The Wars We Took to Vietnam

Reviewed by: The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling, and: Then The Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam Susie Lan Cassel The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. By Milton J. Bates. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1996. Then The Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam. By Martha Hess. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Since the 1973 American withdrawal from Vietnam, a generation of historians, correspondents, politicians, and soldiers have filled bookcases with accounts of the war. Only in the last several years have two important voices joined the conversation: the voice of literary critics and cultural studies specialists, and the voice of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans. The recent works by Milton J. Bates and Martha Hess represent these relatively unfamiliar points of view, but they may otherwise seem like strange bedfellows in an article. Bates’s work is an interdisciplinary study of American culture, literature, and film while, in contrast, Hess’s text is a Vietnamese oral history that could be classified as literature. Yet, these books put forth familiar messages: they suggest that the Vietnam War was an unjust invasion that left two nations still struggling for meaning and closure some twenty years later, and they imply that the writing and sharing of literature, with its power for signification and catharsis, can contribute meaningfully to reparation and resolution. Bates’s book is a fascinating and sophisticated thematic analysis of five American cultural wars—on the frontier, race, class, sex, and generation—which, he argues, have been displaced, collapsed, or intermingled with the terrain of the Vietnam War. His treatments of the frontier and generation wars are thorough but unoriginal. Critics like Beidler have also pursued a frontier argument and seen Vietnam as a natural extension of Manifest Destiny: the cowboy/soldier, in the name of moral and spiritual authority, conquers the Indian/Vietnamese. When speaking of the generation war, Bates turns to Freud [End Page 297] to explore the tension in relationships between World War II fathers and their sons, who felt pressured to resist what they may have perceived as an oppressive draft/war. Examining Rabe’s Sticks and Bones and auto/biographies from distinguished military families, he reveals a reverse (perhaps unsuccessful) Oedipal conflict where the young are betrayed by the old, and sons die instead of triumphing over their elders. The chapter on class is Bates’s best. Through a Marxist lens, he shows “how the working class was used for other people’s purposes during the Vietnam war and how it is still being exploited in our war stories” (p. 87). Like factory workers, he argues, the average grunt felt “more expendable and less important than the weapons and machines he used” (p. 97). Included here is an interesting reading of Mailer’s Armies of the Night and stimulating delvings into genre convention where the film Platoon is seen as an elegiac romance and Heinemann’s Paco’s Story as a picaresque-western. With race and gender, Bates’s discussions are truncated and less satisfying. He predictably focuses only on African Americans in his section on race, invoking the problematic (and inaccurate) metaphor—the “middle passage”—to make a simplistic case that Vietnam served as a moment of transformation for African Americans. He sees it as a “passage” where blacks turned against the integrationist hopes that the war was supposed to codify and turned toward increased racial-consciousness, leading to greater militancy and activism upon return to the states. Given his anti-essentialist focus, it is unclear why Bates titles his next chapter “The Sex War” (rather than “ The Gender War”). After rehashing the 1960’s feminism of Friedan and Millet, he alludes to a potentially exciting discussion of masculinity and war that never materializes. He reviews Coming Home (Jane Fonda’s film) and Mason’s In Country and then turns to “more sophisticated veteran writers,” such as Tim O’Brien and Phillip Caputo. In these chapters on race and sex, there are troubling slips at the point where the two issues intersect—the construction of the Vietnamese female body. Bates concocts an anecdote to illustrate what he terms “Afro-Asian sympathy.” In his words, “When a Vietnamese bar

Art · Art history · BATES · Literature · Media studies · Memoir · Narrative · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · Storytelling · Vietnam War · Vietnamese · Gender Studies · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies