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Teaching the Vietnam WarBy W.D. Ehrhart
Imagine the man who belongs to that voice. What do you conjure? Bone-deep physical exhaustion, perhaps. A soul too weary for anything but a kind of hollow resignation. The party's over, but there is nowhere else to go, nothing to look forward to. All that remains, like lingering cigarette smoke and the odor of stale alcohol floating heavily in the still air, is silence, thick and deep and all but impenetrable. That sentence, buried in the early pages of Larry Heinemann's superb novel of the Vietnam war, Close Quarters, is, in my estimation, one of the most powerful and evocative sentences pen ever put to paper. In thirty-five words, Heinemann graphically offers readers a frightening glimpse of the cost of war, the toll war takes on the human psyche. It is a hard nugget of truth, capable of breaking teeth and impossible to swallow whole. One cannot read sentences like that without being brought up short, without confronting the reality behind the generations of mythology and rhetoric that propel young men (and now women, too) to the killing fields. Indeed, if one wants to know the essence of war, how it feels and smells and tastes, what it does to those who are scorched by its flames, one is likely to find more truth in literature than in any history ever written. But of course, most people today read neither history nor literature. In my class on Vietnam War Literature this past semester, I took a poll on the first day: fewer than half a dozen students had ever read a book about the Vietnam war. But every single student in the class had seen at least half a dozen commercial movies about the war. And for most of my students, all but one under the age of 35, those movies, together with several popular television shows and a few vague childhood memories, constituted the sum total of their knowledge about the most turbulent event in US history since the Civil War. For those of us who lived through those years, especially those of us who came of age during those years and were deeply affected by Vietnam, it seems impossible that the stuff and substance of our lives could be for others nothing more than history, as remote and inaccessible as the siege of Troy, perceived only through the distorted lens of the glitz-and-glitter world of Hollywood. But succeeding generations cannot absorb the experience of previous generations by osmosis. That is why I teach the Vietnam war. I think it is important. I think people ought to know what happened and why. Here is the course I taught this past semester for the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts at Boston (I taught it as a literature course, but it can just as easily be taught as history using virtually the same materials): I begin my course with a history book: George Herring's America's Longest War. Because my students generally know nothing worth knowing about Vietnam, it is essential to offer them at least enough basic history to allow them to place the literature into some kind of historical context. We read Herring a chapter or two at a time, just prior to whichever book corresponds to that period of the war. I have disagreements with Herring; I would prefer to use Michael Maclear's The Ten Thousand Day War, but it is too massive and detailed to use in conjunction with the eight additional books I assign. Herring's book is the best short history that I have come across. After reading Herring's chapter on the French Indochina War, we begin the literature with Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, set in 1952 and written in 1954. This book is undoubtedly the most remarkable book ever written about the war. That an English journalist could see so clearly and dispassionately the whole terrible disaster into which the United States even then was so energetically and blindly hurling itself is only slightly less amazing than the fact that no one who mattered paid the slightest attention to Greene's warning. Next we read Tran Van Dinh's No Passenger on the River, a novel set mostly in Vietnam in 1963, and written within a year after the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, which is the climax of the book. Long out of print, Dinh's book was just republished in 1989. In the past, I have used Smith Hempstone's A Tract of Time, which deals with the same period, but Dinh's book offers the advantage of a Vietnamese point of view, something that remains hard to come by in the literature available in English. The students also read the poetry of Jan Barry, who served in Vietnam as a young enlisted soldier in 1962. (All the poetry in the course is taken from Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War, Texas Tech University Press, 1989.) Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters, set in 1967-68, comes next. This is perhaps the hardest selection to make because the overwhelming majority of books about the war are written by veterans and deal with the American combat experience. Many of these books, both novels and memoirs, are very good. (One thinks immediately of Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War or Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato.) But "the Vietnam experience," it seems to me, is in fact much larger than the simple story of American boys slogging through the paddy fields, however compelling that story may be. One book on that aspect of the war is enough. And if I can only use one, it has to be Close Quarters. All through the 1980s, as the public image of the Vietnam veteran was transformed from drug-crazed psychopath to cultural icon, I have been wondering how long the rest of the "Vietnam generation" would stand silently on the sidelines, allowing popular culture to obliterate the fact that the overwhelming majority of my generation did not serve in Vietnam, though many were nevertheless touched, and sometimes deeply affected, by the war. Finally, in 1988, Saigon, Illinois appeared. The novel's author, Paul Hoover, was a legal conscientious objector during the war who did alternative service in a Chicago hospital. The book is funny, sensitive and honest, giving at last a credible voice to those who chose not to go, or at least to one significant segment of that group. In conjunction with Saigon, Illinois, we also read poems by others of my generation who did not go: Christopher Bursk, Charles Fishman, James Moore, Bill Tremblay and Tom Wayman. It is a little awkward, for me and my students both, to teach my writing, but I do, and it is usually very rewarding and enlightening for all of us. The book I use most often is Passing Time, a nonfiction memoir that covers the years immediately after I returned from Vietnam, roughly 1969-74. While there is no shortage of books about the combat experience, as I said, books which deal at length with the aftermath of the war for those who fought it are still relatively few (one of the best is William Crapser's extended short story "Wild Child," which appears in his collection Remains), and that part of the experience is important, as any vet will tell you: in Vietnam, no matter how bad things got, you could always look forward to your rotation date, but once you got back to The World, there you were, and you just had to get by as best you could. It wasn't easy, and for many vets, the passing years have not made it any easier. By this time, we've read all of Herring, chapter by chapter, and we move on to a concentrated discussion of the poetry of John Balaban, D. F. Brown, Horace Coleman, Bryan Alec Floyd, Yusef Komunyakaa, Walter McDonald, Basil T. Paquet and Bruce Weigl. Long before they reach college, most students are convinced that poetry is either boring or inaccessible or both. But I can't teach a Vietnam course without resorting to poetry. The poetry written about Vietnam is both plainspoken and eloquent. If your students think they don't like poetry, or can't understand it, have them read some of this stuff; it'll blow their socks off. Vietnam affected women, too, in all sorts of ways, and I try to reflect that in my course. The book I use is Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country. Though women's literature on the war is still relatively sparse, I could easily have chosen Lynda Van Devanter's Home Before Morning, Patricia Walsh's Forever Sad the Hearts, or one of several oral histories about women in Vietnam. I chose Mason's novel, set in Kentucky in 1984, because its teenaged female protagonist is endearing and believable, because Mason's treatment of veterans is thoughtful and sympathetic, and because Mason understands intrinsically the frightening fluidity of the boundary between reality and contemporary popular culture. The ending is too easy, but you can't always have everything. Speaking of endings, I close the course with Robert Mason's Weapon. Mason is the author of an excellent memoir of helicopter warfare called Chickenhawk, but if I used that, I'd have to drop Close Quarters. Moreover, Weapon does something I can't do with Chickenhawk. Set in Nicaragua in 1988, Weapon allows me to pull the entire Vietnam experience out of history and connect it to the world we live in today. There is little value to history if one cannot demonstrate its relevance to the present and the future, and that's what Weapon does. That's the course, in a nutshell. It begins, as the war did, forty years ago; it ends in the present, just as the war and its aftermath have stayed with us. My students and I have also had the added advantage of classroom visits by Jan Barry, Larry Heinemann, Yusef Komunyakaa, and David V. Connolly, a Vietnam veteran and poet from South Boston. But you don't have to be a student to take this course. You can read all of these books on your own and come away with a pretty decent understanding of a very complex and unsettling time. Certainly, the course does not cover every aspect of the war. I would like to have spent more time on the experience of black soldiers, and had intended to use A. R. Flowers's novel De Mojo Blues, but the book is out of print, so the only black voices the students hear are Coleman's and Komunyakaa's. I would like to have had more literature by Vietnamese; after all, it was their country. The voices of support troops and rear echelon soldiers, ten times more numerous than actual combat troops, go unheard, though had time permitted, I might have used John Ketwig's memoir And a Hard Rain Fell or David A. Willson's novel REMF Diary. If there is a good work of literature dealing with Cambodia, I am not familiar with it, and Asa Baber's novel of Laos, Land of a Million Elephants, has been out of print for twenty years. I could go on almost indefinitely about what is missing from my course, but no single course could ever begin to cover it all. What I have tried to do is to offer as broad a range of material and voices as possible in the time available to me. For students who seldom read, except when they are required to, it is invariably a revelation, often a difficult and uncomfortable revelation. But that's okay. In fact, that's the whole point. I want them to imagine, however imperfectly, the dilemma of a boy with a fresh draft notice in his hand, the weight of a rucksack after ten hours of humping the boonies, the damage high speed steel does to human flesh, the terrible anguish that is so benignly pigeonholed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Had US policymakers possessed a little imagination, they might have heeded Graham Greene's warning. Had the American people heard that voice trailing off "as though it were the end of an early-morning party, with wine bottles and beer bottles lined up along the windowsills and across the floor and everybody out of cigarettes," they might have asked a few more questions before allowing their children to be sent halfway around the world to kill and be killed. Human lives, our own or anyone else's, ought not to be squandered. A little imagination might have saved the world a whole lot of trouble. It might still. And there is nothing to stimulate the imagination like a good book. Bill Ehrhart is a Marine veteran, poet and author, and long-time member of VVAW.
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"His voice trailed off as though it were the end of an early-morning party, with wine bottles and beer bottles lined up along the windowsills and across the floor and everybody out of cigarettes."