“One More Redskin Bites the Dirt”: Racial Melancholy in Vietnam War Representation

Imagining Unity

In 'Platoon,' Oliver Stone's semi-autobiographical 1986 film about the Vietnam War, audiences witnessed a curious foregrounding of the Civil War—not Vietnam's struggle for national sovereignty, which escalated, due in part to US interference, into a vicious and protracted conflict between the North and South of that nation, but the American Civil War. Protagonist Chris Taylor, reflecting at the end of the film on the conflict between his platoon's opposing camps, concludes that "we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves; and the enemy was us." As Vietnam War scholar Keith Beattie has argued, this final voice-over suggests that the greatest obstacle to peace is American disunity (2). Less than a generation later, however, we are told that we must be united to go successfully into war: "United We Stand" was the widely-circulated catch-phrase for the American response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a slogan reproduced upon untold mountains of merchandise items. The phrase itself—partly declarative, partly prescriptive—became a crucial touchstone in the narrative of the event in both official policy and popular understanding. It was invoked to give a name to the compassionate acts of individuals who helped each other through the tragedy, both within and outside of New York; and ultimately, it co-opted this authentic goodwill into an official script about the necessity of retaliatory war. The wistful desire for unity, which was clearly not forthcoming, underlined a reactionary impulse to invoke and relive a triumphalist past where "we" prevailed spectacularly over a racialized enemy, a narrative contained in the bizarre visual link between the World Trade Center and Iwo Jima in one commemorative sticker, available on eBay, that depicts NYC firefighters working together like the marines in that iconic photo to raise the towers like a giant flag.

Such images beg a certain question: who is the "we" that is invoked when we are asked to envision "a nation united"? Unity, in America, is a racially fraught condition; or, as Toni Morrison contends, "American means white" (47). Vietnam War representation, entangled as it is in implicit narratives of citizenship, nation-building, and racial superiority, magnifies the racialized nature of American unity. This was a war in which, as we are frequently reminded, blacks, Latinos, and other minorities, many of them poor, were disproportionately represented both in combat units and among the casualties. Why, then, is the typical protagonist of Vietnam War narrative, whose struggle is presumed to be universal or at least representative, so consistently white and middle class? In Platoon, Chris Taylor's privileged status is inscribed within the narrative with some awkwardness; he is considered an oddity, a "cru-sader," for voluntarily relinquishing his privilege, leaving college so that he might join "the unwanted" on the front lines. Here, as in the majority of Vietnam War films, the narrative's defining conflicts occur between white soldiers; struggles related to race, though often visible, are compartmentalized, pointedly separate from and peripheral to the central narrative. Typically, character development and epiphany are the sole domain of the whites. Why is it so important that the iconic Vietnam veteran also be what Lauren Berlant has called the "modal American citizen" (21), a normative portrait of purportedly representative whiteness?

The inverse of this question might be, as cultural critic Shirley Samuels has asked in a related context, "If the body of the republic is of mixed race, how to anatomize, describe, and photograph it?" (114). Against the backdrop of a war that was always already racialized, the race of American soldiers and the American public takes on peculiar resonances. Were fraggings really so often racially motivated? Did the Black Panthers recruit in Vietnam, a widely circulated rumor that African Americans themselves helped to proliferate? Might militant blacks really smuggle weaponry home for use in urban warfare against the police? Figurations of the enemy in Vietnam War literature are frequently edged with a racial hysteria that transplants to Southeast Asia America's hysterical perception of its own multi-racial self and its own racist...