Notes
301 Notes Chapter One. MIA in America 1 See Timothy J. Lomperis, “Reading the Wind”: The Literature of the Vietnam War (1987). 2 David Langness, in a recent Paste magazine article about American war fiction, takes the “you had to be there” aphorism even further. “By definition,” he cautions, “only survivors write war stories. . . . When you read a war story, take it with a salt tablet. It was written by someone who lived, who didn’t pay the full freight, who made it out somehow.” Taken to its illogical extreme, the presumption that only combat veterans can truly understand the experience mandates that really only war fatalities are its true claimants. 3 Published originally as Marking Time. 4 Standard combat jargon: fucking new guy. 5 Ward Just proves the exception to the rule. At the conclusion of The American Blues, Just’s journalist-narrator finally comes to terms with his inability to finish his book—or his preoccupation with the Vietnam War: “For many years I had accepted the thesis, half a century old now, that the large abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, and cowardice, were obscene. That which was chaste was factual . . . Now I knew I was mistaken and in this war all we had were the large abstract words . . . I had a skull overflowing with facts—untainted, innocent—and none of them described the war. . . . Only the large words were equal to the experience, in which the sacrifice was so out of balance and the results so confounding. Glory or disgrace, sacred or profane; pick the words you want. Only in this way would the deepest secrets, those closest to the heart, be disclosed” (203–204). 6 An important exception is the veterans who become antiwar activists. While most of the fictional veterans of the war cannot, or will not, talk about their Vietnam experience, activists like Ron Kovic and Bill Ehrhart (both real rather than fictional creations, interestingly) positively scream their opposition to the war and their own war experiences throughout their respective memoirs. 7 Real-life non-veterans who have publicly regretted their failure to serve include James Fallows (“What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?,” 1975) and Christopher Buckley (“Viet Guilt,” 1983). 8 Pete, one of the struggling Vietnam vets in Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985), and the terminally ill Vietnam and career military vet Henry Teeter in John A. Miller’s 1995 story “Guns” express similar enjoyment of, and nostalgia for, their tours of duty in Vietnam. 9 Kidder’s dismissal parallels Jerry Lembcke’s thesis in his controversial The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2000). Ryan.indb 301 Ryan.indb 301 8/22/2008 3:12:06 PM 8/22/2008 3:12:06 PM 302 10 Prominent among the Vietnam-era activities of Senator John Kerry that propelled angry Vietnam veterans to derail his 2004 Democratic presidential campaign through their “Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth” attacks were Kerry’s 1971 testimonies. Under the Swiftvets.com link, “Phony War Crimes,” the anti-Kerry vets counter his testimonies at the Winter Soldier hearings and the April 1971 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing with the insistence that “false testimony and exaggerations were primary characteristics of the war crimes disinformation campaign, and also of the VVAW itself.” 11 Interestingly, these novels and memoirs—no doubt because of the irresistibly dramatic, narrative power of the atrocity—do not quibble about what qualifies as an immoral or illicit activity. As the journalist Jonathan Schell demonstrates in The Military Half, his 1968 “Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin,” official rules of engagement allowed considerable latitude in identifying and responding to actionable civilian activities. “A village could be bombed immediately and without the issuing of any warning to the villagers if Americans or other friendly troops or aircraft had received fire from within it,” Schell notes. Also, “a village could . . . be destroyed if intelligence reports indicated that the villagers had been supporting the Vietcong by offering them food and labour” (13–14, 15). 12 The sole survivor is a seductive dramatic conceit. Like Paco, O’Nan’s Larry Markham, Estevez’s Jeremy, Bausch’s Michael, and the movie Rambo, among others of these protagonists, carry the guilt, the shame, and the burden of memory of being the last man standing in their combat group. 13 Scott Ely’s 1988 novel Pit Bull presents another young woman oddly fascinated with the scarred body of an...
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