decades, the Vietnam War has continued to be the subject of diverse interpretations of what the war was about, of how it was fought, of who "won" the war, of what exactly the war accomplished, of what the American public thinks about those who fought in it (or, more recently, as shown in the 1992 presidential campaigns, what it thinks about those who did not fight), and of what long-term effects it had on the United States. Anyone who has ever visited the Vietnam War Memorial-itself the most controversial memorialization of a war in American history-and who has seen the numerous and various offerings made by observers at the wall knows just how diverse U.S. citizens' relationships to that war continue to be. From war medals to POW bracelets to cans of beer to burned American flags to wedding rings to running shoes: the things people leave at the wall give testimony to just how many and how very different kinds of stories there are to tell about the soldiers whose names are inscribed there. In this essay I look at the way the Vietnam War was interpreted in popular culture and then draw some conclusions about the importance of understanding how and why war stories are told. The Early Vietnam War Stories Anumber of stories about Vietnam appeared in the 1950s and set the stage for many Americans' thinking about Vietnam. Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1956) is an allegorical tale about French, British, and American intervention in Vietnamese government affairs. The story is played out through three men's relationships to a Vietnamese woman. The book is devastatingly prophetic about the failure of American idealism about democracy in the face of different historical and cultural forces. When made into a Hollywood film a few years later, however, the story of "innocence failed" became one that celebrated American innocence and described it as a plausible way to understand Southeast Asia. At about the same time, theater and film audiences were being treated to one of the decade's biggest draws, South Copyrighted Material .145.111.183] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 17:31 GMT) 222 SU5QIl Jeffords Pacific. a story about a young American military woman who falls...