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Warring Fictions
American Literary Culture
and the Vietnam War Narrative
Jim Neilson
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

title:
Warring Fictions : American Literary Culture and the
Vietnam War Narrative
author: Neilson, Jim.
publisher: University Press of Mississippi
isbn10 | asin: 1578060885
print isbn13: 9781578060887
ebook isbn13: 9780585034041
language: English
subject
American literature--20th century--History and
criticism, Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975--Literature
and the conflict, Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975--
Personal narratives, American, Vietnamese Conflict,
1961-1975--Historiography, War stories, American--Hi
publication date: 1998
lcc: PS228.V5N45 1998eb
ddc: 813/.5409358
subject:
American literature--20th century--History and
criticism, Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975--Literature
and the conflict, Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975--
Personal narratives, American, Vietnamese Conflict,
1961-1975--Historiography, War stories, American--Hi
Page iv
For Susan, who gave me peace
Copyright 1998 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
01 00 99 98 4 3 2 1
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neilson, Jim
Warring fictions : American literary culture and the Vietname War
narrative / Jim Neilson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57806-087-7 (alk. paper).ISBN 1-57806-088-5 (pbk.:
alk. paper)
1. American literature20th centuryHistory and criticism.
2. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975Literature and the conflict.
3. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975Personal narratives, American.
4. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975Historiography. 5. War stories,
AmericanHistory and criticism. I. Title.
PS228.V5N45 1998
813'.5409358dc21 98-33587
CIP
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Page v
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Manufacturing Canons 1
1. Commercial Literary Culture 17
2. Academic Literary Culture 39
3. La Condition Humaine 55
4. Official Distortions 89
5. Rock-and-Roll War 135
6. America as Home 165
7. Undying Uncertainty 191
Conclusion: True War Stories 211
Notes 223
References 229
Index 245

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The ultimate target is the human mind. It may be "changed," it may be rendered impotent for expression or it may be extinguished,
but it still remains the critical target.
Notes on Strategic Hamlets, USOM, Saigon, Office of Rural Affairs

Page ix
Acknowledgments
This book evolved over several years and in several locations. In the suburbs of New Jersey, Texas, and
Georgia I relied on the unwavering support and love of Colleen, Scott, Irene, and Chip. On the streets and
canals of Bangkok, I saw firsthand the ravages of underdevelopment and the pernicious effects of U.S.
militarism. My education here was greatly assisted by Rick's tutelage and guiding (and continuing)
influence. At Miami University, my education was furthered through friendship with Mike Shea and
through the intervention of Don Daiker. This book began in earnest at the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro under the guidance of Lee Zacharias (and through the collegial encouragement of Anna
Copeland and Charles Cunningham). It grew to the soulful sounds of Memphis and drew inspiration from
the hard-working humanities librarians there. With the great help of Jeff Williams (that rarest of
academics, one whose practice is guided by his political principles) this book took its present shape,
ironically enough, in the shadow of The Citadel. Above all, this book was influenced by the pedagogy,
collaboration, and camaraderie of Greg Meyerson, whose insights and influence can be found on nearly
every page.

Page 1
Introduction
Manufacturing Canons

Page 2
This book examines the critical reception of Vietnam War novels and autobiographies; it does not offer
new interpretations, nor does it make a case for the importance of these texts. By looking at critical
reception I hope to reveal not merely the vicissitudes of literary taste but the ideology of literary culture.
In recent years, particularly in debates about canon development, critics have begun to recognize the
ideological work involved in literary reception, but very little has been written on the ideology of
contemporary literary culture. My focus on the critical reception of Vietnam War novels and
autobiographies, therefore, is intended to explain something of the process by which contemporary
literary texts achieve precanonical status and to examine how this process has cohered with larger
cultural forces to further a conservative rewriting of the Vietnam War. In tracing the development of a
canon of Vietnam War prose narratives, I examine the sometimes antagonistic, often sympathetic
relationship between commercial and academic literary cultures, and I outline how academic literary
culture has been transformed in recent years, identifying the important and often overlooked ideological
continuity between traditional and revisionist literary studies.
I focus on Vietnam War literature for several reasons. First, a personal one: as a teenager I lived in
Bangkok, where I witnessed the damage caused by U.S. use of Thailand as a military staging area and site
for its troops' "rest and recreation." Second, since the writing and reception of Vietnam War literature
took place during the advent of theory and the revising of literary studies, its reception may reveal
whether this transformation in critical practice has meant a comparable transformation in the ideology of
literary culture. Third, as part of a struggle over the representation of the Vietnam War, a struggle over
what the war meant, over how and why it was fought, this literature has both reflected and contributed to
the construction of recent historical memory. My concentration on the reception of Vietnam War novels
and memoirs rather than on the texts themselves is an attempt to examine the contours and processes of
ideological hegemony within literary culture.
Since helicopters lifted off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in

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Saigon more than twenty years ago, a generation has come of age without contemporaneous knowledge of
the war. To this generation, the war is understood through documentary footage, popular films and
television, novels, songs, memoirs, and historical texts (as well as through school instruction, personal
reminiscences, and family lore). Despite such varied cultural representations, the war has for many been
reduced to a simple lesson: it was a noble struggle fought by heroic young men who were betrayed by
cowardly politicians and a treasonous media. A more critical yet, I believe, equally inaccurate
interpretation is often asserted by the liberal establishment and mass media: America's involvement,
though well-intentioned, was tragically flawed due to a national character whose naivet exceeded its
ambition, what New York Times correspondent Homer Bigart defined as "less a moral crime than the
thunderously stupid military blunder of throwing half a million troops into an unwinnable war" (quoted in
Herman and Chomsky, 238).
As a result of this misinterpretation and reinvention of the war, less than a decade after its conclusion
pundits and politicians advocated and pursued a militarist policy in Central America with little fear of
mass protest and with no substantial public repudiation. (The extent to which this policy had to be
conducted clandestinely and by proxy via Oliver North and the Contras, however, suggests that something
of the social activism of the 1960s persisted into the 1980s. The reconstruction of the Vietnam War has
been aimed at overturning just this legacy.) By the 1990s, this reconstruction was so successful that during
the Persian Gulf War a majority of Americans, including a sizable number of those opposed to sending
troops to Kuwait, praised America's Gulf warriors and overlooked atrocities like the bombing of fleeing
troops and civilians on the Basra road, the use of fuel-air explosives and other weapons of mass
destruction, and the postwar devastation inflicted upon the population of Iraq. The bombing of miles of
stalled traffic on the Basra road by helicopters, missile launchers, fighter-bombers, and B-52s, according
to Steve Niva, included feverish carrier air assaults with whatever bombs were at hand, inspired glee
among many U.S. commanders and soldiers, and resulted in tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties (6970).
Fuel-air explosives, which had originally been used in Vietnam, were designed, in Robert McNamara's
words, to "do with conventional weapons what previously had required nuclear munitions" (quoted in
Noble, 32). The postwar devastation of Iraq resulting from the allies' destruction of electrical generating
plants created a typhoid epidemic that a Harvard

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University medical team estimated would, within one year, cause the deaths of 170,000 children (Tyler).
As Jack Geiger of Physicians for Human Rights put it, the situation of the Iraqi people had become "a
slow-motion catastrophe" (quoted in Cainkar, 346).
How did a nation that had once had a mass antiwar movement and had once responded with outrage to
U.S. atrocities become oblivious to such horrors? How was it that the most popular and most thoroughly
documented war in U.S. history was transformed into a lesson in patriotism and national character? In
examining the construction of the Vietnam War canon, I offer a partial explanation and sketch out the
background assumptions, ideological necessities, and configurations of power that have allowed this
transformation to flourish.
To those in power, Opposition to the Vietnam War raised unsettling questions about the wisdom, and
consequently the authority, of America's governing class. The mass political and social liberation
movements that accompanied the antiwar movementwith their demands for meaningful political
representation, economic equality, and social justiceposed a threat to the established socioeconomic
order, as did the development of the environmental and consumer rights movements and the increase in
labor strife that occurred during the late 1960s, which Barbara Ehrenreich describes as "the most severe
strike wave since shortly after World War II " (121). It was, as Harvard University professor and
Foreign Policy editor Samuel Huntington declared in a 1975 report for the Trilateral Commission, a
crisis of democracy. (Harvey Kaye identifies several similar phrases used by Western intellectuals to
describe the sense of crisis they perceived in the late 1970s: "governmental overload," "ungovernability,"
the ''cultural contradictions of capital," the "economic contradictions of democracy," the "twilight of
authority," the "twilight of capitalism" [58].) To William Simon, writing in 1978, the legacy of the
progressive movements of the 1960s was a nation "careening with frightening speed toward collectivisma
statist-dictatorial system" (222). Similarly, three quarters of Harvard Business Review readers who
responded to a 1975 survey feared the American commitment to private property and limited government
would not last another decade (Vogel, 145). For a business class that had largely had its own way (and
had allowed minor concessions to labor during the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s), the 1970swith its
environmental regulations, consumer protections, social activism, economic stagnation, and energy
criseswas a fearful time redolent of creeping socialism. American business,

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therefore, undertook a concerted effort to organize and propagandize against the activist legacy of the
1960s. Confronting this crisis, Huntington reasoned that "democracy is only one way of constituting
authority. During the 1960s the democratic principle was extended to many institutions where it can, in the
long run, only frustrate the purposes of those institutions. the effective operation of a democratic political
system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and
groups" (Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, 11314). To reinforce this public noninvolvement in politics
American business greatly increased its own involvement through a strategy that included, according to
Kaye, "variably successful attempts at coalition-building among the different sectors of capital; grassroots
organizing through employees and shareholders; the establishment of PACs to coordinate financial
contributions to candidates sympathetic to their interests; and 'advocacy advertising' campaigns marketing
not products, not commodities, but the views of corporate America" (77).
The achievements of the mass social movements of the 1960s had to be not merely thwarted but
discredited, if not erased from public memory. The view that opposition to the war (and to the elites who
planned, promoted, and profited by it) was morally correct and politically effective, that American
military policy was criminally brutal, and that the war was a logical extension of American economic and
geopolitical aims had to be obscured. The rewriting of the Vietnam War should be viewed not merely as
an attack on the supposed excesses of the 1960s but as part of a continuing business-led assault on social
market capitalism and the legacy of the New Deal. Michael Lind notes that "Social market capitalism in
the industrial democracies was adopted in the middle of the twentieth century, not out of altruism on the
part of the political and business classes, but as an expedient in order to secure social peace" (197). The
New Deal and Great Society programs, whatever their limitations, both resulted from mass struggle and
social crisis. Both were opposed by powerful individual and corporate interests. Huntington, Simon, and
others were voicing the familiar concerns of many in the business and governing classes, concerns that
seemed to reach a peak during the global recession of the 1970s. One way to end this stagnation in the
industrial West and Japan was to overturn the excesses of democracy. And rewriting the Vietnam War
was a useful part of this strategy.
But the question remains: how, against the best efforts of so many, did

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a war once perceived as a nearly genocidal slaughter to perpetuate American neocolonialism come to be
viewed as an American tragedy? And to what extent have cultural and in particular literary
representations of the war helped in this transformation? It could be argued that Vietnam War novels and
memoirs have contributed significantly to this process, since they reach an important readershipthe
editors, publishers, writers, pundits, and professors who make up America's intellectual class. By
promoting a literature that favors individual lives over social relations, universal truths over historical
contingency, and textual sophistication over social analysis, this class has helped reproduce, not merely in
the small audience of serious fiction writers but in the general public as well, a simple and ideologically
unthreatening view of the war. The conventional narrative of the war in film and TVwith its grunt's-eye
view (and exclusion of senior officers, commanders, and policy makers), the alienness of the Vietnamese
landscape and culture, the near invisibility of the Vietnamese, the focus on isolated atrocities (and the
lack of focus on the destruction caused by U.S. aerial bombardments)derives from novels and
autobiographies written by American veterans, published in the 1970s and 1980s, and championed by
American literary culture.
On the other hand, belief in a causal connection between cultural products and the dominant ideology,
between Vietnam War narratives and a conservative rewriting of the war, inevitably oversimplifies the
hegemonic process. If the base/superstructure model of classical Marxism overemphasizes the
determining role of productive forces, this causal view alleges too great a determining role for cultural
products. It also serves as self-justification, a means of giving the marginal work of literary/cultural
academics a veneer of political urgency. While I have no desire to overestimate the role of literary texts
in reshaping recent history, the mere fact of my having written this book should suggest that I believe these
texts have had some impact on the reconstruction of the war.
Critics of Vietnam War literature have almost uniformly seen these texts as offering a radical alternative
to the popular rewriting of the war. Whereas in the broader culture perceptions of the war have been
revised to perpetuate a belief in American militarism and to repudiate the mass social movements of the
1960s, this literature, it is alleged, offers a steadfastly opposing indeed, a counter-hegemonicview.
Thomas Myers argues that Vietnam War literature has an "unwavering commitment to resurrect and to
speak tothe war's secret history, to be accessible

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conduits for a radically new American sensibility" (30). Philip Beidler suggests that this literature
bespeaks "a major fulfillment of the true 'alternative' spirit of the youth culture of the era, the belief in acts
of imagination that could do nothing less than change the world" (Re-writing, 2).
In contrast, I argue that the most consistently praised narrative prose of the Vietnam War, though critical
of U.S. policy and graphic in its depiction of American atrocities, makes only a modest critique that fits
well within an elite-sanctioned doctrinal framework and coheres with what Kaye describes as the
political project "of creating new, post-social-democratic and post-liberal, conservative consensuses and
governing narratives" (66). Despite the generally more progressive views of writers, editors, publishers,
and literary scholars, the depictions of the war appearing within critically sanctioned literature woefully
misrepresent the heroism and the vast suffering of the Vietnamese and consistently view the war through
the narrow prism of American history and culture. While contemporary literary scholarsparticularly under
the sway of postcolonialismhave begun to examine representations of Vietnamese in these texts, they have
done so within the framework of an identity politics that diminishes understanding of America's
geopolitical aims, which were to thwart anticapitalist revolutionary movements and to maintain as large a
sphere of economic dependence as possible.
Literary culture has consistently ignored materialist critique, which Teresa Ebert defines as the
"uncover[ing of] the concealed operations of power and the socio-economic relations connecting the
myriad details and representations of our lives. It shows that apparently disconnected zones of culture are
in fact materially linked through the highly differentiated, mediated, and dispersed operation of a
systematic logic of exploitation" (7). The manufacture of a Vietnam War literary canon is useful, then, for
examining the process by which contemporary literature becomes cultural capital, a body of knowledge
that functions as a marker of class and whose possession, in John Guillory's words, "can be displayed
upon request and which thereby entitles its possessor to the cultural and material rewards of the well-
educated person" (ix). By examining the ways in which these novels and memoirs have been championed,
I hope to discern the institutional pressures, group beliefs, and cultural conventions that shape literary
reception, as well as the ideological function of literary culture itself.

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While it may be misleading to speak of the entirety of the publishing and reception of literature as a single
"culture," since there are considerable differences among the commercial and academic sites of this
culture, in the case of Vietnam War literature the texts most praised by commercial reviewers have also
been the most written about by academic critics. Likewise, both reviewers and critics have emphasized
textual strategies over historical and ideological content and have understood this literature almost
exclusively through a liberal ideology that has found in American military policy in Vietnam error rather
than intent, tragedy rather than calculation.
That academic literary culture, especially within elite universities should repeat this view of the war is
somewhat surprising, given, first the humanities' reputation as a hotbed of radicalism and, second, the
university's relative freedom from the kinds of institutional requirements and ideological limits that
govern the mass media. (The radical nature of the professoriat has been grossly exaggerated. A 1984
Carnegie Foundation survey asking professors to identify their political orientation yielded predictably
centrist results: 5.8 percent declared themselves left, 33.8 percent liberal, 26.6 percent middle-of-the-
road, 29.6 percent moderately conservative, 4.2 percent strongly conservative [cited in Balch and
London, 43]). A good deal of this book, therefore, is devoted to demonstrating the shared ideology of
commercial and academic literary culturesliberal pluralism. My intent is to show that through its
traditional focus on aesthetics and vaguely humanist concerns literary culture has furthered a moderate
critique of the war, and to suggest that the production and championing of such a circumscribed view is
the predictable result of a publishing industry and literary culture dependent upon existing social
structures and relations of power. That within the framework of liberal pluralism literary culture helped
revise the war to accord with the needs of capital, is, I suspect, counter to received ideas about literature,
the academy, and the autonomy of culture, and may elicit several objections that demand response.
The first such objection is that the war was revised for the sake of historical accuracy, not ideological
necessity. Few would dispute the notion that public perceptions of the Vietnam War are considerably
different now than during the war. Whereas the late 1960s and early 1970s saw large antiwar
demonstrations, occasional news accounts of U.S. atrocities, and even (infrequently) public discussion of
U.S. imperialism, the 1990s sees the war as a tragic error, a noble but misguided struggle

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against global communism that led to the unfortunate sacrifice and mistreatment of brave Americans. The
Gulf War revealed the predominant lesson of Vietnam to be the need to use massive firepower, to censor
the mass media, and to promote jingoistic sentiment. In this view, the rewriting of the Vietnam War was
due not to ideological necessity but to a more accurate understanding of recent history, including
recognition of the evils of communism, the heroic (and unappreciated) actions of the American military,
and the misguided behavior of the mass media, the antiwar movement, and much of the liberal
establishment. Such views, however, overlook the considerable effort that has gone into rewriting the war
and creating a pro-military, pro-business, anti-social welfare consensus. A main goal of this book is to
demonstrate the complicity of literary culture in this revision. As evidence of the shift in the intellectual
climate one need only look at the career of Noam Chomsky. Whereas during the war Chomsky's At War
with Asia was published by Random House and his "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" (and many other
essays) were published in the New York Review of Books, today his books are published by tiny presses
like Common Courage and South End, while his essays appear in obscure periodicals like Z Magazine.
Chomsky's books are rarely reviewed in the mainstream media. According to David Edwards,
"Chomsky's work on international affairs has never been reviewed by any major professional journal in
the United States"; the book editor of the liberal Boston Globe has declared she will review no books by
South End Press so long as they publish Chomsky; New Republic editor Martin Peretz has declared
Chomsky "beyond the pale of intellectual responsibility"; Chomsky has never been invited to write for the
New York Times' editorial page or Book Review, for Harper's, the Atlantic, or the Village Voice (42);
and since 1986 (while publishing more than twenty books) he has had not a single title reviewed in the
New York Times Book Review. The exclusion of Chomsky from the mainstream media is but one instance
of the institutional marginalization of the Left that has occurred since the mid-1970s, and it suggests that
radical views of the war have been excised from the mass media not for the sake of historical accuracy
but to accord with the country's move to the right.
Others might object that a liberal media would not further a conservative agenda. I concede that the mass
media is largely liberal in orientation. What this orientation amounts to as a practical matter, however, is
not sympathy for the Left but its virtual exclusion and a welcoming embrace of conservatives. Indeed, this
liberal-conservative axis represents

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the poles of ideological belief, rendering alternative positions invisible and constraining political choice.
As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky note, "Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be
reflected within the mass media, which in this narrow sense may adopt an 'adversarial stance' with regard
to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy" (177). Arguments that fall
outside this framework are defined as extreme and are ignored. From a Marxist perspective, the
marginalization of alternative views and the reinforcement of implicit consensus (in the guise of elite
disagreement) is understandable, even predictable, since institutions like the media function to reproduce
the structural domination of capital over labor. In the context of the Vietnam War, this elite disagreement
has meant for conservatives that the war was lost by indecisive politicians, seditious students (and
compliant educators), and an irresponsible press, and for liberals that the war was lost through a mixture
of military and political blundering, a blinkered anticommunism, and an excessive idealism. Neither
liberals nor conservatives acknowledge that U.S. actions were criminal and included a war of attrition,
deforestation, enforced homelessness, torture, assassination, the use of chemical agents and weapons of
mass destruction, and the knowing slaughter of countless civilians, and that similar actions (on a smaller
scale) have been a regular part of American foreign policy throughout the twentieth century. "Common
sense" has it that the United States has been a reluctant player in international affairs, staunchly upholding
democracy against the communist onslaught and intervening only to oppose egregious acts of terror. Yet
history shows that early in this century the United States fought in the Philippines, and invaded the Soviet
Union, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, and Panama. Since World War II, the United States
has supported military dictatorships in Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, El
Salvador, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and the Philippines; has helped overthrow democratically elected
governments in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Greece, Argentina,
and Haiti; has taken part in covert actions and proxy wars against Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia,
Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Egypt, Lebanon, Peru, India, and Zaire; and has waged war
against Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama,
Libya, Iraq, and Somalia (Parenti, Aqainst Empire, 3839).

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Liberals and conservatives have also attempted to discredit the activist Politics that seeks to explicate the
above history, that helped end the Vietnam War, and that continues to agitate for social justice. And they
implicitly endorse a version of American exceptionalism, with liberals more willing to acknowledge that
the United States has not always lived up to its democratic promise. The choice, therefore, is not between
Right and Left but between dogmatists and apologists. Consequently, the notion that a liberal media would
not facilitate a conservative rewriting of the war ignores the common ground these groups share and
accepts the perception of liberals and conservatives as warring factions rather than two sides of a
narrow, elite dispute.
A third objection to my line of argument might be that academic literary culture is too diverse to have a
dominant ideology. With its many critical approachesversions of feminist, ethnic, and gender;
poststructural, postcolonial, postmodern, deconstructionist, and new historical; Lacanian, Freudian,
Foucauldian, Bakhtinian, de Manian, and Marxian criticismacademic literary culture may appear too
fractured to have an overriding ideology. But the fact that academics may choose from among a menu of
approaches to analyze literature and culture is not so much evidence of ideological diversity as a listing
of the choices available within the relatively narrow institutional parameters that define contemporary
scholarship. In truth, the notion that a multitude of individual interests precludes an overarching ideology
is itself a defining feature of liberal pluralism.
We must also remember that this array of critical approaches exists within a specific historical context
and political economy. A good deal of the radicalizing of the profession in recent years stems from the
impact the post-Fordist economy has had upon the academy. Facing an increase in temporary and part-
time teaching jobs, a work speed-up, and a surplus of job applicants, graduate students and junior faculty
have understandably been attracted to a version of historical and quasi-Marxist analysis. The same
pressures that encourage this politicization, though, encourage department and university administrators
and senior faculty, wary of dwindling funds and bad publicity, to be circumspect about hirming and
promoting those who may be perceived as challenging dominant beliefs and agitating for serious reform.
A radical scholar or two may be brought into a department to provide academic coverage, but it is
unlikely that a department will have more than this number, let alone be

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dominated by Marxists. Non-elite schools and community colleges are unlikely even to hire token
Marxists, unless their politics are muted. Thus, although its practice has been significantly altered since
the heyday of New Criticism, academic literary culture continues to endorse a liberal-pluralist ideology.
It might also be argued that the radical politics of contemporary academic literary culture repudiates
liberalism. Many literary academics have dismissed liberalism as a vestige of a discredited
enlightenment/humanist tradition. Liberal pluralism has also been criticized for its tendency to
homogenize difference, thereby reinforcing an unequal access to power and with it a white, male,
heterosexual Western hegemony. It is here that commercial and academic literary cultures have parted
ways somewhat, as evidenced by the persistent criticism of "political correctness" and multiculturalism
within the popular press.
In light of the ongoing conflict between liberal pluralism and multiculturalism, formalism and
poststructuralism, humanism and postmodernism, there would seem to be little ideological common
ground between commercial and academic literary cultures. It is my contention, however, that these
differences are minor and that much of what passes for radical literary scholarship is in effect a more
complex, slightly more progressive version of traditional, humanist aestheticizing. If literary studies
appears radical, it is because the general culture has become more conservative. In a culture where
genuinely radical voices have been virtually eliminated from public discourse and centrist-liberals define
the Left, left-liberals like Cornel West or Michael Brub seem by comparison fire-breathing Marxists.
The belief that literary studies is radical is due as well to the media's having been influenced by right-
wing attacks. This foundation-funded and pundit-promoted perception of universities as mini-terror states
where radicals, feminists, and minorities enforce a politically correct conformism continues to color the
mass media's view of the academy. Any argument made by a leftish academic is filtered through this
perception, which increases the likelihood that it will be derided and dismissed. This view of literary
studies and the academy has been further promoted by the belief that multicultural identity politics is
inherently radical. Within contemporary America, with its backlash against feminism, its assault on
affirmative action, its reassertion of biological determinism (notably via Charles Murray's and Richard
Herrnstein's The Bell Curve), its scapegoating of immigrants, and its persistent

Page 13
homophobia, multiculturalism may indeed seem radical. However, this academic interest in previously
marginalized groups rarely encompasses a critique of capitalism; at most it promotes a more inclusive
pluralism within the framework of capital. Hence some in the academy may assail liberalism, but these
are minority voices. And many who denounce liberalism practice a politics and a scholarship that is, in
essence, liberalism by another name.
A further objection to my argument is that the reception of Vietnam War novels and memoirs is not
representative of academic literary culture. Contained within a field (American literature) and a subfield
(contemporary literature), Vietnam War narratives do not occupy a central place within literary studies.
Although a sizable number of books, articles, and dissertations have been written on Vietnam War
literature, it remains a sub-subfield of study. Whereas many, if not most universities now offer courses in
feminist, postcolonial, queer, and a variety of ethnic literaturesnot to mention the usual author, genre, and
period coursesVietnam War literature is at best an irregular feature of college curricula, a subset in a
menu of choices. Likewise, the Modern Language Association has deemed Vietnam War literature
unworthy of a regular session at its annual convention.
Rather than reading this neglect as evidence of the idiosyncratic nature of Vietnam War literature, though,
I argue that this neglect itself demonstrates the liberal ideology prevailing within literary studies. After
all, what ought we to infer about academic literary culture if the literary/cultural reconstruction of
arguably the most important event in post-World War II U.S. history, an event that continues to
reverberate within American culture, is deemed barely worth scholarly attention? In this neglect and in
the ongoing preoccupation with constructions of race, gender, and sexual identity can be found a
continuation of American literary culture's traditional concern for self-affirmation and democratic
pluralism and its refusal to accede to radical critique in any but a token manner.
Let me anticipate one more critique of my argument: "those who claim literary culture is dominated by a
single ideology must be conspiracy theorists." A common response to ideological critique, to the
perception that institutions like the mass media and the academy reinforce a dominant ideology, is that this
can be accomplished only through a vast and impossible conspiracy. Large institutions such as these are
too disparate and

Page 14
contentious, too filled with strong-willed individuals, and too lacking in control mechanisms to do
anything so narrow and consensual as reproducing a single ideology. In suggesting that public discourse is
constrained in such a way that it reaffirms prevailing social relations, I am not arguing for the existence of
a conspiracy. Ideology is powerful because it is flexible, rather than monolithic. Because of institutional
necessities, economic pressures, political requirements, and class interests, the individuals who make up
commercial and academic literary cultures share a rough ideological consensus that conforms to the
general framework of liberal pluralism. Likewise, those novels and autobiographies that negotiate the
process of cultural production and reception to achieve precanonical status and become cultural capital
will almost inevitably embody and promote this dominant ideology.
Vietnam War narratives have held the possibility of reminding an older generation and of teaching a
younger generation about recent history, politics, and the worship of the American empire. For whose
interests was the war fought? Who in the United States was most likely to fight and die? How does this
war cohere with previous and subsequent U.S. foreign policy? What brutalities did the United States
engage in and what were the ultimate consequences of these brutalities for the Vietnamese? What goals
did the United States hope to achieve through this war and to what extent were these goals achieved?
How has the war and its legacy affected contemporary political, social, and economic life in the United
States, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and the rest of southeast Asia? These questions are answered obliquely
if at all in critically sanctioned Vietnam War literature and are consistently overlooked by commercial
reviewers and academic critics for the sake of more traditional literary aesthetic concerns. The goal of
this book, therefore, is twofold: to explain how critically acclaimed Vietnam War narratives have at times
addressed these important questions, and to show how, by ignoring such questions, American literary
culture has been complicit in a reactionary rewriting of the war.
The underlying assumption of this book is that literary texts, as representations of the real world, construct
imaginary social orders and character systems and political economies. These texts are richly implicated
in and are responses to an ongoing ideological struggle. To read these texts is to delve into a war over
historical meaning and, in turn, over what we believe and how we live. Literary culture, though, has
largely

Page 15
overlooked such readings for the sake of an amorphous humanismwhat Stephen Brint labels ''literary
liberalism." To Brint, this liberalism
is a way of seeing and evaluating character, society, and human life through the aesthetic and moral lenses of literature. It is based on
the ability to understand and hold in balance many perspectives, identification with the predicament of many types of human beings, a
sense of the existential issues bearing on men and women, an appreciation of the importance and fatefulness of judgment, insights into
the dark recesses and unexpected generosities of human hearts, and a willingness to consult conscience as a guide. (211)
Literary liberalism has helped make the "timeless" concerns of reviewers and critics seem profound,
while making the timely issues addressed by radical critics seem trivial. This movement away from
historical considerations has significant ideological consequences, particularly when dealing with an
issue as charged as the Vietnam War. Because literary culture as an institution is bound up in and
dependent upon capitalist social relations, it has tended to aestheticize rather than elaborate the historical,
social, and political dynamics of literary texts and has failed to consider that such readings may promote a
much needed political education.

Page 17
1
Commercial Literary Culture

Page 18
In recent years scholars have begun exploring how dominant social groups maintain privilege and achieve
ideological hegemony through cultural products, as well as how subordinate groups sometimes
appropriate and subvert this hegemony. Particular effort has gone into deciphering the institutional
configurations and practices of English studies. Yet professors of English have largely ignored the vast
apparatus that provides them with literary textscommercial literary culture.
The nature of the publishing industry has contributed to this neglect. With negotiations between agents,
authors, and editors conducted in private, and with the details of sales and distribution often relegated to
trade journals and corporate documents, the process by which books are selected, prepared, and
circulated is difficult to investigate in any but an anecdotal manner. The fragmentary and ephemeral nature
of the review process also hinders a systematic understanding of the reception of texts and the
development of critical reputation. Consequently, the scholarly work done in this area has focused on the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has for the most part overlooked contemporary literary culture.
The most significant examination of the works of contemporary literary culture remains Richard Ohmann's
twenty-year-old essay, "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 19601975." Laying out the process that
determines the critical fate of contemporary novels, Ohmann finds that to reach "precanonical" status, a
novel must first be selected by an agent and editor. (In twenty-seven years, Viking allegedly has published
one unsolicited manuscript out of 135,000 submissions, Random House one out of 60,000 [Rodden, 58].
The odds of having an unsolicited manuscript published have been calculated at almost 30,000 to 1
[Unsworth, 683]. Even if these figures are inflated, they nonetheless reveal the important gatekeeping role
played by literary agents and editors.) Next, a book must be promoted by a publishing house's publicity
department, chosen by a review editor (especially the one at the Sunday New York Times Book Review,
read by New York metropolitan book buyers (whose patronage is necessary for commercial success), and
written about by critics at gatekeeper intellectual journals. Based on surveys of leading intellectuals

Page 19
conducted in 1971 and 1991, these gatekeeper journals were, in order of importance:
1971
New York Review of Books
New Republic
New York Times Book Review
New Yorker
Commentary
Saturday Review
Partisan Review
Harpers
1991
New York Review of Books
New York Times Book Review
New Republic
New Yorker
Atlantic and Foreign Affairs
Commentary
Public Interest
Nation
Daedelus
Harpers (Brint, 156)
There have been remarkably few changes in twenty years. But this consistency is a bit misleading, since it
masks the rightward shift in many of these journals, particularly the New York Review of Books and the
New Republic. One can detect here the decline of the New York intellectuals (in the disappearance of
Partisan Review) and the rise of the neoconservatives (in the appearance of Irving Kristol's Public
Interest). The appearance on this list of Foreign Affairs, which regularly publishes essays by the likes of
Henry Kissinger, Caspar Weinberger, George Kennan, Arthur Schlesinger, and Walt Rostow, suggests the
nationalist and capitalist premises that so often shape intellectual debate in the United States. Ultimately,
to reach precanonical status, a book must, after passing through these gatekeeper intellectual journals, be
analyzed by academic critics and taught by college teachers.
This model is neither a permanent nor an all-encompassing description of the process of critical
reception. The vagaries of the market (the fate of the NYTBR, the increasing marginalization of literature,
the

Page 20
development of new technologies, etc.) can change the specifics of Ohmann's model; likewise, literary
reputations may develop outside this scheme. Indeed, the mass media regularly feature stories about the
unlikely success of an obscure title that, against all odds and with virtually no publicity and reviews,
becomes a best seller. Nonetheless, Ohmann's outline remains an accurate model of how, in general,
contemporary novels gain cultural sanction. Ohmann does not, however, identify the mechanisms within
commercial literary culture that marginalize radical discourse.
How a centrist ideology is reproduced within the mass media is explained most cogently in Edward
Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. To Herman and Chomsky, the media function as a
propaganda system that "inculcate[s] individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will
integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society" (1). Information conveyed by the
media is effectively censored because it must pass through a set of news filters: (a) the size, concentrated
ownership, and profit orientation of mass media firms; (b) advertising as primary income source; (c)
reliance upon information provided and "experts" funded by government and business; (d) "flak used to
discipline the media"; and (e) anticommunism. Since in both the publication and reception of texts
commercial literary culture functions within and depends upon the mass media and is thus subject to
similar institutional strictures, Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model can help explain how
contemporary literature is shaped by, received within, and appreciated for its adherence to a liberal-
pluralist ideology.
Like so much else in American commerce, the publishing industry has been increasingly corporatized and
its ownership increasingly concentrated. Of the major independent hardcover book publishers circa 1981,
only W. W. Norton; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Houghton Mifflin; and Crown were not corporate-owned.
With Crown since purchased by Advance Publications and Farrar, Straus & Giroux by the German media
giant Holtzbrinck, Norton and Houghton Mifflin as of this writing remain the only large, independent
hardcover book publishers in the United States. As Forbes magazine declared in 1981 (well before the
recent spate of mergers, layoffs, and imprint and publishing house closings), it is "hard to find an industry
that has been picked cleaner by the conglomerates than book publishing" (quoted in Coser, Kadushin, and
Powell, 372373). Although defenders of the current state of publishing

Page 21
claim 25,000 publishers in the United States, Ben Bagdikian argues that the actual figure "is closer to
2,500 if one counts only American firms that regularly issue one book or more in any year" (19).
Bagdikian goes on to explain that more than half of the book business is held by six firms and that if these
six were equal in strength, they would have revenues of more than $500 million each, while the remaining
2,494 firms, if equal in strength, would have less than $3.5 million each. This leads to numerous
advantages for larger firms, including, according to Bagdikian, "credit from big banks for expansion and
acquisitions, bidding for manuscripts, negotiating and paying for shelf space and window displays in
bookstores which increasingly are owned by national chains, mounting national sales staffs, buying
advertising, and arranging for author interviews in the broadcast media" (19).
As a result, according to Publishers Weekly executive editor Daisy Maryles, "a writer's best shot at the
charts is getting one of the top conglomerates to issue his or her book." Maryles calculates the extent of
conglomerate domination by noting that in 1994 the eight largest publishing firms "account[ed] for 83.9
percent of all the available hardcover positions on the [bestseller] list and 85 percent of all the paperback
positions. The next six publishers bring the share to 92.6 percent for hardcovers and 94 percent for
paperbacks. That doesn't leave much room for the rest of the hundreds or thousands, counting smaller
independent houses of publishing players" (Maryles, "Bestsellers," 580). In 1995 ownership narrowed
even further, with the top seven conglomerates accounting for 87 percent of hardcover slots on the
bestseller list (Maryles, "Winning," 32). The dominance of large firms, along with the decrease in
independent publishing houses and booksellers, means less diversity of opinion and a marginalization of
views that dissent too loudly or depart too radically from the status quo.
Such marginalization occurs not through overt censorship but through institutional sympathy between a
publishing house and its corporate owner. As Bagdikian argues, "In any field, whether the media or
detergents, when most of the business is dominated by a few firms and the remainder of the field is left to
a scattering of dozens or hundreds of smaller firms, it is the few dominant ones who control that market.
With detergents it means higher prices and lowered choice. With the media it means the same thing for
public news, information, ideas and popular culture" (1920). Given the interlocking network of
companies in which publishing houses operate and given the ongoing business arrangements

Page 22
and political maneuverings of these companies, it is unlikely that texts critical of a whole range of issues
from the practices of an individual executive to the geopolitical machinations of conglomerates will be
published, let alone widely marketed and distributed.
Ironically, the greater the sales, profits, and size of conglomerate-owned publishing houses, the greater
the commercial pressures. Herman's observation about the decrease in public service programming on
commercial television networks applies equally to the commercial publishing industry: "larger profits are
capitalized into higher market values, owners expect and demand further profit growth, and the
competitive stakes and pressures rise" ("Market," 53). Thus, although since the 1920s publishing houses'
average profit has been approximately 4 percent, conglomerate-owned houses now frequently demand
profits of 12 to 15 percent (Schiffrin, 30). Even a marginal and academically prestigious publishing house
like Routledge has been affected. While its profit margins were well above average (around 7 percent),
corporate owner International Thomson Publishing, seeking returns of 17 percent or more, laid off scores
of editors and seems to be moving more toward publishing textbooks virtually the only books that
regularly return such substantial profits. With decreasing budgets and increasing pressure to turn a profit,
university presses too have been affected, leading them to fill niches that in a preconglomerate age had
been filled by commercial houses. Nicholas Weir-Williams, director of Northwestern University Press,
notes that "All university presses are trying to get broader audiences. All of us are trying to get books that
used to be published by New York publishers 10 years ago" (quoted in McMillen). University presses
have thus begun to publish serious books intended for a nonacademic audience; according to Phil
Pochoda, they are now publishing "books on topical and public issues, on pop music and pop culture,
memoirs, poetry and even fiction" (13). But as Pochoda also notes, missing from university offerings are
books ''on most political subjects, especially those dealing with class and politics. The end of the cold
war witnessed the virtual disappearance of academic Marxism. No alternative radical political theory has
emerged that might provide the needed academic cover for partisan publishing forays into such politically
controversial areas as poverty, welfare, health or education policy, or that might frame responses to the
right-wing assault on civil liberties in general and on women, racial and ethnic minorities, and labor in
particular" (14). If Pochoda overstates the fate of academic Marxism, he nonetheless

Page 23
identifies a significant trend away from Marxism and class analysis generally within the academy.
In addition, the consolidation of bookstores has limited the fate of even academic books to a mere handful
of book-buyers. According to James Shapiro, "Only two or three specialist buyers now decide which
books make it into hundreds of stores. Where university publishers could once depend on trying to
persuade buyers at a good many independents, a great deal now is at stake in pitching books to the buyers
for Barnes & Noble and Borders." For university presses too small to maintain direct accounts with
chainstores, things are even worse: "they have to go through the one buyer in a particular field at Ingram
Book Co., the giant wholesaler that acts as a middleman between them and booksellers" (McMillen).
Fewer publishers, demand for greater profits, a handful of book-buyers, and a single wholesaler amount
to an even tighter ideological filter and a greater reduction in books of radical critique.
As an example of the sheer size and power of the conglomerates that own publishing houses, I turn to
National Amusements, a conglomerate headed by telecommunications mogul Sumner Redstone. Among its
holdings are publishing companies (Simon & Schuster, Prentice-Hall, Allyn & Bacon, Pocket Books,
Macmillan Publishing USA, and The Free Press); TV networks (MTV, VH-1, USA, UPN, BET,
Showtime, The Movie Channel, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and the Sci-Fi Channel); TV stations (in
San Francisco, Shreveport, Hartford, Rochester, and Albany); radio stations (in New York, Chicago, Los
Angeles, St. Louis, Houston, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle); video production companies (Gulf &
Western Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Spelling Entertainment, and Viacom); Blockbuster Video
(4,100 stores) and Blockbuster Music (550 stores); and more than 1,200 motion picture theaters
worldwide. Similarly, Advance Publications also owns Random House, Vintage, Pantheon, Knopf, and
Ballantine Books; the Birmingham News, New Orleans Times Picayune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
Newark Star-Ledger, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Oregonian newspapers; business weeklies in thirty-
five cities; Architectural Digest, Details, Glamour, GQ, Mademoiselle, Parade, Vanity Fair, Vogue,
and The New Yorker magazines; the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, and cable franchises
reaching 4.5 million households (see Ledbetter, "Merge Overkill" and Miller, "Free the Media").
At the risk of stating the obvious, large commercial publishing firms with ties to multiple corporate
enterprises do not feverishly pursue books

Page 24
critical of capitalism, let alone those that advocate its dismantling. As the intricate web of ownership and
partnership grows, the likelihood of such books seeing publication decreases. With pressure to maximize
profits, publishers more than ever must attempt to anticipate and reflect broad public sentiment, hence the
move away from modest-selling books toward blockbusters. While the rewards of successful
blockbusters are great, so are the losses brought on by multi-million-dollar advances and massive printing
runs. The failure of potential blockbusters results in a vicious cycle in which publishing houses seek even
bigger books, risk greater losses, and are forced to eliminate midlist books (some of which are picked up
by academic presses). Commercialism itself, then, is a significant filter, marginalizing and even excluding
books thought insufficiently reflective of popular interest, hence insufficiently profitable. For instance,
Carole Gallagher speaks of the difficulty she had finding a publisher for American Ground Zero: The
Secret Nuclear War, an examination of the effects of nuclear testing upon soldiers, test-site workers, and
populations living downwind from nuclear tests in six western states. Gallagher says, with only slight
hyperbole, "I went to every publisher in the Western world and they turned my book down because, until
MIT Press, they said it was a bummer, too expensive, or just too depressing" (quoted in Hennelly, 60).
The rejection of a manuscript because it is "too depressing" is at root ideologicalespecially when this
depressing content reflects the actions of a government more interested in maintaining nuclear supremacy,
maximizing corporate profit, and building a national security state than in protecting its citizens' health.
Another explanation for this aversion to material that is "too depressing" is that commercialism requires
optimism and reassurance; ideally, consumers are to be put in a positive, spending mood (hence the
upbeat endings of news broadcasts). Leftist critique, because it identifies suffering, injustice, and
exploitation and because it assaults comforting myths and falsehoods, is likely to seem too depressing. A
story about retarded children being fed radioactive isotopes is not likely to inspire viewers to run out for
a happy meal. Refusing to publish a book because it is too depressing effectively recasts ideological
exclusion as commercial common sense.
In justifying their refusal to publish certain texts, publishers may also claim that a book is too difficult. It
may be that a book is genuinely too difficult for a wide audience. But a book's "difficulty" may also be
short-hand

Page 25
for its unfamiliarity. With conventional wisdom trumpeted incessantly through the mass media and with
counterarguments and evidence ignored or misrepresented, even relatively simple political arguments
may appear strange or disconcerting. Since leftist critique by its very nature exists outside the framework
of public discourse and challenges its premises, it will often be viewed as difficult, hence uncommercial.
We can only speculate about the many books that meet with such resistance and are not published or are
published by obscure presses and effectively silenced. To Jason Epstein, former Random House vice
president and founder of the New York Review of Books, "there is finally a point beyond which a
publisher cannot go against the tide. Eventually he risks drowning" (quoted in Kostelanetz, 68). Due to
their desire for maximum profits, conglomerate-owned publishing houses are even more likely to be
constrained by mainstream opinion. Such opinion is not static; at times, particularly in the early 1930s and
late 1960s, the public zeitgeist shifted leftward, and the publishing industry reflected this shift. Chris
Faatz notes that "During the sixties and seventies, corporate publishing was rife with books on the New
Left, the civil rights struggles of African-Americans and other peoples of color and the rise of the
women's movement" (915). These historical moments were short-lived, however, and were followed by
periods of attack, revision, and recrimination.
In his important (and overlooked) book on corporate propaganda, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy,
Alex Carey identifies three such moments: the pre-World War I Americanization program launched in
1912, the post-World War II anticommunist crusade, and the post-Vietnam assault upon left activism and
its attendant critique of business. The first of these was a response to the massive immigration of
18901910, to muckraking journalism and trust-busting legislation, and to the growth of organized labor, in
particular the IWW. The elaborate business-promoted and government-supported nativist response to
these developments, culminating in the Great Red Scare of 19181919, established the thoroughly pro-
business climate of the 1920s. The post-World War II anticommunist crusade was a belated response to
the creeping socialism of the New Deal, the belief, in Carey's words, "that U.S. society had been under
continuous subversion by the Democrats ever since Roosevelt introduced his New Deal policy in 1933"
(65), as well as a response to the threat posed to the free-enterprise system by global communism. Carey
notes that by 1948, "American business's anti-New

Page 26
Deal/socialist/communist propaganda campaign was costing $100 million a year for such advertising
alone" (79). This business-led assault culminated in the purgings and censorship and paranoia of
McCarthyism. The most recent of these assaults, which was a response to the excessive democracy of the
1960s, saw expenditures on grassroots corporate propaganda reach a billion dollars per annum by 1978
and culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan and the ever-widening assault on progressive, even
modestly liberal policies. To Carey, "As in 191921 and 194650 so in 197680: complete business
hegemony over American society was reestablished" (95).
Because the publishing industry is now dominated by media conglomerates, and because there exists an
inevitable if broad sympathy between a publishing firm and its products, we are unlikely to see renewed
interest in leftist discourse on any significant scale within the publishing industry. I am not suggesting that
large firms will not publish leftist books, merely that such books will be published infrequently and
distributed narrowly. The rightward tilt of corporate publishing is plain to see, as former Pantheon
managing editor Andr Schiffrin explains:
In the United States, the political nature of books has changed drastically since the conglomerates acquired so many houses. Harper,
Random House and Simon & Schuster were once bastions of New Deal liberalism. Yet the current output of U.S. publishing is
markedly to the right. The editors involved are still basically the same people; one must assume that they are responding to new
pressures. Indeed, one of the major reasons my colleagues and I left Pantheon was the clear directive from the new Random House
management that we should move away from the kind of political publishing for which Pantheon had been known, that we should
consider books from the right instead. one has only to look at the Random House lists five years later to see the degree to which it has
abandoned critical political and social commentary. The same thing is happening throughout the publishing industry. (31)
As a consequence, Schiffrin notes, "In 1992, during the presidential election, there were virtually no
books published for the general reader dealing with the major issues facing American citizensNAFTA,
national health insurance, the future of the welfare systemother than those taking a right-wing viewpoint,
often subsidized by conservative foundations and then published by major conglomerates" (3132). Most
book editors would probably assert they have never been told what they could or could not publish.
Richard Snyder, former president of Simon & Schuster, declared, "I know what the truth is, whether I'm
owned by Gulf &

Page 27
Western or not. I know that not one book we've put out has been tampered with as far as the content of the
book is concerned. I know that we are totally independent" (quoted in Whiteside, 121). This assertion
would seem to be called into question, however, by Simon & Schuster's cancellation of Corporate
Murder, in which author Mark Dowie examined corporate decision-making generally, and in particular
Ford's design of the Pinto and its notoriously dangerous gas tank. According to Bagdikian, although senior
editor Nan Talese and her staff supported the book, "neither the title nor the book was acceptable. Talese
reported that the president of Simon & Schuster, Richard Snyder, was vehemently opposed to the
manuscript because, among other reasons, he felt it made all corporations look bad" (30). (Simon &
Schuster also demanded to see a copy of Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly before publication and argued
unsuccessfully for deletions.) Bagdikian does not suggest that direct pressure was applied by Gulf &
Western; instead, he argues that corporate influence occurs "without any pressure, it is natural and
inevitable that important people in a media subsidiary will be conscious of who their owners are"
(quoted in Wiener, 750).
This understanding of the ideological limits of mainstream publishing firms is not far-fetched conspiracy
theory. There have been instances in which books were refused publication for strictly ideological
reasons. Such was the case with Counter-Revolutionary Violence, a critique of U.S. foreign policy by
Herman and Chomsky that was to be published in 1973 by Warner Modular, Inc., a subsidiary of Warner
Communications. According to Claude McCaleb, after Warner Publishing president William Sarnoff read
an advance copy, he "immediately launched into a violent verbal attack saying, among other things, that
[Counter-Revolutionary Viloence] was a pack of lies, a scurrilous attack on respected Americans,
undocumented, a publication unworthy of a serious publisher. He then announced that he had ordered the
printer not to release a single copy and that the [book] would not be published" (quoted in Bagdikian,
3334). Sarnoff had ads for this book canceled, and ordered both the Warner catalog listing the
Herman/Chomsky book and the entire 10,000-copy press run of Counter-Revolutionary Violence
destroyed. Christopher Hitchens narrates the fate of Counter-Revolutionary Violence: "[All] copies
might have been pulped if it were not for a legally binding contract. Instead they were sold to an obscure
outfit named MSS Information Corporation, whereupon Warner washed its hands of the entire deal and of
all responsibility for advertising, promotion, and

Page 28
distribution." Similarly, in 1979, McGraw-Hill published Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of
Iran, an account of the overthrow of Iranian premier Mohammed Mossadegh written by former CIA
officer Kermit Roosevelt. Roosevelt asserted that the coup had been undertaken at the behest of the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Upon receiving complaints from British Petroleum, successor to AIOC,
McGraw-Hill recalled the book from stores and reviewers (Bagdikian, 39). Another example of
corporate pressure affecting a book's publication is Marc Elliot's Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark
Prince, signed by Bantam in 1989 and dropped in 1991. (It was eventually published by Birch Lane
Press/Carol Publishing.) Jon Wiener speculates that Eliot's book was killed because Bantam had
contracted with Disney to publish children's book versions of Disney movies (744).
One should not be surprised by the infrequency of overt censorship. There are many steps a manuscript
must negotiate in the publication process, any one of which might prevent its eventual publication. Many if
not most radical books will have been eliminated from consideration by major publishing houses long
before contracts are offered or manuscripts edited. Also, it takes only a few such prominent incidents to
reveal the bounds of acceptable discourse. The persistent affirmation of the dominant ideology by the
mainstream publishing industry is due not to commands issued by media moguls or cultural commissars
but to the editors and officers of publishing houses having to some extent internalized the values of the
corporations for which they work.
As for the absence of works of fiction from the above discussion, I suspect fiction is thought less serious,
less in need of intervention, less directly critical or explicitly political. Also, literary tradition and
prevailing critical orthodoxies have promoted a model of fiction that privileges the individual
imagination and denigrates as polemical literary texts that identify specific social ills and encourage
radical activism. This model has engendered a form of self-censorship, authors shaping their writings to
fit what they perceive are the ideological parameters of mainstream publishing. As Russell Berman
writes, "no matter how literary production and consumption may be reciprocally determined, the nature of
production has its own definite consequences: authors who understand themselves as employees
dependent on publishing houses with precise marketing strategies will choose to write in certain ways"
(56). And these certain ways are not likely to challenge the publishing industry's liberal-pluralist
ideology.

Page 29
Unlike the news media, book publishers do not depend upon advertising revenue. Nonetheless,
advertising still serves as a filter, affecting the kinds of books published and the manner in which they are
received. For although book publishers may not depend upon advertising revenue, related companies
within media conglomerates do. Thus, when Prentice-Hall arranged to have Gerard Colby Zelig's Du
Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain made a selection of the Fortune Book Club (which belonged to Time,
Inc. and which was administered by the Book-of-the-Month-Club), Du Pont complained to Time, the
Fortune Book Club canceled its contract, and Prentice-Hall stopped promoting Zelig's book. According to
Richard H. Rea, a representative of Du Pont, Prentice-Hall general counsel William Daly revealed that
the Book-of-the-Month Club "had notified Prentice-Hall that, after further pressure from Du Pont, they
were cancelling their agreement. Daly said the pressure consisted of threats of litigation and cancellation
of all of Du Pont advertising in Time, Life and Fortune" (quoted in Bagdikian, 38). Similarly, in 1968
Reader's Digest Association was prepared to publish a book critical of the advertising industryThe
Permissible Liethrough its subsidiary Funk & Wagnalls. Reader's Digest Association canceled this book,
according to Bagdikian, because "the association presumably felt threatened by loss of advertising from
its magazine if its book subsidiary offended the advertising industry" (163).
Like other industries, book publishing has seen many layoffs and salary reductions in recent years. Said an
anonymous publishing company employee in 1994, "all the jobs seem to be residing in three companies,
and even that is so uncertain now." This source was unnamed, according to the New York Times, because
employees "were forbidden to speak disparagingly of the company in public, or they would forfeit their
severance packages" (Lyall). In such a climate, editors will be even more circumspect about what they
publish and will be more aware of the risks they run when publishing books critical of the liberal-
pluralist consensus.
Another way the concentrated ownership and narrow ideology of large publishing firms affect the
reception of contemporary novels is through the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR), which remains
the most important determinant of a book's commercial fateespecially the fate of books with serious
literary pretensions. Its influence is clearly recognized by the publishing industry: each of the major
publishing houses devotes more than 50 percent of its advertising budget to the NYTBR. According to
Ohmann, "The New York Times Book Review had about a

Page 30
million and a half readers, several times the audience of any other literary periodical. Among them were
most bookstore managers, deciding what to stock, and librarians, deciding what to buy, not to mention the
well-to-do, well-educated east-coasters who led in establishing hardback bestsellers. The single most
important boost a novel could get was a prominent review in the Sunday New York Times" (Politics,
7172). Although there is not an absolute connection between favorable reception in the NYTBR and a
book's lasting critical reputation, the public and critical prominence gained from such reception is an
important initial step in defining what in contemporary literature is worth serious scholarly
attentionaccording to Julie Hoover and Charles Kadushin, 75 percent of elite intellectuals read the
NYTBR (Ohmann, Politics, 74). If agents, editors, and publishers are the obstacles a book must negotiate
in order to be published, the NYTBR is the most significant early test of a book's critical worth, of its
potential to reach precanonical status.
Praise from the NYTBR is not a prerequisite for critical respect; other newspapers and journals, as well
as academic critics, also help determine a book's reputation. (And new venues for critical attention, such
as Oprah Winfrey's book club, are bound to appear.) It is not praise so much as recognition by the NYTBR
that contributes to a book's sales, to its being considered worthy of review by others, and to its being
published as a paperback. The latter is vital if a text is to remain available for critical evaluation and
study. Thus, according to Ohmann, "the single most important boost a novel could get was a prominent
review in the Sunday New York Timesbetter a favorable one than an unfavorable one, but better an
unfavorable one than none at all" (Politics, 72).
The NYTBR serves as a kind of cultural clearinghouse, sorting through the approximately 45,000 books
published yearly in the United States, 4,000 of which are works of fiction (Norman, 22) and identifying
those worth serious attention. In so doing, it naturalizes the values of mainstream publishing culture. In
other words, the NYTBR reaffirms and gives cultural sanction to the world view of the professional-
managerial classwhat Brint defines as knowledge-based professional elites: "people who earn at least a
middling income from the application of a relatively complex body of knowledge" (4)that dominates
American book publishing. Because books published by larger houses are more likely to fall within the
dominant ideological frame, because the NYTBR concentrates on books from these larger firms, and
because the NYTBR plays such a determining role in the development of literary reputation, the process by

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which contemporary novels are granted cultural sanction encourages a centrist politics that rarely
questions capitalist or nationalist premises.
The sympathy between the NYTBR and the mainstream publishing industry is due to the shared class and
cultural backgrounds of reviewers, editors, authors, and agents. But it is due as well to the Book Review's
dependence on advertising revenue. A 1968 study found an almost direct correlation between the amount
a publisher advertised and the review space accorded its books by the NYTBR. (It should come no
surprise, then, that since 1980 the New York Times has reviewed only three books from South End and
one apiece from Common Courage and Monthly Review presses.) Advertising appears to affect what will
and will not be reviewed in the New York Times (and in many other newspapers). Newspaper reviews,
especially the NYTBR, establish a book's initial reception, help determine its sales (thus keeping it in
print), and help develop its critical reputation. That a book's being reviewed depends in part on
advertising, therefore, is one more indication that the size and wealth of publishing firms and the biases of
a market economy influence the shaping of the literary canon and the creation of cultural capital.
Also constraining discourse are the restrictions inherent in the magazines and newspapers that publish
book reviews. Lack of review space (most newspapers review no more than three or four books per
week) and the need, especially in magazines like Time and Newsweek, to review recent best sellers (a
need exacerbated by the financial demands and consequent mass entertainment biases of media
conglomerates) means that scholarly texts, let alone texts that exceed the ideological boundaries of the
mass media, receive little attention from commercial culture.
Book reviewers in large-circulation magazines and newspapers are likely to share, in broad outline, the
ideology of the periodicals for which they write, and these periodicals are likely to fit within the
spectrum of acceptable public discourse. For an example of how public scholarship reflects the
prevailing ideology, consider the case of China scholarship in the 1950s. In response to the fall of China
and the subsequent McCarthy backlash, there was, according to Peter Steinfels, "a nearly complete change
in the scholars reviewing China studies for the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. At
these two papers, the group who had done over 80 percent of the reviewing in this field between 1945
and 1950 reviewed not a single book after 1952" (67). A similar change occurred in the New York
Review of Books, which flirted with radicalism during the 1960s by publishing essays by the likes of
Noam Chomsky

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and Stokely Carmichael and which was red-baited for doing so. (To Tom Wolfe, the Review was ''the
chief theoretical organ of radical chic," and to Walter Goodman, now New York Times television critic, it
was "cocktail party revolutionary"; Esquire asserted that "from among [its] auhors the next Stalin and his
speechwriters will emerge"quoted in Nobile, 7, 5, 126). The Review has since moved steadily to the
right. By the 1990s, it helped legitimize the perception that universities were being terrorized by rampant
"political correctness", notably by publishing C. Vann Woodward's favorable review of Dinesh D'Souza's
Illiberal Education.
The role of commercial literary culture in creating a canon and developing literary reputations depends
upon two sets of experts: those who construct and market books (agents, editors, and marketing staff) and
those who evaluate books (reviewers and critics). I have already discussed many of the ideological
constraints imposed upon and internalized by the former group. Reviewers and criticswho define the
formal characteristics that determine literary merit, explicate such features, and place literary works
within various genres, conventions, and traditionslikewise function as an ideological barrier. By
privileging imagery and language, experts can downplay a text's social dynamics; by showing how these
formal devices encourage multiple and often contradictory meanings, experts can suggest the naivet of
political formulas and the richness and complexity of the individual imagination; and by focusing on a
few, exclusive traditions, experts can marginalize countertraditions and their potentially alternative
ideologies. A book's political import can be hindered obliquely, by downplaying its social commentary
and praising its formal qualities, or overtly, by repudiating its ideology. In other words, reviewers by and
large reinforce modernist assumptions of critical value, championing complex and sophisticated
narratives at the expense of schematic and dogmatic ones and valuing the individual and timeless human
struggle over social struggles against specific injustices. I am not suggesting that consideration of a book's
aesthetics precludes analysis of its politics; rather, I argue that reviewers tend to focus on aesthetics at the
expense of a book's politics. Similarly, Brint argues that discourse in center-liberal periodicals follows a
cognitive frame whose "predominant style is based on synthesis, elegant writing, and an 'unusual' or
'interesting' perspective. Close observation, fullness, and breadth are prized characteristics. it is more
important to 'say something worthwhile and interesting'to educate the sensibilitiesthan it is

Page 33
to take a stance as the 'guardian of values,' no matter whether these values are threatened, ignored, or
widely acclaimed" (163).
To demonstrate how reviewers sometimes function as an ideological filter, I turn to the critical reception
of two works by the contemporary American novelist Richard Powers: The Gold Bug Variations and
Operation Wandering Soul. The Gold Bug Variations was accorded ample praise by the literary-critical
establishment; it was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and was chosen book-of-the-
year by Time. This praise was directed almost exclusively at its intellectual breadth and linguistic and
structural inventiveness, with virtually no discussion of the book's social critique. USA Today described
The Gold Bug Variations as "both a homage to high art and an intricate mystery," Kirkus spoke of "the
mysteries of love and the passionate pursuit of knowledge," while the New York Times declared it "a
cerebral quest for a philosophical heffalump" (James, 9). Yet in the midst of his philosophical quest,
Powers shows how market-determined social relations thwart community. The novel's central characters
are alienated from the culture at large, their social contact consisting of little more than "checkout clerks,
the muffled sadism from upstairs and a host of cheerful, limited-time phone offers" (228). They must
ignore the "fifteen million adjacent catastrophes,'' must "consign entire boroughs to misery beyond
addressing," and must step "gingerly over a baseball-batted body at the top of the subway stairs" (291).
The novel's central device, an elaborate reflection upon the similarities between Bach's Goldberg
Variations and the genetic code, is meant to make us aware of the interdependence of lifea vital concern at
a time when "the whole community is about to go under, pulled in by our error. Why," Powers asks, "do
we want to revoke the contract, scatter it like a nuisance cobweb, simplify it with asphalt?" (325).
Powers attempts to provide us with a vision of the world that is grounded in biology and genetics, one
that may help us overcome apathy and ignorance and lead us to revere natural creation. It is his hope that
"anyone who once adds up the living number must act ecologically, commensally forever" (326). Critical
praise for The Gold Bug Variations, however, has paid scant attention to its political urgency, focusing
instead upon its structural complexity and linguistic inventiveness. Such priorities are commonplace in the
culture of book reviewing. By emphasizing aesthetic merits and downplaying the political merit of literary
texts, reviewers and critics have promoted a literature and an appreciation of literary

Page 34
texts that diminishes whatever small potential literature may still have to effect social change.
Operation Wandering Soul, although a finalist for the National Book Award, was not so consistently
praised. While some of this criticism was directed at the book's perceived failings (especially its
daunting complexity and linguistic excess), some also was aimed at Powers's social critique. For
Operation Wandering Soul is an indictment of the murderous effects of consumer culture (particularly
upon a group of children at a charity hospital in contemporary Los Angeles), of the lethal consequences of
U.S. imperialism in southeast Asia, and of the brutal treatment of children throughout history. An example
of Powers's often frank social critique is his description of Bangkok: "a skylined, sprawling runaway,
AIDS-infested needle nest. It had become a child-peddling shambles. Some hundred thousand juvenile
whores of both sexes made a living in the place, the murder capital of the exotic East, the Golden
Triangle's peddler, catamite to the slickest of tourist classes, gutted by CarniCruze junkets and
semiconductor sweat shops, glistening in fat postcolonialism, clear-cutting its irreplaceable upcountry
forest to support its habit" (309). There are many similar passages that brutally critique the suffering
wrought by capitalism. To repudiate this critique, Bruce Bawer in the Washington Post asserts that
"Powers divides people too neatly into good and bad, and does so along crude, politically correct lines,
aligning himself throughout with the received ideas of today's academic establishment." For Lee Lescaze
in the Wall Street Journal, "Mr. Powers decries the brutalization of children by man and disease. That is
not a case that needs much arguing. It is hard to think of another novel in which such a sophisticated
presentation wraps such a simple core." Lescaze also points to "an addedand clichdburden": the notion
that the central character's father "was a government agent who wrought evil in Indochina and elsewhere
on behalf of the U.S.'' (Besides the world view of critics, Lescaze's evaluation suggests the American
exceptionalism that reigns within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, since Lescaze was himself a
prominent foreign correspondent.)
According to these critics, to demonstrate the effects of social injustice in contemporary America is
crude, to decry the brutalization of children simplistic, and to reveal the global terror created by U.S.
foreign policy clichd. Ideological objections are offered as aesthetic judgment. Bawer and Lescaze do
not say they object to Powers's critique but to its dogmatic and unsophisticated nature; they make political
arguments meant

Page 35
to discredit Operation Wandering Soul and to discourage further critique under the guise of aesthetic
evaluationPowers's critique lacks subtlety and originality. But it is unclear how one might effectively use
subtlety to address the global suffering caused by gross inequity in wealth and power, especially in a
culture so benumbed by commercialism. Similarly, one might wonder what the value of originality is if
the suffering of children and the consequences of U. S. militarism are seen as clichs.
Books are commonly denounced for their "bias"i. e., they are seen as simplistic, dogmatic, unoriginal, and
unimaginative. Such denunciations of overtly ideological books are commonplace for mainstream book
reviewers, as revealed in the following reviews from the New York Times. To Foreign Policy editor
Alan Tonelson, in a review of Turning the Tide, Noam Chomsky's "one-dimensional interpretation of
American foreign policy" and "blanket condemnation reflects a failure to think of United States national
interests in a Hobbesian world in which tragic choices are sometimes unavoidable." To Karen Pennar,
Richard Barnett and John Cavanaugh in Global Dreams ''do a creditable job of introducing the uninitiated
to the ways in which multinational corporations operate across borders"; unfortunately, "These are not
new arguments." To Harper's magazine editor Michael Pollan, although Michael Parenti in Inventing
Reality "provides a valuable rebuttal to the drumbeat of criticism of the news media from the right" and
"shows how even the press's putative objectivity can contribute to unbalanced coverage," he "paints the
press in such broad, Marxist strokes that he ignores many details." Parenti is "so simplistic and
doctrinaire in accounting for this bias," Pollan writes, "that he makes his book easy to dismiss." Not just
this book, one might add, since of the many books Parenti has authored between 1980 and 1997, only
Inventing Reality was deemed worthy of review by the New York Times. The answer to the problems of
simplicity, dogmatism, unoriginality, and unimaginativeness, according to reviewers, is clear. Chomsky
should recognize that the United States has "brought record prosperity to the people of the industrialized
world [and] to South Korea, Taiwan and others and [has] permitted all of these populations to exercise
unprecedented control over their destinies" (Tonelson). Likewise, Barnett and Cavanaugh should
recognize that "American culture and American products are emphatically not being force-fed around the
world" and that "as world economic growth rises, consumer spending does too" (Pennar). And Parenti
should acknowledge the media's "courage and independence during Vietnam and Watergate"

Page 36
(Pollan). In other words, to escape ideological biases, radical critiques like these should acknowledge
the benevolence of U.S. foreign policy, the benefits of global capitalism, and the brave autonomy of the
corporate media.
Frequently, denunciations of a book's ideology appear as a criticism of a book's language and style. Thus
Nicholas Lemann, writing in the New Republic, declares Herman and Chomsky's argument (in
Manufacturing Consent) to be "delivered in the leaden prose of a sectarian tract. Though they use the
word 'Orwellian' a lot, they write in exactly the ideological style that Orwell so perfectly parodied" (36).
Similarly, in his review of Anatomy of a War for the New York Times Book Review, David Oshinsky
finds Gabriel Kolko's writing "reminiscent of the war itselfbleak, redundant, interminable," and his book
"loaded with eye-glazing rhetoric about imperialism, class protest and revolutionary values." Note that
Lemann's and Oshinsky's objections (like Bawer's and Lescaze's to Operation Wandering Soul) are
dressed as aesthetic evaluations: it is not Herman and Chomsky's politics, not their critique of the
unacknowledged ideology of the mass media that Lemann objects to but their "leaden prose" and
''ideological style." But since Herman and Chomsky set out to write an overtly ideological book, one that
attempts to identify the hidden ideology of the mass media, they would seem to have had little choice but
to use an ideological style. Likewise, in writing a book critical of U.S. imperialism and sympathetic to
Vietnamese communism, Kolko was necessarily bound to use such rhetoric as "imperialism," "class
protest," and so forth. In wishing for a less ideological style and a more lively rhetoric, Lemann and
Oshinsky actually want the normative, ostensibly nonideological "style" and "rhetoric" of liberal-pluralist
discourse.
To express uncertainty and to appreciate the values of opposing arguments, for reviewers, is to recognize
the complex and untidy nature of the world as it really is. Yet in calling for books that are unbiased and
nonideological, uncertain and complex, literary culture is actually asking for books that fall within the
parameters of acceptable discourse, books that reinforce liberal-pluralist and capitalist democracy.
Commercial literary culture rejects and repudiates as biased any discourse indecorous enough to
acknowledge its own ideology, rather than to disguise this ideology (in the manner of liberalism) as
common sense. It is true, of course, that commercial literary culture is more receptive to radical discourse
than the mass media generally and that, notwithstanding the constraints

Page 37
imposed by the concentrated ownership of publishing houses and by commercialism, such texts do get
published, distributed, and reviewed. The point is not that there is a prohibition on radical discourse but
that the practices of commercial literary culture make such discourse infrequent and force it through a
number of filters whose effect is to limit, ridicule, criticize, and marginalize. These barriers preclude (or
make extremely difficult) the stitching together of a coherent counter-hegemonic narrative, one that might
contribute to an active, radically egalitarian politics.

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2
Academic Literary Culture

Page 40
Academic literary study takes place within a bourgeois institution meant to reproduce existing social
relations through the training of an educated class. School is, in Louis Althusser's well-known
formulation, an ideological state apparatus that "teaches in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling
ideology" (133). Or as Richard Ohmann explains, "Society needs help from the schools to justify its
present divisions, including much inequality. There is pressureindirect but heavyon teachers of literature
to join in this effort. The ruling classes want a culture, including a literature and a criticism, that supports
the social order and discourages rebellion, while it sanctions all kinds of nonthreatening noncomformity"
(English in America, 2425). To the extent that the literary canon is a standard feature of undergraduate
education and familiarity with some part of it is required of many students, it is likely to support the
existing social order and discourage rebellion. Therefore, for the canon to be sanctioned by the academic
literary establishment (however it may be configured vis--vis gender, race, and nation), neither its
content nor its dominant interpretations should seriously challenge liberal-pluralist belief. The literary
canon or any body of knowledge widely taught within universities and assented to by an academic
discipline (by its elite members, official organizations, prominent journals, etc.) is likely to inculcate
students in, and reflect the values of, the professional-managerial class. The central question then
becomes: how within the relative freedom of the academy are such constraints enforced? How is "indirect
but heavy pressure" applied and "nonthreatening nonconformity" maintained?
One means of limiting radical discourse in the academy is through specialization/disciplinarity. Because
of the proprietary nature and specialized requirements of academic disciplines, it is difficult to publish
outside official areas of expertise. Literary scholars, it is presumed, are ill equipped to analyze much
more than literary texts and the narrow historical and cultural background out of which these texts emerge.
Thus, notes Edward Said, when someone like Noam Chomsky "tries to represent U.S. foreign policy from
an adversarial standpoint, the recognized experts on foreign policy try to prevent his speaking on the basis
of his

Page 41
lack of certification as a foreign policy expert. There is little refutation offered his arguments; just the
statement that he stands outside acceptable debate or consensus" (Representations, 7980). That some
radical thought has crept into the humanities suggests how inconsequential the humanities have become.
Those disciplines with access to wealth and power business, economics, and the applied sciences (in the
postwar period, less than ten percent of federal grants to universities have gone to the social sciences and
humanities [Brint 95]) are also the most conservative spheres of professional activity. Not surprisingly,
these professionals seldom acknowledge, let alone focus on the means by which capitalism reproduces
inequality. This failure is understandable, given these disciplines' dependence on government and
corporate funding in the form of research grants, scholarships, endowed chairs, consulting fees, new
technologies, even academic buildings. (An example of this surrender to capital can be found in Michigan
State University's new business school. According to Lawrence Soley, "The second floor of the building
is named after the Kresge Foundation, a 350-seat lecture hall is named for the Ford Motor Company, the
fourth floor is named for a Toyota dealer, the fifth floor is named for the Chrysler Corporation, and the
MBA lounge is named for the First of Michigan Corp" [71]). Division by academic discipline, therefore,
is one means of isolating radical discourse, of creating the illusion of a range of opinion while confining
radicals to marginal fields with relatively little access to power.
In addition, the hierarchical structure of disciplines helps perpetuate a nonthreatening orthodoxy. To win
approval from faculty when a student, from colleagues when untenured, and from peers when publishing,
one must follow the unspoken policies and underlying beliefs within a discipline. Patrick Hogan identifies
how ideology is reinforced through disciplinary specialization:
specialization guilds function to regulate production and consumption, to the benefit of their members. Principally they do this through
the control exercised by their members in specialized journals, review committees for special topics in journals of broader scope,
review committees for book manuscripts submitted to presses, as well as through conferences, awards, book reviews, citation
practices within articles, and so on. professional systems of "expertise" function to confine professional discussion within quite narrow
bounds. (198)
Accordingly, literary studies is concerned primarily with certifying proficiency in the "professional
discussion" of literature. "Nobody is especially

Page 42
concerned about what you say, with what extreme, moderate, radical or conservative positions you
adopt," Terry Eagleton writes, "provided that they are compatible with, and can be articulated within a
specific form of discourse. It is just that certain meanings and positions will not be articulable within it"
(Literary Theory, 201). In other words, while seeming to hold universal standards little concerned with
political content, the conventions of professional discussion within academic disciplines reinforce
nonthreatening nonconformity and marginalize radical discourse. Disciplinary practice is inescapably
ideological.
Orthodoxy is reinforced as well, especially within the last twenty years, by the hierarchical structure of
the academic workforce, with its core of tenured professors and periphery of graduate students and
temporary, often part-time adjuncts. The latter serve as a reserve labor pool that limits the number and
expense of full-time workers, undermines job security, maintains worker subservience, gives employers
greater flexibility, and hinders worker solidarity. In the face of this large reserve of replacement workers,
disciplinary orthodoxy is even less likely to be challenged.
Training and credentialing is another aspect of the guild system that helps constrain discourse. In
dependent positions, with current and future livelihoods on the line, graduate students are pressured to
internalize or at least mimic (and certainly not too vocally oppose) accepted disciplinary practice. Junior
faculty likewise must negotiate a probationary period in the form of tenure that encourages adherence to
disciplinary/professional standards. Untenured assistant professors occupy an uncertain position within a
system that, in Paul Lauter's words, "produces tremendous pressures to behave, not to get organized, to
devote themselves to 'appropriate' scholarly activities" (203). (As is always the case in arguments about
the maintenance of a dominant ideology, however, there is space for exceptions. The authors of books and
dissertations that challenge disciplinary orthodoxy may in fact reap professional rewards. These
infrequent exceptions, though, should not be understood as evidence of academic disciplines' openness to
radical discourse. Nor should the appearance of token radicals be taken to mean that disciplines are
meritocratic in any important way.) The structure of academic departments, where temporary and junior
faculty depend on favorable evaluations from supervisors and "peers," produces a climate in which
conforming to professional norms is frequently a requirement for continued employment. To exhibit
"unprofessional" behavior, behavior

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that violates unspoken ideological boundaries, may mean being denied tenure, and being driven to the
margins ofor even permanently expelled fromthe profession.
Both journalists and academics, then, often honestly assert their maverick independence while producing
work that rarely flouts convention or institutional common sense. Despite their many differences,
commercial journalists and college teachers have in common an institutional structure that encourages
conformityor what Ohmann describes as "nonthreatening nonconformity." Recognizing the similarity
between journalists and academics, Chomsky argues that
a talented young journalist or a student aiming for a scholarly career can choose to play the game by the rules, with the prospect of
advancement to a position of prestige and privilege and sometimes even a degree of power; or to choose an independent path, with the
likelihood of a minor post as a police reporter or in a community college, exclusion from major journals, vilification and abuse, or driving
a taxi cab. Given such choices, the end result is not surprising. (quoted in M. Rai, 4243)
But it is not only fear of being replaced that keeps academics from radical critique. As in the general
economywhere the dream of success through hard work persists against a backdrop of downsizing, temp
jobs, and wage stagnationso in the academy many graduate students, adjuncts, and professors at less
prestigious schools believe in a meritocratic system that rewards exemplary individuals. Although they
may speak cynically about the profession, most academics continue to believe that hard work and
intelligence can lead to significant professional success. Belief in "meritocracy" and "affinity for the
values of autonomy and self-direction," notes Stephen Brint, are defining characteristics of the
professional-managerial strata. One cannot overestimate the extent to which this myth of upward
mobilitythis belief that with enough and the right kind of publications, with positive student and peer
evaluations, and with diligent professionalism one can secure a fulfilling, full-time, tenure-track
positionkeeps exploited and marginalized academics from disagreeing too forcefully with institutional
belief.
This pressure to conform is not generated exclusively from within the academy. Because much of their
funding comes from the state, academics must also be sensitive to public criticism. Flak from politicians,
pundits, and journalists helps constrain academic discourse. In recent years, of course, considerable flak
has been directed at literary studies. A concern

Page 44
as trivial as the makeup of the literary canon received much media attention, spurred on by conservatives
like Alan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza. Following their lead, William A. Henry III, writing in Time,
described the academy as an upside-down world and asked us to "imagine a literature class that equates
Shakespeare and the novelist Alice Walker" (66); Henry bemoaned the fact that "Western cultural and
social values [are] so out of favor in the classroom when so much of the rest of the world has moved to
embrace them" (68). Newsweek ridiculed the notion that the literary "canon perpetuates the power of
'dead white males' over women and blacks from beyond the grave" (Adler, 54). For the New Republic,
"the 'multiculturalist' criticism of the canon fails to grasp that the canon is itself a cacophony, that it
teaches not certainty but doubt, that it presents not a single Western doctrine about the true or the good or
the beautiful, but an internecine Western war between different accounts of those values, which will rattle
the student more than it will reassure her" (''Derisory Tower," 6). To Fred Siegel, also in the New
Republic, "perhaps the most enabling fiction of multiculturalism is that there has been a single core
curriculum composed of the canonical texts of Western civilization that is widely forced, with great harm
to minorities, upon students across the country" (36). And Robert Hughes in Time derided
multiculturalists' perception of the canon as "that oppressive Big Bertha whose muzzle is trained over the
battlements of Western Civ at the black, the gay and the female" (47).
Much of this canon anxiety took place during the "political correctness" (PC) skirmish of the early 1990s.
With cover stories in Time, Newsweek, the New Republic, New York, and the Atlantic; with stories on the
nightly news and five consecutive nights of discussion on the "MacNeil-Leherer News Hour"; with
criticism from National Endowment for the Humanities chair Lynne Cheney, Secretary of Education
William Bennett, and President George Bush, the PC scare functioned as flak, negative commentary
encouraged and promoted by powerful individuals and institutions to thwart democratic reform.
Although not the preoccupation it was in the early 1990s, criticism of literary revisionism remains a
staple of editorial writers. In 1996, for instance, the New York Times's liberal columnist Maureen Dowd
lamented changes in the core undergraduate curriculum at Georgetown. For the "race and gender brigade,"
Dowd writes, Shakespeare is "too white, too male and too dead," while "gorgeous language and timeless
insights are

Page 45
no longer enough." The PC scare, as conveyed by the median helped discipline universitiesand the
humanities specificallyfor making what was perceived to be too public, too consistent, and too radical a
critique of prevailing power relations, and for potentially hindering the training of the professional-
managerial classhindering, that is, their internalization of the dominant ideology.
The academy has also been a particular target of a residual charge of anticommunism. In recent years, this
attack, although portrayed as defense against the threat of "political correctness," has, as was common in
anticommunist rhetoric, yoked the Left with totalitarianism. John Taylor in New York approvingly quoted
Camille Paglia and Alan Kors, who said, respectively, "It's fascism of the left. These people behave like
the Hitler Youth" and "In certain respects, the University of Pennsylvania has become like the University
of Peking'' (35). Likewise, Taylor's article featured a photograph of Red Guards parading their dunces
and Hitler Youth burning books (33). George Will fantasized about an "academic constabulary" patrolling
"campuses, pouncing on speech, films, teaching material, even parties that deviate from approved
ideology. And Charles Krauthammer saw university-sponsored sessions in racial sensitivity as a "middle-
class take on Chinese reeducation camp[s]."
Within this rhetoric were echoes of the anticommunist assault upon the academy during the late 1940s and
early 1950s. During this period, more than six hundred teachers and professors were dismissed or forced
to resign because of their political sympathies or activities (Caute, 406). In recent years, Angela Davis,
Marlene Dixon, H. Bruce Franklin, Paul Nyden, Michael Parenti, and Barbara Foley, among others, have
lost teaching positions (at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of Chicago; Stanford
University; the University of Pittsburgh; the University of Vermont; and Northwestern University
respectively) because of their politics. One can only speculate about the number of academics never hired
or denied tenure for ideological reasons.
In American universities, Marxist literary criticism was virtually nonexistent from the end of the second
world war until the 1970s. According to Ohmann,
Marxism disappeared from the academy. the handful of its adherents in the humanitiesGaylord Leroy, Robert Cohen, Norman Rudich,
Paul Siegel, perhaps a dozen in all?were isolated from each other, from interested students, from scholars in other fields. Right across
the humanities and

Page 46
social sciences, this exclusion shut down certain kinds of inquiry, posted "no trespassing" signs around some topics (notably class
struggle), and sanitized others, such as exploitation and power. ("English and the Cold War," 84)
To be a Marxist critic curing this period was to risk one's career, since there were so few academically
reputable journals in which to publish and since, as Michael Parenti notes, "almost any criticism of the
existing politico-economic order invited the suspicion that one might be harboring 'communist
tendencies'" (Against Empire, 180).
Many would suggest that anticommunism as a tool for disciplining academics is a thing of the past, since
Marxism now pervades the humanities. In merely allowing Marxism to be mentioned without immediate
censure or repudiation, the humanities have changed considerably. However, this academic Marxism is
mostly a paper politics that emphasizes difference and discourse, not class analysis. As Aijaz Ahmad
points out, "It is not uncommon to come across texts of contemporary literary theory which routinely
appropriate discrete Marxist positions and authorial names while explicitly debunking the theory and
history of Marxism as such" (5). But I overstate the tolerance for even this watered down Marxism, since,
with the exception of a few disparate fellow travelers in the Radical Caucus and Marxist Literary Group,
Marxism hardly exists within college English departments.
Still another obstacle literary critics confront when attempting to revise the literary canon is commercial
literary culture itself. In Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, Michael Brub suggests that the process of
canonization begins when texts are printed and thus "'given' an author who remains current (and who
remains an item of currency, in the temporal and economic senses)" (59). This process continues with a
small number of books that are assigned an aesthetic functioni.e., authorized to be read as literature. This
group is further reduced to those few works granted precanonical status. And it is from this latter that the
literary canon is culled. Although he draws extensively from Ohmann, Brub differs in stressing the
importance of academics in the development of literary reputation and canon-building. For Brub, "the
academic activities of the past fifteen years positively require modification of Ohmann's thesis" (31)
because of the appearance of newly precanonical works that were not discussed in influential journals
and because of a "newly formed competition between academic and non-academic critics for the right to
represent contemporary and noncanonical authors.''

Page 47
Brub is right to argue that the ability of academics to champion newly canonical works has increased.
In part this enhanced power has come about through default, since the conglomeration of the mass media
and the increasing marginalization of literature have restructured public discussion of literary texts. As
Brub observes, "The number of responsible generalist forums for recent academic work has been
steadily dwindling for about a quarter-centuryroughly the same period of time during which American
criticism has engaged feminism, gay and lesbian activism, African American studies and varieties of
Commercial literary theory" (Public Access, 59). Ironically, the conglomeration of publishing has
strengthened the role of literary academics. With serious literary works less likely to be published and
reviewed, academics are more influential within the narrow realm of literary culture. By teaching books,
academics can influence what stays in print, and academic publishers can publish texts deemed
uncommercial by large publishing firms. As literature becomes increasingly marginalized, the margins
gain more power to shape the literary canon. Yet academics must still rely on commercial literary culture.
Academic-sanctioned contemporary novels almost without exception negotiate a process that involves
achieving prominence through being published by a major firm (and thus being reviewed in mainstream
periodicals) and through achieving sales large enough to remain in print. The strictures inherent in the
size, ownership, and profitability of publishing firms, therefore, are inextricably bound up with the
construction of a literary canon.
The makeup of the canon is also strongly influenced by prevailing critical orthodoxies, whether the
formalism of the 1950s and 1960s or the poststructuralism of the 1980s and 1990s. In both cases, practice
within academic literary culture has been defined by the methods and values of the dominant critical
methodology and its implicit ideology. Focusing on the complex and irreducible figuration of literary
works, formalists diminished the importance of historical and political contexts. Yet their objective
,nonideological appreciation of literature was inherently political, since their dismissal of ideology and
concern for textual unity naturalized the then dominant ideology of cold war liberalism. Terry Eagleton
notes that "just as American functionalist sociology developed a 'conflict-free' model of society, in which
every element 'adapted' to every other, so the poem abolished all friction, irregularity and contradiction in
the symmetrical cooperation of its various features" (Literary Theory, 47). Literary practice during the
early cold war, in the words of William Epstein, was

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marked by a "desire to reconcile opposing forces and stake out a position in the vital center of critical
practice, to present 'objective criticism' as a consensual, non-ideological project mediating the difference
and modifying the extremes of the other critical approaches" (75).
Among the problems with formalism were these: first, its biases led to the creation of a literary canon that
(in terms of race, class, nation, and gender) was unrepresentative; second, it denied canonicity to authors
and texts that were overtly ideological, since these did not fit formalist notions of literary value; and third,
it downplayed the ideological content of those works that were granted canonical status. By concentrating
on texts that fit their critical framework, formalist critics often excluded from consideration works that
foregrounded social concerns. A text's ability to analyze, critique, and challenge social injustice and
economic inequality, to denaturalize ideologically reaffirming myths, and to give voice to the powerless
and the exploited was simply irrelevant. In the traditional American literary canon, therefore, genuinely
radical or alternative discourse was uncommon. The result of formalist hegemony was, in the words of
Alexander Karanikas, "to denigrate the democratic content in American literature, to smother its
traditional note of social protest, and to elevate in its stead new literary gods and canons more acceptable
to the rightist tradition" (viii). These new literary gods were chosen for their textual complexity and
sophistication. But New Criticism's preference for sophisticated modernist aesthetics also meant a not
accidental overturning of the proletarian literary and social movements of the 1930s. As Barbara Foley
notes, "When the New Critics proclaimed the superiority of showing over telling or the heroism of
holding opposed ideas in balance without committing oneself to a single point of view. they were also
articulating a mandarin distaste for the unabashedly leftist social commitments guiding much literature and
criticism produced and read in the 1930s" (3). One of the signal achievements of New Criticism was to
supplant an avowedly political literary tradition with an ostensibly apolitical one, replacing a grossly
simplistic and dogmatic approach with one that was richly ambiguous. And, like liberalism itself, this
fundamentally political act was made to seem disinterested and objective. ''Literature itself," writes John
Guillory, "[was] installed as a sensibility that produc[ed] a state of unquestioned belief without
specifying directly what these beliefs [were]. Precisely because sensibility is not the same thing as belief,
it is never subject to decay into mere orthodoxy" (138). The consequences of New Critical ascendance,
though,

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were hardly apolitical. As Cary Nelson reports, "during the McCarthy of the 1950s, many people
destroyed their copies of political books and magazines from the 1930s. The institution of literary studies
cooperated and eliminated the names of political poets [and novelists] from the ongoing conversation of
the discipline" (910).
Formalists did not, however, merely value literature for how closely it parroted
capitalist/nationalist/individualist ideologies. On the contrary, texts that uncritically promoted these
beliefs were viewed as crass and jingoistic to be canonized a text had to criticize the dominant culture.
Against the optimism and sentimentality of popular culture, New Critics offered the alienation and social
criticism of modernist high culture. Gerald Graff explains: "New Critics were culture critics with a
considerable 'axe to grind' against the technocratic tendencies of modern mass civilization" (Professing
Literature, 149). The apparent paradox herethat canonical literature was both an embodiment and a
critique of the dominant cultureis central to liberal pluralism, which sees itself as uniquely free to be self-
critical, to challenge one's own convictions and to be critical of established authority in what the New
Republic called an "internecine Western war" or what Lionel Trilling labeled an adversary culture. To
Trilling, "Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary
intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writinghe will perceive its clear
purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of
giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture
that produced him" (Beyond Culture, xii-xiii). This perception, however, ignores the limitations of
liberal critiqueits failure to examine critically presuppositions about individualism, capitalism, and
American exceptionalism. So while it is true that in order to receive sanction literary works had (and
must still), as part of the modernist denunciation of low and especially middlebrow culture, be critical of
the dominant culture (and for this reason literary academics have been a frequent target of the Right), this
criticism has been modest and has not seriously challenged the fundamental beliefs of liberal pluralism.
Moreover, literary culture's token acceptance of radicals amounts to little more than symbolic resistance.
Through incorporating and coopting radical critique, literary culture can both disguise and bolster its
defining liberal pluralism.
Given the nationalist mythos underlying the American literary canon, the cold war climate in which
formalism flourished, and the cultural

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authority accorded New Critics, it is not surprising that their critique was circumscribed. After all, as
Gerald Graff and Bruce Robbins ask, "How was culture to be at once the essential expression of the
national consensus and a profound critique of the national consensus?" (424). The answer is that such
critique has never been profound and has been little more than, in Nina Baym's words, "a consensus
criticism of the consensus" (69). Barbara Herrnstein Smith likewise asserts the narrow range of critique
within mainstream literary culture: "However much canonical works may be seen to 'question' secular
vanities such as wealth, social position, and political power, 'remind' their readers of more elevated
values and virtues, and oblige them to 'confront' such hard truths and harsh realities as their own mortality
or the hidden griefs of obscure people, they would not be found to please long and well if they were seen
to undercut establishment interests radically or to subvert the ideologies that support them effectively"
(51). Formalism, in conjunction with anticommunism, according to Ohmann, "left us with our moral
critique of bourgeois society from the standpoint of culture, while excising culture from bourgeois
society, severing and exempting it from historical critique, as history studies, history of ideas, and the
other maneuvers of sealed-off 'literary' history" (''English and the Cold War," 84). In sum, the critique
made by traditional American literary culture overlooked numerous ideological presuppositions, took
place within a framework of liberal capitalism and U.S. nationalism, and regularly denied sanction to
those works that offered a more radical critique of establishment belief and practice.
Although still a matter of contention for some (especially for the editorial staffs of periodicals like
Commentary and the New Republic), the transformation of literary studies is an accomplished fact and the
downfall of New Criticism a familiar tale. Within the last twenty years scholars have repeatedly
identified the ideological nature of New Criticism and the traditional canon and have revised their critical
practices and the literary canon. In so doing, they have sought to influence and perhaps refashion
American culture itself. Inspired by contemporary theory's belief that truth and knowledge are contingent,
are socially and linguistically constructed, scholars have viewed culture in its many forms as relatively
autonomous (in contrast to the determinist base/superstructure model of classical Marxism), as a site of
struggle for representation by various groups and subcultures. This "contemporary theoretical revolution"
is, according to Stuart Hall, grounded in "the notion that the arena or

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medium in which ideology functions is one of signification, representation, discursive practices" ("Toad
in the Garden," 73). Many contemporary literary and cultural scholars thus see a correlation between the
dominant culture's sanctioning of previously excluded literary works and traditions and its movement
toward greater social justice. The underlying belief of canon revision seems to be that if the canon can be
made to give voice to the diversity of American culture, so may the society at large be refashioned.
Dominated by a politics of identity, however, this revisionism frequently repeats the problems of liberal
pluralism. It diminishes the significance of class, since, as John Guillory writes, "class cannot be
constructed as a social identity in the same way as race or gender because it is not, in the current
affirmative sense, a 'social identity' at all" (13). And it alleges as primary and efficacious a politics of
representation. Teresa Ebert makes a similar observation about most forms of feminism, which she sees
as "founded upon poststructuralist assumptions about linguistic play, difference, and the priority of
discourse" and which she argues substitute "a politics of representation for radical social transformation"
(1). Likewise, Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton argue that the progressiveness of poststructuralist-
inspired liberalism ''aims merely at a superficial (superstructuralist) change in the existing social order by
promoting a 'multicultural community,' the legitimacy of which is grounded in questions of representation
and signification and whose vision of 'freedom' amounts finally to nothing more than 'free speech"' (23). If
literary culture is truly dominated by liberal-pluralist politics, one might ask how arguments like Ebert's
and Morton and Zavarzadeh's reach publication. It should be remembered that literary culture, of course,
is not totalitarian in its suppression of dissent. And the above arguments about the limits of academic
feminism and poststructuralism are (a) esoteric concerns aimed at a narrow, mostly elite audience, (b)
published by noncommercial, small-circulation presses (the University of Michigan and Guilford
respectively), and (c) hardly dominant views even within literary culture, let alone within the academy as
a whole. In general, when evaluating literary texts, contemporary literary critics help sanction the view
that although there may be a gap between democratic rhetoric and practice, this gap can be closed and the
current political structure revised in more representative fashion to approximate America's egalitarian
ideals.
The result of this attempt to revise American literary culture without

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overturning its economic configurations or structures of power, however, has been the application of a
representative gloss to an unrepresentative and exploitative system. The ease with which previously
marginalized texts have been embraced by the publishing industry and incorporated into school curricula
suggests the modest critique and reformist aims of revisionist literary studies. The writers and texts
included within the revised canon and the critical approaches sanctioned by the academic establishment
have generally endorsed an identity politics and have viewed resistance in terms of gender difference
rather than ideological solidarity. The problem with this position, notes Peter Osborne,
is that it tends to reduce racial politics to the expression of oppressed subjectivities, and thereby to lead to the construction of
moralistic, and often simply additive, 'hierarchies of oppression,' whereby the political significance attributed to the views of particular
individuals is proportional to the sum of their oppressions. Such a tendency both positively encourages a fragmentation of political
agency and harbours the danger of exacerbating conflicts between oppressed groups. It also makes group demands readily
recuperable by the competitive interest-group politics of a liberal pluralism. (216217)
As welcome as the changes to the literary canon and to methods of critical evaluation have been, they do
not offer a significant challenge to ideological hegemony, as has been alleged by proponents and
bemoaned by detractors. This hegemony has not seriously been challenged by the new multicultural canon,
since its proponents invoke familiar notions of liberal pluralism and U.S. nationalism. Thus for Henry
Louis Gates, multiculturalism "represents the very best hope for us, collectively, to forge a new, and vital,
common American culture" (Loose Canons, xvii). For all the media brouhaha over the radical goals of
multiculturalism, the rhetoric of revisionist literary scholars is filled with affirmations of American
exceptionalism. Gerald Graff writes of "the glaring contradiction between American ideals and American
reality" ("Foreword," x), and Michael Brub considers dissent to be ''entirely in the American grain,"
"integral to, rather than a betrayal of, American political traditions" (Public Access, 25, 81). Ultimately,
the social critique made by contemporary literary studies fails to address the systemic causes of social
injustice and economic exploitation and thus reproduces, albeit in the marginal realm of literary studies,
an individualist (or identity group) ethos and nationalist ideology. In their focus on identity politics and
lack of interest in class analysis, literary academics mirror the politics of the professional-managerial

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class in general. American professionals, according to Brint, "are more liberal than either business
people or blue-collar workers on issues involving the greater acceptance of minorities and women," but
are conservative "on issues involving labor, welfare, [and] the reduction of income inequalities" (8687).
For Brint, ''even the most liberal segment of professionals are, by and large, far from left-of-center in
their political views, and they certainly show little opposition to basic organizing principles of a business
civilization. On issues connected to the economy and economic inequality, they are usually more
conservative than blue-collar workers" (19).
The Vietnam War novels and autobiographies that have been acclaimed by such liberal professionals
were written in the age of revisionist literary studies, canon revision, and poststructuralism. Indeed, the
war and poststructuralism grew simultaneously; Jacques Derrida delivered his paper "Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" at Johns Hopkins in 1966only a year after the official entry
of U.S. troops into Vietnam. Consequently, as a serious literary genre Vietnam War fiction has been
defined by its endorsement of a postmodern sensibility and its adoption of the first-person psychedelia of
New Journalism. Vietnam War authors describe a world that is fragmented and illogical, a world where
the distinctions between past and present, fact and fiction, true and false, reality and hallucination
collapse. Their experiences during and after the war seem to fit the defamiliarizing aesthetics, skeptical
conceits, and alleged radicalism of postmodernism and the surreal subjectivity of New Journalism. Yet
under the sway of contemporary literary scholarship, Vietnam War literature has contributed to a
conservative rewriting of the war, following a tendency identified by Aijaz Ahmad in which
dominant strands within [contemporary] "theory," as it has unfolded after the movements of the 1960s were essentially over, have
been mobilized to domesticate, in institutional ways, the very forms of political dissent which those movements had sought to
foreground, to displace an activist culture with a textual culture, to combat the more uncompromising critiques of existing cultures of
the literary profession with a new mystique of leftist professionalism, and to reformulate in a postmodernist direction questions which
had previously been associated with a broadly Marxist politics. (1)
Consequently, the canon of Vietnam War narratives that has developed under the sway of prevailing
postmodern/poststructuralist literary studies

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has depoliticized political dissent. These works were composed, published, and received during a time of
ascendent conservatism, a time when, writes Andrew Martin, "neoconservative interpretations of Vietnam
worked to transfer responsibility for the lost war from those who planned and executed it to those who
opposed it" (xxi). This is not to say that Vietnam War literature is uncritical of the war and U.S. policy.
"Serious" literature about the war does not blame antiwar activists, and it does criticize aspects of
American policy. Yet it does not challenge the fundamental morality of U.S. aims, nor does it document
the large-scale killing of Vietnamese.
With its focus on the suffering of individual American soldiers and its refusal to consider the war as an
extension of U.S. global interests, this literature does not counter and in many ways supports the Right's
ongoing historical reconstruction. This support is encouraged (and radical critique is hindered) by a
sanctioning process involving literary agents, editors, and marketers; review editors and book reviewers;
critics at gatekeeper intellectual journals; academic critics and college teachers. Thus, although the
Vietnam War produced widespread public dissension, as well as a critique of global capitalism and U.S.
imperialism, the literature of the Vietnam War that has received cultural sanction makes only a limited
and modest critique of U.S. militarism in Indochina, one consistent with the liberal-pluralist values of
American literary culture. From this literature and criticism, one rarely sees what Robert McNamara
described to Lyndon Johnson as a "picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring
1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission" (quoted in
Martin, 20).

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3
La Condition Humaine

Page 56
Graham Greene's The Quiet American, the first novel to examine the role of the United States in
Indochina, created a minor sensation when first published in 1956. Of particular concern to reviewers
was Greene's depiction of the quiet American, Alden Pyle, a seemingly innocent and well-intentioned
diplomat whose attempt to promote U.S. interests via a "Third Force" between colonialism and
communism led to the deaths of fifty civilians. Viewing Pyle as a representative American and his actions
as characteristic of American foreign policy, many reviewers took Greene to task for his malign depiction
of U.S. behavior in Indochina.
Greene's criticisms could not be reconciled with the conventional belief that U.S. foreign policy was
premised on support for democracy. In realityas demonstrated in the early 1950s by the U.S.-sponsored
overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Guzman Arbenz in Guatemala and by U.S.
refusal to allow nationwide elections in Vietnamsupport for democracy was never much more than a
rhetorical ploy. Ignorant of (or blind to) the extent of U.S. covert action and U.S.-sponsored terror,
operating within an era of often rabid anticommunism and having already recognized Greene as an
important contemporary writer, American literary culture faced a potentially awkward situation with the
publication of The Quiet American. A respected and culturally sanctioned writer, Greene not only
disagreed with conventional understanding of U.S. global policy but found this policy murderous. Greene
was too prominent a writer to ignore, but his argument was too radical to endorse. The result: American
literary culture acknowledged Greene's skill but repudiated the anti-Americanism and pro-communism of
The Quiet American.
Robert Gorham Davis's front-page review in the New York Times Book Review makes clear how
troubling The Quiet American was to belief in the probity of U.S. foreign policy. Davis flatly declares
The Quiet American "a political novelor parableabout the war in Indochina, employing its characters less
as individuals than as representatives of their nations or political factions." In The Quiet American,
according to Davis, "the effect of circumstances is specifically ideological and political." Davis finds
unfair

Page 57
the argument between Alden Pyle and the novel's narrator, middle-aged English newspaper correspondent
Thomas Fowler, objecting to "the easy way Fowler is permitted to triumph in his debate with Americans"
(1). And he argues that "there is no real debate in the book, because no experienced and intelligent anti-
Communist is represented there" (32). Given the one-sided nature of U.S. anticommunist rhetoric,
especially in the 1950s, Davis's criticism is at best disingenuous, since no mainstream critic would object
to an anticommunist writer's failure to include the views of an experienced and intelligent communist. It is
not the easy way Fowler is permitted to triumph that Davis objects to but that Fowler is permitted to
triumph at all.
Davis also faults Greene for disregarding the lethal consequences of communist rule. He reminds his
readers of "the thousands of individuals who make desperate escapes from Communist countries every
week in order to live as humans" (32); he suggests that "the elimination of liberals and social democrats
always comes first in the Communists' program for political seizure of power" (1); and he wonders
whether in granting primary justice to the communist cause Greene has reconciled himself to the "terrible
surrender" that "history or God now demands of the church and Western civilization" (32). Davis's
review reveals just how useful a tool anticommunism can be for excising information that does not fit
well with dominant ideological belief. Davis cannot accept Greene's fairly modest and historically
accurate criticism of U.S. foreign policy because it grants some credibility to the communist cause. In the
struggle against global communism, any recognition of U.S. immorality and any sympathy for communism
is akin to aligning oneself with the totalitarian assault upon the West.
As his overt discussion of the politics of The Quiet American suggests, Davis was no apolitical formalist.
On the contrary, he had denounced New Criticism for having a "reactionary position in politics and a
dogmatic position in theology" (quoted in Ohmann, Enqlish in America, 85). His passionate attack on the
dangerous politics of The Quiet American derived from his own political past. A member of the
Communist Party and a regular contributor to the New Masses in the 1930s, Davis had long since become
disenchanted with communism. During the 1950s he wrote for Commentary and the New Leader and was
active in Sidney Hook's Committee for Cultural Freedom. In 1953 he was the first witness before the
House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC) investigation of subversion in higher education. He
declared that testifying and naming

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names before HUAC was a "golden opportunity" to "speak out" (quoted in Schrecker, 191). It is likely
that when they chose Davis to review The Quiet American the editors of the New York Times Book
Review knew he would attack Greene's politics and "anti-Americanism."
Davis also criticizes Greene for asserting "that only the Communist respects or understands the peasant"
(quoted in Davis, 1). In finding sympathy between communists and Vietnamese peasants, Greene is
alleged to have fallen prey to a familiar romanticizing of communist-led anticolonial struggles. Relying on
his initial attraction to and subsequent alienation from communism, Davis fails to recognize that Greene
speaks of an indigenous Vietnamese communism that was the only significant social force to respect and
understand the peasantry and to offer the possibility of overturning the French, of implementing a policy of
genuine land reform, and of addressing the country's persistent poverty. As Gabriel Kolko argues, "The
basic pattern in modern Vietnamese history was the non-Communists' endemic inability to relate to the
dynamics of their own times. Only the Communist Party could fill such a vacuum. Its triumph was due not
simply to its own abilities but also to the virtual absence of other serious opposition to French
colonialism" (Anatomy of a War, 13). This background was recognized by the CIA, who understood that
"If the scheduled national elections are held in July 1956, and if the Viet Minh does not prejudice its
political prospects, the Viet Minh will almost certainly win" (quoted in Kolko, Anatomy of a War, 84).
Likewise, President Eisenhower wrote that he had "never talked or corresponded with a person
knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had an election been held at the time of the
fighting (1954), possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh
as their leader" (quoted in Joseph, 87). In his inability to see Vietnamese anticolonialism and communism
as other than part of the global red menace, Davis echoes a belief common to U.S. policy elites, one
stated forthrightly in a 1954 report by the Special Committee on the Threat of Communism: "defeat of the
Viet Minh in Indo-China is essential if the spread of Communist influence in Southeast Asia is to be
halted. Communist imperialism is a transcending threat to each of the Southeast Asian states'' (quoted in
Sheehan et al., 3537). This is the so-called "domino theory," which served as a consistent justification for
U.S. political and military involvement in Indochina. President Eisenhower, for instance, argued that Asia
"has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship, and we simply can't
afford

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greater losses. the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia, now you are
talking about millions and millions and millions of people. the possible consequences of the loss are just
incalculable to the free world" (34).
Because it sought to hinder the spread of communism in Southeast Asia and maintain French support
against communism in Europe, the United States, from the end of the Japanese occupation of Vietnam,
supported French attempts to reinstitute colonial rule. According to the Committee of Concerned Asian
Scholars, "though the French returned to Indochina first in a few symbolic French transports, these were
followed by a long succession of American ships, flying the American flag, manned by American crews.
The French army, disembarking from these ships in American-made uniforms, launched their assaults with
American lend-lease weapons, tanks, trucks, and jeeps" (23). Between 1950 and 1954 U.S. military aid to
the French increased from $150 million to $1 billion, and by 1954 the United States was underwriting 80
percent of the cost of the war (Committee, 23). America's support for the French and opposition to
Vietnamese anticolonialism (and much of the subsequent history of American militarism in Southeast
Asia) was due in part to this inability to recognize the local and specific nature of Vietnamese
communism. This American insensitivity to Vietnamese sociopolitics and hostility toward communism is
satirized through Alden Pyleand is unintentionally reaffirmed by Robert Gorham Davis in his review of
The Quiet American.
Philip Rahv, writing in Commentary, raises some of the same objections as Davis, asserting that the
argument between Pyle and Fowler is too one-sided and that Greene states "his case with such glibness
and plain malice that he invites us to discount him as a suspect witness" ("Wicked American Innocence,"
489). Just as Davis criticizes Greene's suggestion that only the communist respects or understands the
peasant, so Rahv argues that "Greene appears to admire [the Viet Minh's] efficiency and its closeness to
the peasant massesbut the Communists are always `close to the masses' in the period of revolutionary
conquest. The issue is what will happen later, when their power is consolidated and identification with
the masses no longer serves Communist interests. One doubts that Greene is sufficiently political-minded
to do justice to such considerations" (480).
Although he denounces Greene's "clever attack on the United States, its policies and methods, values and
ideals," Rahv does not ultimately

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condemn Greene. Instead, he advises his readers not "to become over-exercised about [The Quiet
American]," since all Greene is doing is turning "the Jamesian theme of innocence vs. experience inside
out" (480). By transforming Greene's criticism of U.S. policy in Indochina into a traditional literary
dialogue about national character, Rahv diminishes the political import of The Quiet American, thus
taming its potentially troubling message and making it amenable to the readers of Commentary.
A. J. Leibling, reviewing The Quiet American in the New Yorker, is far less tolerant of Greene's
depiction of Pyle. Leibling is outraged by the suggestion that the U.S. State Department encourages
terrorism. "If the State Department had promoted the historical explosion," he writes, "we needed a new
State Department" (153). Leibling is upset because "anybody who read the book would wonder whether
the State Department was engaged in the business of murdering French colonels, and in their default,
friendly civilians" (153). As it turned out, the State Department was engaged in exactly this business.
Years later, in his introduction to a new edition of The Quiet American, Greene spoke to Leibling's
criticism, writing that "a Mr. Liebermann [sic] condemned me for accusing my `best friends' (the
Americans) of murder" (''Introduction," xviii). Greene identified several reasons to believe U.S. officials
had been involved in terrorist activities and suggested press complicity in keeping this information secret.
1
Like Davis in the New York Times, Leibling in the New Yorker accepts the basic morality of U.S. policy
and reacts hostilely to Greene's suggestion that this policy is criminal. In reacting so fervently and denying
Greene's argument so completely, Davis and Leibling reveal both their own and American literary
culture's sympathy with the status quo belief in the benign and democratic nature of U.S. policy.
Time's anonymous reviewer demonstrates this complicity even more strikingly, asserting that "the
Kremlin alone might pretend to believe that American Government officials abroad are prone to fool
around with bombs." Time finds Greene guilty of anti-Americanism and suggests that he failed to
recognize "one of the great facts of the 20th century," one that has "baffled, beguiled and infuriated many
minds""the phenomenon of U.S. good will" ("Greene Hell"). Time's belief in American good will and
Soviet evil was not limited to its review but was apparent throughout the March 12, 1956 issue in which
The Quiet American review appears.
For instance, in an article about the Communist Party in Italy Time writes of "Khrushchev's new python
policyembrace, constrict and devour"

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("Dissidents in Red"). Discussing British military aims, Time asserts that Sir Anthony Eden's military
advisers had come "to a gloomy conclusion. They have now revised from ten to five years their estimate
of the time it will take before Russian industrial strength reaches the point where the Communists may
again be tempted to violent global conquest" ("Wastebasket Defense''). While warning its readers of an
immanent Soviet militarism, Time reports without comment tangible evidence of the ongoing harm caused
by U.S. militarism. Time tells of Japanese scientists' findings that a nuclear explosion in Nevada had
"dropped radioactive rain on much of Japan and radioactive dust on the northern island of Hokkaido," that
radioactive rain had fallen in Paris, and that "the fission products from far away Nevada had also fogged
photographic film as they drifted over Europe" ("Round-the-World Traces," 74). Time reports these
incidents matter-of-factly, with no apparent concern over U.S. complicity in the spread of radiation across
two continents.
Time also tells of how Guatemala had been "torn by bitter years of a Communist-written land reform that
set peasant against landholder," a policy that had been instituted in 1952 by "Red-led" President Arbenz
and had resulted in land seizures "amid scenes of bloodshed and destruction." Time praises the 1956
reform (written with the advice of U.S. farm experts), which "provides for the well-compensated
expropriation of idle parts of big estates and their division among the landless" ("Reformed Land
Reform"). Missing from this account is any suggestion of U.S. economic interest in Guatemala. In truth,
Arbenz's land reform was initiated to diminish the reach of the United Fruit Company, which owned more
property than half of Guatemala's landholding population, which owned Guatemala's telephone and
telegraph facilities and all but 29 miles of its railroad track, and which in 1950 reported an annual profit
that was, according to Richard Immerman, "more than twice the revenues of the entire Guatemalan
government" (73).
2
Missing too is recognition of the CIA-led coup that toppled Arbenz.
And in their praise for President Carlos Castillo Armas's attempt to raise "the agricultural health of all
Guatemalans," Time does not reveal that Castillo Armas returned to United Fruit more than 99 percent of
its expropriated lands (Immerman, 198) and instigated a brutal authoritarian rule. The Castillo Armas
government disenfranchised three quarters of Guatemala's electorate; outlawed all political parties and
labor organizations; began burning "subversive" books (including Dostoevski novels and Victor Hugo's
Les Miserables). After eighteen months of Castillo

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Armas's rule, only one half of one percent of the peasants who had won plots under the Arbenz land
reform program remained on their new land (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 221233). Castillo Armas destroyed
the labor movement, outlawing more than five hundred unions and requiring that union charters be
approved by the National Committee for Defense against Communism. "By the end of the decade," writes
Immerman, "Guatemala's union membership had fallen to ten thousand, one-tenth of the total during
Arbenz's last year in office. In all of Latin America, only Haiti had fewer organized workers" (200).
American policy in Vietnam followed a similar pattern. Colonel Edward Geary Lansdale, a CIA
operative long thought the model for Pyle, planned clandestine activities designed to discredit the
Vietnamese communists. (Greene disputed the contention that Pyle was modeled on Lansdale. "I grow
tired of denying," he wrote to the London Sunday Telegraph, "that there is any connection between my
character Pyle in The Quiet American and General Lansdale, the American counter-insurgency expert
whom I have never had the misfortune to meet" [Yours etc., 127]). A report included within The
Pentagon Papers explains that Lansdale was "to undertake paramilitary operations against the enemy and
to wage political-psychological warfare" (Sheehan et al., 54). This operation included spreading stories
about a Chinese communist regiment raping village girls, compiling an almanac of famous North
Vietnamese astrologers predicting disaster for the communists, contaminating the oil supply of the Hanoi
bus company, and smuggling eight and a half tons of supplies to a paramilitary group in the North.
Just as the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala led to the dictatorship of Armas, so opposition to the Viet
Minh resulted in the despotism of Ngo Dinh Diem. Thwarting the nationwide elections (which had been
guaranteed by the Geneva Accords and which would have ensured a communist victory), the United States
helped establish the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Against one opponent, Bao Dai (and with the Viet
Minh and the Communist Party outlawed), Diem was elected president with 98.2 percent of the vote,
including 605,025 votes from the 450,000 registered voters in Saigon (Young 53). Whereas the Viet Minh
had begun a policy of radical land reform, Diem instituted his own reform which, like the Armas reform
in Guatemala, did little to redistribute land ownership. Diem's reforms, explains the Committee of
Concerned Asian Scholars, "reduced rents which the Viet Minh had abolished, sold land which the Viet
Minh had given away, and reestablished estates which

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the Viet Minh had broken up" (29). According to The Pentagon Papers, by 1960 "45% of the land
remained concentrated in the hands of 2% of landowners, and 15% of the landlords owned 75% of all the
land" (quoted in Trung Buu Lam, 39).
In 1956, as The Quiet American was being repudiated by much of the American literary establishment,
Diem issued Ordinance 47, which called for the detention of people thought dangerous to the state, gave
legal justification for the creation of political prison camps, and suspended habeas corpus (Fitzgerald,
119). This policy was administered by military tribunals who allowed no appeal and made being a
communist or even working with one a capital offense (Kolko, Anatomy of a War, 89). According to
Frances Fitzgerald, Diem's "[prison] camps contained a wide variety of people, from the leaders of sects
and the smaller political parties to the uncooperative members of the press and the trade unions. the
Diemist officials arrested thousands of people whose only political sin was to have fought for
independence against the French" (120, 140141). It has been estimated that by the end of 1958 there were
40,000 political prisoners in South Vietnam and that between 1955 and 1957 the Diem regime was
responsible for 12,000 deaths (Kolko, Anatomy of a War, 89). John McDermott summarizes Diem's
policies and their consequences: "by a system of totalitarian controls, by a series of military expeditions
against its own peasantry, and by the forced regroupment of almost the entire rural population did the
Government of the Republic of Vietnam attempt to pacify the countryside. In a period of eight years the
entire social system of the countryside was destroyed" (9). Diem's tyranny, besides revealing the
fraudulence of U.S. good will, demonstrates the often destructive consequences of U.S. foreign policy,
consequences that Greene depicts in The Quiet American and that reviewers in the New York Times, the
New Yorker, and Time repudiate as false and polemical.
Not all critics denounced Greene or thought this portrayal of American global terror unbelievable.
American literary culture's reaction to The Quiet American was not lock-step anticommunism. There was
a measure of ideological diversity, as demonstrated by Walter Allen's review in the Nation. To Allen,
"Greene expresses a criticism of America and especially of American behavior in foreign affairs that is
widely held, if not openly stated, by a great many people outside the United States" (344). But instead of
looking at Pyle, the emodiment of American policy, Allen concentrates on the initially neutral observer,
Fowler. Ignoring Greene's publisher's assertion that "religion plays little or no part" in The Quiet

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American, Allen sees in Fowler "the hall mark of the Greene man, whether presented as Catholic or
atheist: the sense of abandonment" (344). Rather than discussing the specific evil wrought by Pyle to
thwart communism, Allen discusses "the awareness of evil; the awareness of two worlds side by
sideheaven and hellyet with how many leagues between them" (345). And he cites Greene's saying years
ago that "Human nature is not black and white but black and grey" (344). Rehearsing an argument that
would dominate critical appraisals of The Quiet American for years to come, Allen transforms a specific
political indictment into a speculation on the metaphysics of evil. While it is possible to read The Quiet
American as concerned with alienation and spiritual exhaustion, doing so diverts attention from the book's
historical urgency. Thus in the left-most journal within commercial American literary culture, the political
content of Greene's novel is exorcised in favor of an analysis of the nature of evil, while mainstream and
conservative publications are consistently attacking him for his anti-Americanism.
Like Allen, John Lehmann in the New Republic dismisses Greene's publisher's assertion that religion
plays little or no part in The Quiet American, suggesting instead that "the religious theme is there all the
same, as anyone can see" (26). Lehmann praises Greene's masterly story construction and declares The
Quiet American "a highly skilled work of fiction by one of our major literary craftsmen" (27). For
Lehmann the stature of The Quiet American depends not on the book's religious thematizing or Greene's
technical expertise but on his depiction of contemporary warfare, on "the theme of the wastefulness and
the cruelty of war" (26) and "the ultimate ethics of all wars of liberation'' (27). Thus, although
sympathetic to his politics and his interpretation of events in Indochina, neither Allen nor Lehmann
focuses on Greene's critique of the murderous consequences of U.S. foreign policy. In the initial critical
reception of The Quiet American, then, we find commercial literary culture attacking Greene's politics,
while the left-liberal side of this culture distances itself from Greene's specific critique to speak broadly
about his "awareness of evil" (Allen, 345) and his "tragic vision of modern life" (Lehmann, 27). This
collapsing of Greene's politics into a general concern for evil and tragedy helped curtail an examination
of the history informing Greene's narrative and helped depoliticize subsequent academic criticism of The
Quiet American.
Because it was viewed through a narrow critical lens that obscured Greene's politics and his attack on
American policy, The Quiet American could be seen (as Allen and Lehmann's reviews demonstrate) as a
work

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of serious literary merit. Yet even this apolitical recognition of The Quiet American generated flak meant
to constrain discourse and control dissent by "assailing, threatening, and `correcting' [thus] trying to
contain any deviations from the established line" (Herman and Chomsky, 28). An editorial in the Saturday
Evening Post (headlined "To Get Rave Reviews, Write an Anti-U.S.A. Novel!") declares The Quiet
American "an obvious piece of Hate-America propaganda," a "bitter tirade presented as a novel," and a
''propaganda tract." Attacking Greene as a communist and an opium smoker, the Post "wonder[s] whether
the preposterous statements in his book came to him in a pipe dream." And the Post attacks newspaper
reviewers for spending "so much time reading fiction that the do not know some elementary facts about
their own country." Among these facts was that the United States "was rushing food and other supplies
into Vietnam for the refugees." Also, the Post claimed that The Quiet American "implies that the
communists love the Asian peasants and that America shouldn't help anti-communists like President Diem
of South Vietnam, even if the Reds conquer all Asia." Besides the familiar inability to distinguish
Vietnamese anticolonialism from global communism, the Post here ignores much about U.S. policy in
Vietnam.
In identifying the food and other supplies the U.S. was sending to refugees, the Post distorts the true nature
of U.S. aid. According to The Pentagon Papers, between 1954 and 1961 more than 75 percent of U.S.
economic aid went to the South Vietnamese military, while the "aid for agriculture and transportation
principally funded projects with strategic purposes and with an explicit military rationale." For instance,
one 20-mile stretch of highway from Saigon to Bien Hoa that had been requested by General Samuel T.
Williams for specifically military purposes "received more U.S. economic aid than all funds provided for
labor, community development, social welfare, health, and education in the years 19541961" (quoted in
Trung Buu Lam, 39).
The refugees alluded to by the Post fled the north upon the end of the French-Indochinese War and the
establishment of the Ho Chi Minh-led government in Hanoi. Although the Post proudly points to the aid
given these refugees by the United States, it does not reveal the part the United States played in facilitating
this migration of a million Catholics. As Marilyn Young makes clear, this exodus was encouraged by the
Catholic hierarchy and organized by Lansdale and his team. "Entire parishes," she writes, "were carried
south in American ships, following priests who told them Christ had moved south, as well as making
promises of land and

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livelihood." According to Young, Lansdale developed a rumor campaign "that the United States would
back a new war, one in which atomic weapons would certainly be used" (45).
Also missing from the Post's criticism of The Quiet American is recognition that the Diem regime and the
very establishment of a South Vietnamese nation violated the Geneva Accords, since the division of
Vietnam was a provisional arrangement that was to last no longer than three hundred days. That the Post
should ignore these points is no surprise; it had, after all, run articles declaring South Vietnam "the Bright
Spot in Asia" and claiming that "Two years ago at Geneva, South Vietnam was virtually sold down the
river to the Communists." "This spunky little Asian country," the Post wrote, ''is back on its own feet,
thanks to a `mandarin in a sharkskin suit who's upsetting the Red timetable'" (quoted in Fitzgerald, 114).
The Saturday Evening Post was not the only mainstream periodical to go beyond the confines of book
reviews to attack The Quiet American. Responding to Soviet acclaim for Greene's novel, Newsweek
notes that Soviet critics "found a key to the secrets of the novel. All the leading characters turn out to be
cut-and-dried political symbols, rather than the complex fragments of humanity which Greene intended
(but hardly achieved)" ("When Greene Is Red," 96). In its repudiation of this reading, Newsweek endorses
an ostensibly apolitical reading of The Quiet American that echoes the assessment of left-liberal journals
like the Nation and the New Republic. Although they may disagree about Greene's achievement, their
critical focus is nearly identical, Newsweek speaking of "complex fragments of humanity," Allen of
"human nature not black and white but black and grey," and Lehmann of a "tragic vision of modern life."
All three readings replace U.S. action in Vietnam with general concerns for the human condition. Unlike
the Saturday Evening Post, however, which chastised the literary establishment, Newsweek praises
American literary critics for objecting to "the one-sidedness of [Greene's] viewpoint and the dreary
stereotyping of his American characters." Newsweek hopes that Greene will take this criticism more
seriously "now that the Communists have proved the woodenness of his characters by making them over
so effortlessly into Marxist stereotypes" ("When Greene Is Red," 96).
Likewise, in Commentary Diana Trilling red-baits Greene, declaring that it would be difficult to find a
clearer example than The Quiet American "of what neutralism means, or clearer evidence of its essential
non-neutrality and of the pro-Communism which it so regularly masks" (66).

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However, Trilling's main target is not Greene's novel but Rahv's review Trilling wonders why Rahv
wants to mitigate Greene's offense, wants to suggest that Americans should not be indignant at "Mr.
Greene's unjust attack." To Trilling, Rahv's review demonstrates American liberalism's "endemic
guiltiness," "fear of nationalistic pride," and "fear of conformity" (67). Ultimately, according to Trilling,
Rahv's mild critique of The Quiet American reveals that American liberals have ''no preference for the
Soviet Union as against the United States, and no philosophical preference for Communism as against
democracy" (68).
The sympathy between cold war liberalism and the immediate reception of The Quiet American, as well
as the considerable flak directed at Greene, reveal both the parameters of acceptable discourse within
commercial literary culture and the means by which such parameters are maintained. (Although I am
suggesting an institutional sympathy, not a conspiracy to shape belief, it is worth noting that according to
Michael Parenti, "In the early 1950s some 400 to 600 journalists were in the pay of the CIA" [Inventing
Reality, 232]). The Quiet American could not be ignoredthe common fate of ideologically troubling
textsso it was attacked. Perceiving themselves independent and their evaluations individually determined,
literary critics, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, were not likely to denounce a book like The Quiet
American in the crude manner of the Saturday Evening Post. Rather, they reinforced status quo belief and
at the same time maintained an illusion of independence by removing The Quiet American from its
political and historical context. Critics diminished Greene's critique by transforming his politics into
transcendent human concerns. This political obfuscation would persist in academic evaluations of The
Quiet American.
Despite the controversy surrounding its initial reception, academic critics have been strangely quiet about
The Quiet American. Although it inspired an initial examination (articles in 1957, 1959, and 1963), no
scholarly article devoted exclusively to The Quiet American appears again in the MLA Biblioqrapby
until 1979. Much of my discussion of the novel's academic reception, therefore, centers around general
and introductory works on Greene's fiction.
In the nearly forty years since it was published, critics have maintained a remarkably consistent dialogue
centered around (1) identifying and dismissing accusations that Greene was anti-American; (2) focusing
on existential and religious themes and on Greene's literary technique; (3) replacing the novel's specific
historical context and political critique

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with a broad concern for the human condition; and (4) praising its complex, ambiguous, and equivocal
moral and political argument. That critics in the 1950s and 1960s overlooked Greene's critique of U.S.
policy, his depiction of war in Indochina, and his representations of the Vietnamese is understandable.
For later critics, however, this reluctance to examine the sociopolitical dynamic of The Quiet American
is something of a surprise and suggests the continuity of apolitical criticism within contemporary literary
culture. In examining The Quiet American, critics have continued to focus on Greene's anti-Americanism,
his themes and techniques, his explication of the human condition, and his moral complexity.
Repeatedly during the 1950s and 1960s, critics responded to the flak directed at Greene. Robert Evans
explains that "One should not imply that Mr. Greene himself is anti-American" (247), and R. E. Hughes
laments that "too many readers were quick to discover, or invent, evidence that here was a bit of anti-
American propaganda" (41). "Criticized by American reviewers for its supposed anti-Americanism,"
writes A. A. DeVitis, "The Quiet American has been misunderstood'' (1 17). Likewise, Philip Stratford
dismisses "the indignation that The Quiet American aroused in the United States" (311). Nearly thirty
years after its publication, critics continued to defend Greene from these charges. George M. A. Gaston
argues that the anti-American element has "more to do with the fate of Fowler than with that of the world
at large" and is "less symptomatic of [Fowler's] politics than of his intellectual and emotional condition"
(Pursuit of Salvation, 93), and Roger Sharrock sees it as "more a vehicle for expressing the nature of the
conflict between Pyle and Fowler than intrinsically significant" (216).
This defense of Greene has resulted in an assortment of justifications. In its review of The Quiet
American, Newsweek declared that "In 1952 [Greene] was temporarily denied a visa to the United States.
In accordance with the McCarran Act, the United States consul in Saigon refused the visa because in his
youth Greene had been a Communist for four weeks. More poignantly, he may remember the libel suit
which Shirley Temple, then age 9, brought against him for a review of 'Wee Willie Winkie.' Delicacy
forbids repeating the exact words of Greene's review, which suggested what a precociously appetizing
tidbit the young star was" ("This Man's Caricature," 59). (Delicacy does not forbid me Greene alleged
Shirley Temple "had a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men" [quoted in Kelly, II]).
Critics have attributed Greene's anti-Americanism to "loss of childhood

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and the pains of growth" (Sharrock, 216), "cultural snobbery" (Kelly, 16), and a "dislike for the suburban
Protestant materialism of England" (Spurling, 54). The persistence of these concerns with his anti-
Americanism demonstrates the lingering effects flak may have upon public discourse. And the need to
refute these allegations reveals the centrist and nationalist politics governing American literary culture.
Critics have refused to see Greene's criticism of U.S. foreign policy as rooted in American conduct in
Indochina and have thus seemed to share a belief in (or at least an uncritical examination of) the benign
motivation of this policy. Defending Greene from these accusations, they have failed to argue that, given
the consistency of U.S.-sponsored terror, anti-Americanism may in fact be justified. (Not all critics have
sought to defend Greene from these charges. John Atkins refers to "This anti-American element [that
caused] a great splash of emotion and upset a lot of people" [232] without attempting to repudiate it.
Instead, he argues that no "prejudice, even the rankest prejudice, necessarily spoils a novel. There is no
reason," he writes, ''why the author should not have a viewpoint, and even a crazy viewpoint does not
damn a novel" [232]. Similarly, Francis Kunkel suggests that even if we grant the premise [of critics like
Robert Gorham Davis] "that this book is riddled with political heresy," such "unhealthy political notions
do not doom a novel." For Kunkel, "only apolitical shortcomings are enough to bury a failing novel"
[150]. Since, according to Brian Thomas, "the book is not an argument but a novel," it is appropriate that
critics looked to it "as an imaginative structure of words discussing it by means of questions pertaining
more to philosophy and psychology than to politics" (26). Instead of repudiating these charges of anti-
Americanism, Atkins, Kunkel, and Thomas dismiss them as irrelevant to questions of literary merit.)
In lieu of discussing Greene's critique of American policy in Indochina, critics have focused on the more
familiarly literary aspects of The Quiet American. Greene depicts in gruesome detail the consequences of
the American-supported anticolonial war. Here, for instance, is his description of a massacre in Phat
Diem:
The canal was full of bodies; I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped; one head, seal-
grey, and anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out of the water like a buoy. [A soldier] had found a punt hidden in
some bushes down the canal. Six of us got in, and he began to pole it towards the other bank, but we ran on a shoal of bodies and
stuck. He pushed away with his pole, sinking it into this human

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clay, and one body was released and floated up all its length beside the boat, like a bather lying in the sun. (44)
Yet while acknowledging that Greene "seems to understand the situation in Indo-China" and sees "beyond
the news reports" (246), Evans argues that it is the existentialist political philosophy that "goes a long
way towards explaining the anti-Americanism of the novel" (247). Criticism of The Quiet American has
consistently ignored the novel's political/historical context for the sake of Greene's existential and
religious concerns, finding Western philosophy more significant than Western imperialism, French
existentialism more significant than French colonialism. To Evans, "The geographical setting of The
Quiet American is Indo-China, but the intellectual milieu is French" (243). Twenty-five years later,
Gangeshwar Rai continues Evans's argument, suggesting that Greene "presents the problem of existence
and essence and shows the significance of free existence deciding essence'' (74) and is "attracted towards
individual's [sic] freedom of choice or his engagement which lies at the heart of Sartrean existentialism"
(75). It is revealing to juxtapose Rai's discussion of Sartrean existentialism with Sartre's own discussion
of the Vietnam War. To Sartre, the war was
a new stage in the development of imperialism, a stage usually called neo-colonialism because it is characterized by aggression against
a former colony which has already gained its independence, with the aim of subjugating it anew to colonial rule. With the beginning of
independence, the neo-colonialists take care to finance a putsch or coup d'etat so that the new heads of state do not represent the
interests of the masses but those of a narrow privileged strata, and, consequently, of foreign capital. (538)
As for the U.S., Sartre argues, "the American government is guilty of having preferred a policy of war and
aggression aimed at total genocide to a policy of peace" (548). This focus on Greene's existentialism,
then, transforms a novel about a struggle for independence and social justice into a metaphysical treatise;
such abstract preoccupations have long been a means by which literary culture has avoided addressing the
kinds of real-world horrors documented in The Quiet American.
Like the reviewers who ignored Greene's publisher's assertion that religion plays little or no part in the
novel, critics have willfully pursued religious themes in The Quiet American. Acknowledging that The
Quiet American "does not deal explicitly with Catholic themes," Francis Kunkel nonetheless declares he
will "examine it in connection with the Catholic

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novels, because it has a religious theme" (148). Likewise, to Francis Wyndham, although "it was
suggested that [Greene] had temporarily abandoned religious themes [The Quiet American has] the same
complex moral problems, the pity and the anger" (23). Philip Stratford suggests that Greene simply
translates the problem of "commitment to religious belief" to ''the sphere of politics" (308).
Yet Greene repeatedly documents the horrors of the war; the novel turns on Fowler's vivid recounting of
the bloody consequences of a State Department-sponsored terrorist bombing: "bits of cars were scattered
over the square; and a man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens. The
doctors were too busy to attend to the dead, and so the dead were left to their owners, for one can own the
dead as one owns a chair. A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a
kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat. The legless torso at the edge of the garden
still twitched, like a chicken which has lost its head" (155156). Rather than finding evidence of the
extremes to which the United States has gone to pursue its interests, Miriam Allott discovers in this
passage "the thematic continuity linking this book with Greene's 'Catholic' novels" (198). Greene
documents other wartime brutalities, such as the dropping of U.S.-supplied napalm by the French and a
French pilot's attack on helpless Vietnamese. Yet instead of discussing the Vietnamese burned by napalm
or killed by U.S.-supplied weapons, Francis Kunkel declares, "God and the ultimates burn in the
background in the foreground blaze adultery and guilt" (149). Similarly, instead of a war between the
Vietnamese and the French, a war between Vietnamese nationalism and Western imperialism, Stratford
sees the novel's "dramatic antagonism" as between "youth and age, innocence and experience,
romanticism and realism, between Pyle's naive faith and Fowler's tired skepticism, between the energetic
meddling of the one, and the impotent non-intervention of the other" (309). By 1964 when Stratford's book
was published, Vietnam was front-page news. In 1963 Diem was murdered in a U.S.-sanctioned coup, the
number of American military advisers reached 15,000, and Buddhist monks' self-immolation gained
worldwide attention; in 1964 Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the United States flew 5,000
air combat missions, and American troop strength reached 23,000 (Clodfelter, 1229). Yet Stratford seems
oblivious to what The Quiet American might reveal about any of this, arguing instead that its central
attitude is Christian.

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While recent critics have not emphasized as much the religious dimensions of Greene's novel, they have
nonetheless continued this discussion. Gaston, for example, argues that "although war and politics are
prominent issues in the book, they serve to poise the ultimate concern of personal salvation" (93). He sees
Pyle, the murderous instrument of U.S. foreign policy, as a "paradoxical savior" and thinks Fowler
"headed for a spiritual recovery" (Pursuit of Salvation, 94). To Gwenn Boardman, The Quiet American
"extends the religious perspective" and "shows one way in which modern man may begin to approach
God'' (108). At one point in the novel, Greene sees "a woman and a small boy. They were very clearly
deada small neat clot of blood on the woman's forehead, and the child might be sleeping." Looking at the
French soldier accompanying him, Fowler explains, "he was wearing a holy medal round his neck, and I
said to myself, The juju doesn't work" (46). Although Greene here suggests that in the face of modern war
religious faith appears to be little more than superstition, Brian Thomas sees this scene as a Catholic
tableau. It is "a type of Piet vision: a sense that all human death may ultimmately be a type of ritual
sacrifice, an imitation of the Christian story of the Passion" (34).
This focus on Greene's Catholicism ignores the religious and cultural background of Vietnam, a country
whose minority Catholic population collaborated with the French and consistently supported French
colonial rule. According to Frances Fitzgerald, "the non-Catholic Vietnamese believed with some
justification that the Catholics had acted as a fifth column for the French in the period preceding the
conquest. Certainly the French had always shown great favoritism towards the Catholics, turning them
into a self-conscious elitist minority" (108). In attempting to impose its political and economic agenda
upon Vietnam through the Diem government, the United States too relied upon the Catholic minority. Diem
was Catholic, led a predominantly Catholic administration, and granted special privileges to Catholic
villages. More than obscuring the novel's historical background, then, this critical focus on Greene's
Catholicism distorts the class structure and political economy of French Indochina. In abstracting
Greene's Christian themes and removing this book from its specific historical context, critics have
imposed the abstract preoccupations of Western humanist intellectuals onto a text that documents the
suffering of the Vietnamese people for the sake of U. S. geopolitical interests.
In his introduction to the 1996 Viking Critical edition of The Quiet American John Clark Pratt speaks of
"the attention now being given to

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The Quiet American as another example of Greene's analyses of 'the human condition'" (xiv). But as we
have seen, this is no recent development. From its initial reception, critics have consistently moved away
from the novel's historical context to look instead at the human condition. Kunkel argues that The Quiet
American can best be understood if we "enlarge our perspective by abandoning Greene's views on
American foreign policy" (150) and ignore irrelevant matters like the Vietnamese struggle for
independence and the murderous consequences of American opposition to the Viet Minh. (Although it
seems irrational to suggest that we achieve a larger perspective by abandoning Greene's views on
American foreign policy, this notion was common to New Critics. For Allen Tate contemporary political
concerns were "a temporary oversimplification of the human predicament" [quoted in Foley, 4], while for
Malcolm Cowley "social aims and political programs" were "likely to be accepted only on the top level
of the mind" [87]). For by concentrating on such issues, according to Kunkel, we are ''misrouting attention
from profound moral and religious issues [and] obscur(ing) the fact that this novel reflects la condition
humaine" (153).
Allott reads The Quiet American in broadly human terms as well, examining "its feelings for the
anomalies which surround most human attempts to achieve [effective moral action], and its assertion
nevertheless of certain enduring human values" (188). While recognizing "the alarming difficulties which
as nations and individuals we are most of us nowadays required to face," Allott does not choose between
U.S. imperialism and Vietnamese anticolonialism. Although her argument that "we need Pyle's courage
and none of his ignorance, Fowler's moral intelligence and none of his indecisiveness" (206) seems to
refer to the Cold War, Allott never directly addresses the issues involved in this struggle or the
circumstances surrounding the French-Indochinese War.
Like Allott, who focuses on "effective moral action," DeVitis suggests that The Quiet American is
"primarily about human beings involved in an ethical dilemma" (116), thereby universalizing the specific
question Greene poseswhat should a neutral individual do when confronted with the lethal excesses of
imperialism? To DeVitis, rather than a place with a history of colonial oppression and an ongoing
struggle for liberation, Vietnam (specifically Saigon) "becomes a microcosm that reflects much of
twentieth-century political thinking" (117). This formulation allows DeVitis to dismiss U.S. policy and
ignore the perspective of colonial subjects. DeVitis also argues that Fowler's decision to help the Viet

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Minh assassinate Pyle is not so much a political act based on opposition to U.S. policy as an act of human
compassion. Fowler has not aligned himself with the Viet Minh and against the United States, according
to DeVitis, but has "taken sides to remain human, and the realization of his compassionate spirit
overwhelms him" (120).
Critics in the 1970s and 1980s, as Pratt notes, have continued to supplant the novel's historical/political
background with a focus on the human condition. Thus Thomas argues that CIA agent Alden Pyle is a
"highly conventional type of romance hero" who "undertakes a journey down a river to a figurative
underworld" (27). Recognizing that "Fowler discovers the realities of a river filled with bloated bodies,
civilians dead in the path of war" (113), Boardman argues that "The Quiet American is a 'morality'
designed to show Everyman how to become conscious of today's distressing and Absurd condition''
(116)Fowler is "The twentieth-century Everyman recogniz[ing] his sin" (110). Similarly, Sharrock argues
that "These scraps of history are by an act of metonymy made to indicate the whole weight of instant
history upon modern man" (202). A dead child in a ditch is to Sharrock suggestive of "the weakness of
modern man without supernatural aid" (206). And Gaston finds the presence of violence important not
because of what it reveals about U.S. intervention in Vietnam but "because it is the one pure emotion that
joins the primitive with the modern world" ("Structure of Salvation," 57). The brutal conditions in
Vietnam for Gaston are meant not to demonstrate the harm caused by Western imperialism but to show
that "the experience of modern man is filled with rot and squalor" (Gaston, Pursuit of Salvation, 94).
Likewise, Gangeshwar Rai writes, "the setting insists on the meaninglessness of human condition [sic]"
(75). Almost every detail that might point away from abstract and universal humanist concernsa river
filled with bloated bodies, a dead child in a ditch, the ever-present violence, the squalor of third world
povertyis transformed into a lesson about the absurd, godless, primitive, meaningless condition of the
twentieth-century Everyman, of modern man adrift in the modern world.
Reading the war-ravaged Vietnamese landscape and even the bodies of dead Vietnamese as symbolic of
the modern condition, literary critics have consistently diminished Greene's political concerns and
ignored his depiction of U.S.-sanctioned terror. By universalizing this text, removing its link to a
particular history and culture, and converting its political commentary into a metaphorical statement about
the modern condition,

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critics have undermined the potential of The Quiet American to warn about American policy in Vietnam
before it escalated, to explain something about how this war began while the war was ongoing, and to
counter the nationalist rewriting of this history that has taken place over the last two decades.
Despite popular belief that academic literary culture has become a refuge for tenured radicals, much
recent criticism continues to dehistoricize and depoliticize The Quiet American by stressing the ambiguity
and complexity of Greene's argument. Critics argue that Greene is critical of both the Viet Minh and the
Americans and thus critical of ideological thinking in general. John Spurling (writing in 1983) asserts that
Fowler takes the side of "the murdered Vietnamese against Pyle and his American bosses" as well as
"Pyle's side against his (Fowler's) own cowardly betrayal to the communists" (57). Writing in 1983,
Gangeshwar Rai argues that Fowler's "attitude toward the Communists as well as the Americans seems to
reflect Greene's own hatred for Communism and his antipathy towards America" (76). Similarly, Anne
Salvatore (writing in 1988) extols Greene's writings because ''a sufficient amount of ambiguity results in
[his] fiction, which forces readers to decide whether an attack or a defense has been mounted" (51). This
praise for Greene's alleged neutrality, his ability to hold opposing positions, is consistent with a New
Critical privileging of paradox and ambiguity, as Stratford makes clear in his assertion that Greene has a
"paradoxically ambivalent attitude. One cannot expect from him either extreme of commitment or non-
commitment" (313). In praising Greene's ambivalence, Stratford repeats New Critical dogma, while the
favorable assessment of the equivocal politics of The Quiet American by recent critics is evidence of the
centrist ideology that persists within contemporary literary culture. For this championing of ambivalence
is a hallmark of liberalism and is the kind of ostensibly nonideological politics advocated by Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. in The Vital Center. For Schlesinger, "Against totalitarian certitude, free society can only
offer modern man devoured by alienation and fallibility. The great issue of this century is who is right. Is
man a creature of doubt and ambiguity? Or has he mastered the secrets of history and nature sufficiently to
become ruthless, monolithic, infallible, to know whom to spare and whom to kill?" (57). Critical praise
for Greene's lack of commitment and his repudiation of "abstract ideological conviction" (G. Rai, 80)
echoes this conceit of cold war liberalism, an anticommunism that positions itself as rational, centrist, and
nonideological.

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Whereas for Schlesinger "the totalitarian left and the totalitarian right meet at last on the murky grounds of
tyranny and terror" (ixx), liberalism "is the spirit of the centerthe spirit of human decency, opposing the
extremes of tyranny" (256).
In the context of American policy in Indochina, this valorization of ambivalence is far from neutral. First,
it distorts Greene's position; he is far more sympathetic to Vietnamese anticolonialism than to U.S. policy.
Greene forthrightly denied his neutrality, arguing that "the temptation to double allegiance tends to
disappear before American capitalism and imperialism" (quoted in Allain, 90). Second, such
ambivalence was not apparent in the United States' steadfast opposition to communism. Given that the
United States was vastly more powerful economically and militarily than the Viet Minh, this
ambivalencethis refusal to take sidesamounted to a defense of U.S. policy.
During the decade that followed the publication of The Quiet American the United States pursued a brutal
war against the Vietnamese communists. Embracing a range of lethal technologies and strategies, the
United States fought a war in three countries, generating massive economic and environmental damage,
dispossessing countless Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, and causing upwards of three million
deaths, horrors already in evidence in the 1950s and documented by Greene in The Quiet American.
Against this murderous background, American literary culture has viewed The Quiet American in terms
of its religious and moral themes and its aesthetic features. The dominance of a system of apolitical,
abstract, and broadly humanistic literary analyses caused a novel about the roots of U.S. involvement in
Vietnam to be seen as an examination of the human condition. Even with the onset of a newer, more
politicized methodology, literary critics have continued to refute Greene's anti-Americanism, to
emphasize conventional themes, to universalize a specific political critique, and to praise a "real world
which is not black and white, but grey" (Sharrock, 207).
While the main tendency of reviewers and critics has been to dehistoricize and depoliticize The Quiet
American, there has also been a tendency to see Greene's novel as an accurate, even prescient depiction
of the lethal ignorance and naivet of U.S. policy. This notion that The Quiet American encapsulated all
that was important about the Vietnam War began to appear in commercial and academic literary culture in
the mid-1970s. Looking back at the war, critics started to reappraise The Quiet American, moving from
accusations of anti-Americanism to an appreciation

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of the novel's forecasting of American actions in Vietnam. Writing in London Magazine, Michael
Menshaw declares The Quiet American "still the best novel about the war, and appallingly prophetic"
(105). In Rolling Stone Gloria Emerson claims Greene "always understood what was going to happen
there, and in that small and quiet novel, told us everything" (123). Richard Kelly asserts that The Quiet
American "has acquired a new relevance since it first appeared in 1955. Alden Pyle anticipates the
painful folly of the American intervention in Vietnam some years later" (67). Gordon Taylor argues that
The Quiet American ''is as likely to be cited as 'evidence' by historians and reporters as to be lauded as
exemplary by literary critics" (294), while "Greene's delineation of the 1946 to 1954 French-Viet Minh
conflict," to Thomas Myers, "is an eerie experience in regard to the replicating and enlarging of its key
elements during the American involvement" (39). Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing to the
present, critics have considered the political and historical dimensions of The Quiet American and have
found Greene's novel an insightful analysis of the motivation behind and the exercise of U.S. foreign
policy.
Despite the frequency of these claims (within the admittedly marginal realm of literary studies), little has
been written that identifies exactly how The Quiet American anticipates subsequent U.S. militarism in
Vietnam. Probably the most complete discussion is Eric Larsen's 1976 essay in the New Republic.
"Remarkable in its prescience," The Quiet American for Larsen "reads like an explicit prophecy of
exactly what was to occur in the disastrous years following 1964" and "is still the best novel to have
come out of the Vietnam War" (4044; emphasis added). He finds "Greene's analysis of the American
motivation in that war rather unpleasantly accurate" (41). And he argues that U.S. prosecution of a
decade-long war against the Vietnamese communists can be attributed to "our failure to perceive life
generously for the untidy thing it really is. Here we can see the specific failure of perception or emotion
that Greene speaks of as 'innocence': our characteristic failure to see or experience life as quite real.
What the satire is all about finally is our inability to think, politically or morally, or perhaps even to feel
without recourse to abstraction" (41). This American innocence, this inability to see life in its full
complexity, is embodied by Alden Pyle and his belief in "democracy." According to Larsen, Greene
describes through Pyle "that part of us that chooses not to think but to substitute a few abstract and
therefore rigid assumptions for the process of real thought" (42). Robert Boyers, in

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Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, also writes of Greene's critique of American
innocence, declaring that "the prime instance of this innocence at work in the international arena is
provided by the United States" (66). According to Boyers, Pyle "is dangerous not because his intentions
are bad, but because he presumes to interfere politically in the lives of persons whose needs he does not
understand" (67). Boyers sees the attack on innocence in The Quiet American as "an attack on the failure
to respect limits: the limits of one's own benevolence" (70). In assessing The Quiet American, Larsen and
Boyers are correct; this American innocence, this tendency to think abstractly about "democracy,'' to
ignore the complicated and contradictory real world, to interfere in lives one does not understand, is a
central part of Greene's critique. For Greene, Pyle's flawsa lack of worldly experience, a failure to
recognize his own destructiveness, an excessive idealism, and a reliance upon abstractionsare America's
flaws.
What Larsen, Boyers, and others fail to perceive is how inappropriate it is to describe U.S. foreign policy
during the cold warand U.S. actions in Vietnamas innocently motivated. Drawing upon the literary conceit
of an innocent American at large in an older, more experienced world, Greene accurately depicts the
public persona of U.S. policy makers and the public perception of U.S. policy. By making Pyle so
ludicrously innocent, Greene attempts to satirize the very notion of American innocence. The result,
however, is a character so unbelievably unaware and so stupidly noble as to arouse our sympathy. Since
The Quiet American was written a full decade before the implementation of free-fire zones, body counts,
and Christmas bombings, Greene's reliance upon the myth of American innocence is understandable.
Larsen, writing in 1976, and Boyers, writing in the mid-1980s, have no such excuse for uncritically
accepting the notion that the war stemmed from America's failure to recognize the limits of its own
benevolence. To accept uncritically the idea of American innocence only a few years after the war (as
Larsen does) and in the midst of Reagan-era militarism (as Boyers does) is to demonstrate the continuing
sway of American exceptionalism. Indeed, if one were to speak of any other nation's innocenceBritish
innocence in the Falklands, Soviet innocence in Afghanistan, Israeli innocence in Palestineone would
rightly be subjected to ridicule. Yet to describe the foreign policy of the world's leading military power
and manufacturer of weapons as innocently motivated (however flawed in practice) is uncontroversial, is
entirely acceptable within American literary

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culture due to that culture's continuing belief in a form of American exceptionalism. Far from innocent,
though, U.S. foreign policy has been guided by economic self-interest, and the American campaign against
communism has been waged to maintain and expand global capital. This anticommunist crusade was
motivated by the need to thwart, in the words of Noam Chomsky, "the effort of indigenous movements to
extricate their societies from the integrated world system dominated largely by American capital, and to
use their resources for their own social and economic development" (At War with Asia, 5).
Greene's use of the innocent American myth may reflect and satirize the dominant ideology, but it also
perpetuates a falsehood about the motivation of U.S. policy elites. For while showing the brutal results of
American policy, Greene does not challenge and in fact reinforces the notion that American policy makers
see their actions as benign and believe in their own good will. In his response to Diana Trilling in
Commentary, Philip Rahv identifies the ideological usefulness of the myth of American innocence:
Mrs. Trilling appraises this anti-Americanism as Communist in essence. But is it? Its principal content, apart from some pointed
witticisms, is the charge of "innocence," which it is said mankind cannot afford to indulge Americans in at this hour of universal peril.
Now obviously this is a charge that Communism does not consider in the least useful; it has never formed a part of its indictment of
America. What the Communists do accuse Americans of is "warmongering" and conspiring to dominate the world for imperialist gain.
Imperialists and "Wall Street profiteers'' are scarcely noted for their "innocence," a quality implying good will and good intentions. (69)
U.S. policy toward the Vietnamese communists, Greene suggests (and U.S. action during the Vietnam
War, Larsen and others suggest), is due to the American national character, to its excessive innocence and
idealism, to the naive determination of people like Pyle "to do good, not to any individual person, but to a
country, a continent, a world" (Greene, Quiet American, 11). No matter how fundamentally ignorant and
misguided U.S. actions were, the motivation behind such actions, on this account, was benign.
The pundits, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and scholars who populate the American foreign-policy
establishment, even while admitting the awful consequences of U.S. policy, reinforce notions of American
exceptionalism.
For Hans Morgenthau, "Only the enemies of the United States will

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question the generosity of [American efforts to build a nation in South Vietnam] which have no parallel in
history" (quoted in Chomsky, American Power, 32). Acknowledging that the United States "did indeed rip
South Vietnam's social fabric to shreds" and agreeing that Vietnamese communists' criticism of American
imperialism "was not entirely wrong," Stanley Karnow argued that the United States was "motivated by
the loftiest of intentions" (439). For Arthur Schlesinger, U.S. policies in Vietnam circa 1954 were "part of
our general program of international goodwill" (quoted in American Power, 329); and for George
Kennan, throughout its diplomatic history but particularly in Asia, the United States has attempted ''to
achieve our foreign policy objectives by inducing other governments to sign up to professions of high
moral and legal principle" (46). We have, Kennan argues, made "ourselves slaves of the concepts of
international law and morality" (54). Likewise, Herman Kahn lamented, "people in this country are not
used to doing dirty tricks and playing rough. It doesn't come naturally to most of us" (quoted in
Windmiller, 118). This belief in American beneficence, which stretches back to the Puritan sense of
divine purpose, did not end with the grim lesson of My Lai, but seems a permanent fixture in American
political rhetoric. Thus Anthony Lake, writing only two years after the Persian Gulf War, asserted that,
unlike other nations, the United States does "not seek to expand the reach of our institutions by force"
(quoted in Chomsky, "Clinton Vision," 28), while in 1994 in the New York Times Magazine and Vanity
Fair respectively, David Fromkin argued that "American motives are now largely humanitarian" and
David Halberstam (who as a Journalist saw firsthand the consequences of U.S. militarism in Vietnam)
wrote of "the American instinct for goodness and morality in foreign policy" (250). This fable of an ever
nobly intentioned America seems not to be challenged by fact. And so attempts to reconcile the historical
record with American exceptionalism sometimes lead to a rather tortured reasoning, as in Robert
Spielman's op-ed in the New York Times. To Spielman, "It took the Iraqui invasion of Kuwait to reveal
what should have been obvious all along to the foreign policy experts: the bipolar, cold war world has
given way not to 'multipolarity' but to 'unipolarity,' with the U.S. the only pole left. But unipolarity is not
the same as American hegemony. A unipolar world is not the same as a hierarchical system dominated by
a single power that creates the rules as well as enforces them" (quoted in A. Kaplan, 13).
Although critical of U.S. policy in Vietnam, Greene tacitly reinforces

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a belief in American exceptionalism. For however much Pyle's idealism is shown to be inconsistent with
his murderous actions, he remains nobly motivated. That Greene was repeatedly attacked for being anti-
American (while he was suggesting that American motives were ostensibly humanitarian) is evidence of
the constrained discourse of cold war liberalism, in which even a modest critique could appear as Red
propaganda. That literary critics' attitudes about Greene's depiction of U.S. policy did not change until
elite attitudes toward the war had changed, that this discussion did not take place until after the war, and
that even at this time critics did not question the novel's affirmation of U.S. humanitarianism suggest a
consistent sympathy between the world views of America's literary culture and its political establishment.
Again, I do not mean to suggest that literary culture merely reflects the politics of the mass media (who in
turn reflect the views of policy elites). There is disagreement within and amongst literary culture, the
mass media, and policy elites. The members of large social and cultural groups do not think identically.
There can be (and almost invariably are) substantial differences of opinion around a range of issues
within and between the various groups that make up the professional-managerial class. Ideology works
not by forcing everyone to think alike but by establishing a framework of acceptable opinion. So long as
disagreement occurs within this frame, it is perceived as rational and is professionally acceptable. Thus
the existence of a consensus on the roles and goals of U.S. power, according Gabriel Kolko, "has never
kept people and organizations from differing on means, for various arbitrary reasons ranging from
bureaucratic interests to personal ambition, but the very nature of the selection of process of such
individuals prevents radical departures from the scale of options conventional wisdom imposes"
(Anatomy of a War, 168169). For this reason, one can find in the mass media (and in literary culture) a
persistent declaration of American altruism. In 1956 Time wrote about the "phenomenon of U.S. good
will"; in 1986 Robert Boyers writes of "the limits of one's own benevolence." Although this thirty-year
span was interrupted by a war in Vietnam, by U.S. militarism in Nicaragua and elsewhere, by America's
consistent support for authoritarian regimes, and by Reagan's renewal of the cold war, belief in American
benevolence has persisted almost unabated within the professional-managerial class.
Given the supposed politicizing of the humanities, one might have expected contemporary critics to pursue
a more radical and more detailed historical examination of The Quiet American. But recent discussions
of

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The Quiet American rarely look at the history Greene documents and do not speak of his limited analysis
of the motivation behind U.S. policy. Much of this criticism is surprisingly traditional. Thomas Myers, in
Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam, argues that "the historical novelist of the Vietnam War"
must both recreate and interpret (38). In other words, these novelists must not merely document their
Vietnam experiences, they must render them with careful "selection, arrangement, and, finally, deeper
judgment" (39). Myers notes that whereas many Vietnam War authors show "a despairing faithfulness to
facts and [a] denial of both the power and the responsibility of imagination" (40), Greene ''revealed that
the adroit manipulation of the realistic mode of the historical novel is more a matter of selective
composition and interpretation than it is of comprehensive, unreflective recording" (39).
Myers's main concern, like the literary critics of the 1950s and 1960s, is with identifying Greene's
artistry, not with examining the intersection of his artistry and his politics. Myers presents a commonplace
notionthat literature is the imaginative reconstruction of events, not a mere historical transcription.
Myers's emphasis falls almost entirely on the literary imagination (on themes, techniques, generic
attributes, and literary history) and tends to disregard the history out of which this literature was
constructed. In a society as ahistorical as our own, this emphasis on the imaginative reconstruction of
events seems almost perverse, and it does not affect the longstanding and ongoing conservative rewriting
of the war. Transformed into a lesson in patriotism and a narrative of American suffering, the Vietnam
War cries out for exactly the kind of "despairing truthfulness to facts" that Myers laments.
Seemingly less traditional in his approach to The Quiet American, Philip Melling, in Vietnam in
American Literature, speaks of the tendency "to ignore the social fabric of Vietnamese life in the popular
and political culture of the United States," and he looks at "the problem of cultural isolationism [as] first
observed by Graham Greene in the 1950s" (89). Yet Melling's central focus is on how "the American
experience in Vietnam resurrects the Puritan experience in New England" (15). Strangely, in a book
grounded in contemporary theory, a book that criticizes as ethnocentric American cultural responses to
Vietnam, Melling turns to the Puritan experience to understand American literature of the Vietnam War.
Thus "Pyle's Vietnam is a dogma of the elect, and his views represent the antifictional prejudices of his
Puritan forebears"; his attitude "reminds us of an earlier Bostonian, the Puritan Mr. Wentworth in Henry

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James's The Europeans" (91). Rather than address whether Greene's understanding of the motivation
behind U.S. policy in the 1950s is consistent with the historical record, Melling traces Alden Pyle's
actions to seventeenth-century New England. This preoccupation with establishing the lineage of
contemporary American belief and rhetoric, of finding its roots in a specifically American past, be it
Puritan New England or the Western Frontier, has long been a staple of literary and cultural critics. As
Howard Temperley and Malcolm Bradbury observe about the main tendencies in American Studies, "One
mark of 'Americanness'is the constant search for an interpretation, an overview: an explanation of
'American' experience, the 'American' national character, the 'American' way" (18). In connecting Alden
Pyle to America's Puritan heritage, therefore, Melling follows a longstanding critical tradition, one that
focuses on literary attributes and qualities over material circumstances, rhetoric over political economya
critical tradition that, in the words of Russell Reising, "draw[s] our attention away from the production
and reproduction of the very ideology which mythicizes the meaning of America to begin with" (79).
With the advent of postcolonial and feminist theory, critics are beginning to view Vietnam War literature
from a more critical and more self-consciously ideological perspective. Zakia Pathak, Saswati Sengupta,
and Sharmila Purkayastha criticize traditional analyses of The Quiet American, asserting that this
"canonized criticism forwarded the liberal humanist program of purifying the story from historical dross,
reducing Vietnam to a microcosm of the modern world and collapsing the politics into categories of
Christian discourse. Countering this apolitical tradition, Pathak, Sengupta, and Purkayastha set out "to
read the collusion of two discourses, imperialist and patriarchal, as constituting [Phuong] and structuring
the text" (202). Unlike the many critics who have focused on Greene's existentialism or his criticism of
American innocence, Pathak et al. consider the inaccuracies of his depictions of Asians: "The Vietnamese
people exist as a dismembered race, as bodies flung in[to] a pond as a woman with a mutilated baby in
her lap" (204). Similarly, they note that "Phuong is without a history; there is a noticeable absence of
cultural markers of class, religion, education, which suggests that these are invisible for Fowler and that
his desire is only for her body" (205). After 35 years of liberal-humanist readings, critics at last have
begun to look at issues of race and gender in The Quiet American.

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Yet Pathak, Sengupta, and Purkayastha admire Greene's novel, reading the narrator Fowler not as a
spokesman for Greene but as the target of authorial irony as "masculinist" and "twentieth-century
Orientalist." Rather than another colonialist erasing and silencing of an Asian woman, Phuong's silence is
seen as a conscious strategy, "a willed act in the furtherance of her objective" (204). This view that
Phuong's silence is in some way emancipatory because it reveals the failure of masculinist and Orientalist
authority and because it demonstrates the ability of the oppressed to maintain a sphere of independence
and control is a common perception in contemporary literary and cultural studies. Phuong's silence is
evidence of Fowler's/Greene's/the West's inability to completely define, represent, and speak for the
Other. Her silence suggests the presence of what James Scott calls the hidden transcript, "a politics of
disguise and anonymity" (19) that is ''the privileged site for nonhegemonic, contrapuntal, dissident,
subversive discourse" (25). One problem with this perception is that it has a tendency to read the racist
and imperialist near erasure of oppressed groups (an erasure that abets exploitation) as evidence of a
failed hegemony. Although the motivation behind such readings (to make literary works more
representative, to give voice to the voiceless, etc.) is admirable, it tends to weaken ideological critique,
supplanting an understanding of the workings of racism and imperialism with a politics of representation.
At its most extreme, such criticism asserts that representations of the Other are almost always subversive
of prevailing power relations since these cannot be wholly confined by traditional, hegemonic discourses.
In suggesting that Fowler's narrative should be read ironically, Pathak, Sengupta, and Purkayastha seem to
fall prey to a formalist privileging of irony. Although the distinction between a fictional first-person
narrator and an author can be important in all forms of literary analysis, there is little reason to draw so
clear a distinction between Fowler and Greene. Because Fowler is the novel's only fully developed
character, because his politics and moral crisis are consonant with the heroes of many other Greene
novels, and because Fowler, like Greene, is an English journalist living in Saigon and writing about
Indochina, it is logical to associate Greene's views with Fowler's.
3
Even if Greene intended Fowler's
narrative to be read ironically and Fowler's character to be criticized, the effect in The Quiet American is
the opposite: inevitably, Fowler comes across as Greene's spokesperson. By suggesting that the virtually
nonexistent Phuong is assertive and resistant, Pathak, Sengupta, and

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Purkayastha sever The Quiet American from its imperialist and Orientalist roots. And by attributing the
novel's racism and sexism to Fowler, they overlook Greene's connection to and complicity with this
tradition.
Two recent views, by Richard West and Suzanne Kehde, are much less sympathetic to Greene. West,
writing in the New York Review of Books, takes issue with the perception of Greene as "a kind of Grand
Old Man of the left, and The Quiet American as his anti-imperialist masterpiece." West inverts the
standard political view of the novel, finding Pyle "bursting with liberal-leftist passions" and Fowler
"inclined to side with the French." And he goes on to argue that Greene's "own views were more pro-
French and anti-Communist than those he attributes to Fowler" (49). These views were misguided,
according to West, because ''The French police in Indochina systematically locked up, tortured, and even
killed political suspects" and because "The colonial government raised a third of its revenue through its
monopoly of opium, which was systematically pushed to the native community" (50). In recognizing
Greene's sympathy with French colonialism and in criticizing colonial practice, West may seem
progressive. But he does not take the next stepto link French colonialism and U.S. neo-imperialism. On
the contrary, for West, Greene's sympathy with the French invalidates his criticism of the United States.
Because of this inability to criticize French colonialism, Greene's criticism of U.S. policy must be
invalid, must stem from "an older, Tory tradition" rather than "left-wing sentiments (51). Since Greene
sympathizes with the French, who are clearly worse than the Americans, his critique of U.S. policy must
be misguidedit must stem from an irrational dislike of America, not from a genuine understanding of the
destructiveness of this policy. Ultimately, West's explanation is not much different from those reviewers
who attributed Greene's anti-Americanism to visa problems or to his having been sued for making
salacious comments about Shirley Temple. Instead of seeing Greene's defense of the French and attack on
the United States as evidence of an insufficiently elaborated understanding of political economy, West
sees it as exculpatory of U.S. actions. After all, if Greene defends the much worse actions of the French,
how can he attack the more benign behavior of the United States? Greene's inconsistency becomes
grounds for excusing U.S. actions and for dismissing The Quiet American in its entirety. About Greene's
giving voice to a French soldier's disgust over accidentally shooting a woman and child, West writes that
this perception "was seldom applied to American troops, who also felt ashamed and disgusted

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when they had killed women and children." Similarly, about Greene's having a French pilot express his
frustration over having to go on fighting, West writes, "Many American pilots probably felt that way but
no great novelist put their thoughts in writing" (50). West's challenge to Greene's presumably left-liberal
critique of U.S. policy is intended to discredit his views and to remove The Quiet American from what
West labels "the antiwar scriptures" (52). And West's emphasis upon the sensitivity of American troops
forced to commit atrocities against their will is in keeping with the rehabilitation of the image of Vietnam
War veterans and the conservative rewriting of the war.
Like Pathak, Sengupta, and Purkayastha, Suzanne Kehde looks at the intersection of gender and
colonialism in The Quiet American. But instead of finding an ironic reading of masculinist and colonialist
discourses, Kehde faults Greene for having "no critique of gender stereotypes and little of imperialist
assumptions" (247), and she sees Fowler as "oblivious to the deep structures of gender differentiation
upon which imperialism rests" (253). Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's idea that Western male
subjectivity is based on homosocial desire, "which in the colonial setting is maintained by both gender
and colonial discourse" (247), Kehde concentrates on Fowler's relationship with Pyle. At times, Kehde
refers to actual history and offers something of an ideological critique. The cordial relationship between
the French police captain Vigot and the British Fowler causes her to note that the British encouraged the
reconquest of Vietnam by the French. Fowler's failure to scrutinize his own subject position in French
Indochina leads Kehde to recognize that Greene, born into an upper-middle-class professional family,
was inculcated in "the attitudes and values appropriate to a citizen of the empire" (254, n. 2). And
Fowler's criticism of Pyle's innocence causes her to perceive the concept of an innocent ''American
character historically consistent and impervious to contingency" (250) as an ideological construct.
But despite this reference to history and ideology, Kehde sees Fowler's verbal attack on American
involvement in Vietnam and his connivance in Pyle's murder as having been caused by a need to "maintain
his own position in the homosocial order" (249), rather by a recognition that Pyle (and America) "endorse
terrorist activities [that] endanger the civilian population" (Kehde, 251). Kehde's concern with
engenderment, with the way gender roles and identity are constructed and maintained, and with how
gender differentiation supports imperialism,

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is a useful critical enterprise. These concerns are far more important earlier critics' nebulous speculations
about twentieth-century everymen struggling with an absurd modern condition. The problem with Kehde's
argument (and with the arguments of many other contemporary critics' analyses of Vietnam War literature)
is its failure to address the role of class. When identifying the weaknesses of such arguments, I do not
mean to suggest that these analyses are invalid or without value but that on the whole contemporary critics
do not connect their arguments about race and gender to a class analysis of imperialism. Kehde's view
that Fowler's criticism of U. S. policy is a displacement of his homosocial desire tends to emphasize his
individual psychosexual development and to dismiss geopolitical explanation. In themselves, the
limitations of Kehde's argument are barely worth discussion. But they are significant as a symptom of
American literary culture's persistent, even systematic exclusion of class analysis and material critique.
What is missing from most analyses of Vietnam War literature is an understanding that the war was fought
to preserve, in Michael Parenti's words, "the security of the whole international system of finance capital.
No country is allowed to pursue an dependent course of self-development. None is permitted to go
unpunished or undeterred. None should serve as an inspiration or source of material support to other
nations that might want to pursue a politico-economic path other than the maldevelopment offered by
global capitalism" (Against Empire, 50).
Criticism of The Quiet American has moved from a defense against charges that Greene was anti-
American and a focus on existential and Christian themes to a recognition of Greene's prescience and an
interest in his race and gender constructions. Significant changes within literary practice have led to a
more socially aware criticism. Such criticism is frequently insightful about literary and cultural
constructions of race and gender and about how these issues intersected with the war. Yet contemporary
critics have also continued to read American foreign policy as well-intentioned and have repeatedly
supplanted history with text and political economy with discourse. One striking exception is Haim
Gordon's Fighting Evil. Gordon forthrightly declares that agents like Alden Pyle "protect the interests of
large corporations based in the United States whose greed and lust for power have created the
neocolonialism that wreaks devastation upon the Third World" (30). But literary culture in general has
been reluctant to see the war this wayas a logical

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and necessary means of maintaining capitalist hegemony. As Gordon notes, literary scholars have written
"with total indifference to the terrible evils and particular horrors Greene describes" (36). Whereas,
according to Gordon, The Quiet American "can be an educational experience [about] the horrors
instigated, supported, and covered up by the Western powers" and whereas "it can also be a call to join
those few persons who do attempt to halt the many evils that prevail'' (83), American literary culture has
consistently shied away from such overtly ideological positions. Focusing on Catholicism, existentialism,
Jamesian innocence, racial empowerment, and gender difference, critics have routinely ignored class
struggle and materialist critique.

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4
Official Distortions

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Except for The Quiet American, every novel or memoir generally considered part of the Vietnam War
literary canon was published after 1975. A look at the critical reception of four earlier, noncanonical
novelsWilliam J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick's The Ugly American (1958); Robin Moore's The Green
Berets (1965); Victor Kolpacoff's The Prisoners of Quai Dong (1967); and John Clark Pratt's The
Laotian Fragments (1974)suggests that the political perspective of commercial American literary culture
during this period shifted from the cold war liberalism of the 1950s to a somewhat more critical
liberalism. Yet despite the politicization occuring within U.S. society, the practice of literary assessment
continued to emphasize an ahistorical aestheticism. Those few academic critics writing about these four
novels in the 1980s and 1990s have likewise endorsed a modestly critical liberalism that rarely
challenges a fundamental belief in American exceptionalism.
Lederer and Burdick's The Ugly American, set in the imaginary southeast Asian nation of Sarkhan, is, like
The Quiet American, a critique of U.S. foreign policy. But unlike Greene, who found U.S. policy both
nave and murderous, Lederer and Burdick point to the willful ignorance, careerist self-interest, and
cultural snobbery that stymie American efforts to halt the spread of communism. Their novel, actually a
series of loosely linked vignettes concerning the actions of foreign service officials, is meant as a
corrective to Greene's harsh assessment. Although unsparing in their depiction of administrative
incompetence and bureaucratic inertia, Lederer and Burdick seem unaware of the use of terror by U.S.
agents. They attribute the failure of U.S. policy to an inability to recognize the skillful duplicity of
communists, a refusal to learn native languages and customs, a reluctance to leave the comforts of the
capital city and its American enclave, a preoccupation with diplomatic social life, and an overriding
concern with large-scale, capital-intensive projects rather than with smaller innovations more likely to
improve the daily lives of the native population. Communist success, on the other hand, is attributed to the
careful training of its diplomats, their willingness to respect native language and customs, and their ability
to cynically prey

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upon natives' misguided resentment. Consequently, the communists are on the verge of world domination.
As one Sarkhanese states, "America had its chance and it missed. And now the Communists are going to
win" (24). Or as a fictional U.S. senator declares, "we're facing the final crisis with Russia the next few
years will decide whether we're going to win or lose" (242). This paranoia about the imagined abilities
of communists is seen in the fanciful timetables by which they are said to plot world domination. The
Senator in The Ugly American sees the fate of the world being determined in the next few years; Soviet
agents in The Ugly American plan "to bring [Burma] within the Communist orbit within 30 months" (35),
and, according to Time, Anthony Eden's military advisors estimated in 1956 that by 1961 the communists
would be ready to attempt violent global conquest.
While their basic thesis is that the United States needs more competent foreign service officers, Lederer
and Burdick also give specific examples of policies and programs the United States might adopt that
might make a difference in the struggle against communist hegemony: providing Asians with powdered
milk to accustom them to fresh milk, which is alien to their diets, so they can begin raising dairy cows;
broadcasting surreptitiously taped conversations of Russian field operatives telling their local agents not
to "talk about 'socialist ownership of lands'" because that "only scares the peasants. Peasants are
backward types" (63); constructing simple water pumps run by bicycles, without exporting technology or
giving aid money, since "Whenever you give a man something for nothing the first person he comes to
dislike is you" (216); or teaching Asians to construct and use long-handled brooms (rather than the
traditional short-handled native variety), thus keeping elderly peasants from becoming hump-backed. (The
American who teaches the Sarkhanese this lesson in mechanical engineering and good posture is
rewarded with a small shrine that reads: "In memory of the woman who unbent the backs of our people"
[238].) The United States might even employ an agent like Colonel Edward B. Hillandale, who
recognizes that ''the key to Sarkhanand to several other nations in Southeast Asiais palmistry and
astrology" (181) and who thus becomes "the only living Caucasian graduate of the Chunking School of
Occult Science" (177)much as Edward G. Lansdale fabricated a book of prognostications by Vietnamese
astrologers.
Ultimately, The Ugly American shows, in Richard Drinnon's words, "How to Handle Natives So the
Fiendishly Clever Russians Will Not

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Win (without Firing a Shot)" (375). The United States can win the cold war, Lederer and Burdick suggest,
by showing how self-evidently hypocritical communists are and by providing cheap technological fixes
that ignore native customs and suggest instead that complex socioeconomic problems can be solved
through Yankee ingenuity. Problems such as the elite ownership of land, lack of access to education, a
corrupt and repressive political system, and a nearly feudal class division are not obstacles to capitalist
victory, according to Lederer and Burdick; in The Ugly American these troubling facts do not exist. The
importance of coercion as a means of enforcing U.S. policy, the kind of sentiment expressed by General
Samuel T. Williams in a letter to Ambassador to Vietnam Elbridge Durbrow"the population of South
Vietnam is more responsive to fear and force than to an improved standard of living" (quoted in Young,
60)is likewise absent from Lederer and Burdick's account.
One might have expected that a book as simplistic as The Ugly American, even during the cold war,
would not receive serious consideration from commercial literary culture. Yet in the New York Times
Book Review Robert Trumbull (a Times foreign correspondent) declares The Ugly American "a book that
is not only important but consistently entertaining" (5), one that "is clothed in sharp characterizations,
frequently humorous incident and perceptive descriptions of the countries and people where the action
occurs" (38). Trumbull even asserts that The Ugly American "may fall into a permanent niche as a source
of insight into the actual, day-by-day by-play of present titanic political struggle for Asia that will engage
future historians" (38). The far more nuanced and complex presentation of American involvement in
southeast Asia made by Greene in The Quiet American, however, was criticized by the Times as
''specifically ideological and political" and was found to be unfair and one-sided. But The Ugly
American, which is filled with ludicrous caricatures of communists and paranoia about the Red menace
("Communism was the face of the devil put on earth to test again the morality of men" [Lederer and
Burdick, 471), is perceived by the Times as a factual account of "why the free world is steadily losing
ground in that part of the world to the Communists" (Trumbull, "The Ambassador," 5), and a permanent
source of insight "unless, of course, the Communists win, and suppress all such books" (Trumbull, 38).
The insistence within both reviews that there exists a titanic struggle between Democracy and
Communism, that Communism may be on the verge of triumphing to the detriment of all humankind, and
that Greene's novel is complicit in this assault upon the

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West, while Lederer and Burdick's novel is a call to arms, reveals how closely commercial literary
culture mirrored the political tenor of the cold war.
A look at news pages in this issue of the New York Times (5 October 1958) reveals a striking
preoccupation with America's fight against "the Reds." (The use of "Reds" to describe Communists as a
collective menace was common in the Times, as can be found in several headlines in the 5 October 1958
edition: " 'Pressures Mold U.S. China Policy': Record Since Reds' Victory in 1949 Shows Diverse
Forces''; "Burke Asks Care in Quemoy Talks: Navy Chief Wants Limit on Concessions to Reds.") The
struggle between Communist and Nationalist China over Quemoy and Matsu occasioned John Foster
Dulles's threat that "a widespread use of force in the Far East [by the Communist Chinese] would
endanger free world positions and the security of the United States" (Kenworthy). And an American
admiral warns against the dangers of negotiations with communists, since "Our conception of negotiations
means a process of give and take. This is not the case of negotiations with the Reds. They want
negotiations to go only one waytheirsand they will not negotiate genuinely except when they are hurt"
(Trussell). Another article explains how several East Germans were jailed for disseminating "Red
Propaganda" in West German labor unions. And Robert Trumbull, reviewer of The Ugly American, in an
article on treaty negotiations between the United States and Japan, quotes Secretary of Defense Neil H.
McElroy: "In the world today, no free country can stand alone, and free nations must continue to
strengthen their cooperation and unity." Given this context, it is no surprise that The Ugly American can
was received favorably, nor that in the same issue of the NYTBR Professor Henry A. Kissinger's Nuclear
Weapons and Foreign Policy was declared "a challenging and original statement of the problem we're up
againsthow to avoid thermonuclear devastation and escape being nibbled to death by the Russians" (42).
Another review, quoting from William Miller's A New History of the United States, wonders simply
whether "capitalism can survive in an era of expanding socialism and communism" (H. Graff, 26).
The most extraordinary convergence between the Time's news coverage and its book reviews, however,
appears in a news story entitled "New Soviet Novel Hailed by Pravda." According to the Times, Vsevold
Kochetov's novel The Yershov Brothers was received favorably by Pravda because it was "the
Communist's answer to that slip of a bygone era two

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years ago, Vladimir Ddintsev's Not by Bread Alone" (much as The Ugly American was an answer to
The Quiet American). Thus in the very same edition in which Trumbull praises The Ugly American
because it spells out "why the free world is steadily losing ground to the Communists," the Times chides
the Soviets for praising a novel because it is "really useful in the ideological struggle against sundry
influences of the reactionary ideology of the capitalist West." While there are obvious differences
between the authoritarian cultural policies of the former Soviet Union and cultural politics in the United
States, the similarity between these two incidents is striking, the main difference being that Pravda
acknowledged the importance of ideology in evaluating a literary text, while American literary culture
purported to evaluate books by objective literary standards uncontaminated by ideology.
Ironically, rather than a corrective to The Quiet American, The Ugly American is largely an embodiment
of the nave self-righteousness Greene criticizes, the belief that simple American know-how can
overcome revolutionary political movements that arose from dire socioeconomic problems and the cruel
legacy of colonialism. Nowhere is this simple-minded belief more apparent than in Lederer and Burdick's
suggestion that the French could have outfought the Viet Minh if they had read Mao's book on guerrilla
warfare. This beliefthat a different military strategy, one that better understood the enemy's tacticswas all
that was needed to win a war in Vietnam would, of course, haunt countless American military strategists
in the years to come.
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Ronald Stead is less sympathetic to The Ugly American. His
disagreement with the book, however, does not arise from its simplistic solutions, its failure to recognize
U.S. complicity in perpetuating economic injustice in the Third World, its gross oversimplification of the
rise of socialist political movements, or its obliviousness to the often violent tactics of U.S. agents. Stead
instead objects to The Ugly American because it mischaracterizes the diligence and idealism of U.S.
foreign service officials, conveying "a false impression that the majority of such workers are ill chosen
[and] giv[ing] no hint that there has been improvement in carrying out tasks calling for exceptional
understanding, adaptability, linguistic capacity, and personal virtue." Despite these shortcomings, Stead
concludes that this "dire warning is worth heeding since no such tocsin can be sounded too often."
Although Time's reviewer finds The Ugly American to be a "slashing,

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over-simplified [and] often silly" book filled with "crude black and white cartoons," he does not point to
the book's wholly sanitized depiction of U.S. foreign policy. At the time of its publication, Diem, with
U.S. support, was conducting a massive campaign of repression throughout South Vietnam, what one
French reporter described as "denunciation, encirclement of villages, searches and raids, arrests of
suspects, plundering, interrogations enlivened sometimes by torture (even of innocent people),
deportation, and 'regrouping' of populations suspected of intelligence with the rebels, etc." (Young, 60).
And during this time experts from the Michigan State University School of Police Administration,
working under a $25 million contract with the CIA, trained and equipped Diem's forces (Young, 61).
Ignoring this background, Time's reviewer finds The Ugly American, its oversimplifications
notwithstanding, a "not-to-be ignored attack on the men and women who have taken up the white man's
burden for the U.S. in Southeast Asia," a book ''that seeks to go beyond and below Graham Greene's The
Quiet American," a book that "illustrate[s] the fact that no nation in history has ever faced the problems
the U.S. encounters" in its responsibility "for the welfare of millions attend[ing] to their wants and hopes,
from plumbing to higher education."
One turns to Robert Hatch's review of The Ugly American in the Nation (then as now a left-liberal
weekly) with the hope that here at least Lederer and Burdick's novel will be revealed for what it isan
apologia for continued U.S. global hegemony. Unfortunately, Hatch makes no such critique. He finds The
Ugly American an entertaining middlebrow novel, "good escape stuff, good movie stuff." He agrees that
the goal of American policy, although often misdirected, "is to help the Asians to solve their own
problems, improve their own standards of living, build their own defenses against encroaching tyranny
from East or West and worship their own gods in their own way." Although Lederer and Burdick have "an
awkward way of advocating decency and generosity," Hatch approvingly concludes that they show "the
way to beat the Russian game."
Only one reviewer speaks to the fraudulence of The Ugly American: Joseph Buttinger, in a 50-page essay
in Dissent. Buttinger is outraged at Lederer and Burdick's falsehoods, exaggerations, and
oversimplifications. He finds this book particularly troubling because it was taken seriously by so many.
"Even the most critical reviews," Buttinger writes, "contain references to the authors' good intentions that
amount to a

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bashful recommendation of the book" (325). Unlike these reviewers, Buttinger points to the book's
"political inanity, its distortion of fact, and its insidious attacks against the cause it allegedly defends"
(328). And he claims that "Lederer and Burdick are shockingly ignorant of the facts essential for a fair
presentation of their subject; they distort, through boundless exaggeration, the truth in respect to conditions
that justify some of their criticism; they falsify vital aspects of reality through omission; and they
constantly twist the meanings of facts and events through their failure to comprehend either the irreducible
complexity of international relations or the difficulties, novel and perplexing, that are inherent in the
policy of foreign aid" (331). More than merely asserting their book's falsehoods, Buttinger compares
Lederer and Burdick's depiction of U.S. foreign policy with a detailed, factual account of this policy. He
shows that the United States spends the vast majority of its aid money on exactly the kind of small projects
Lederer and Burdick say it ignores. And he recognizes that Lederer and Burdick's assertion that there is a
horde of 1,500,000 Americans working overseas for the U.S. government is a gross exaggeration, the
actual figure being closer to 40,000 (including 22,000 who work for the Department of Defense).
Buttinger debunks many more of Lederer and Burdick's falsehoods, including the belief that by reading
Mao on guerrilla war the West may triumph in revolutionary struggles and stop the spread of communism.
As Buttinger explains, though, the French did read Mao but were still unable to defeat the Viet Minh
because they (and Lederer and Burdick) did not recognize that "the Indochina War was primarily a
political struggle" (366). For Buttinger, "The French generals in Indochina could have known the
collected works of Mao Tse-tung by heart and still would have lacked what they needed to winsufficient
support from the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It was French policy, the attempt to preserve
French colonial rule, not ignorance of Mao Tse-tung's writings, which made it impossible to defeat the
Vietminh" (366). Ridiculing Lederer and Burdick's simplistic solutions, Buttinger explains that any
attempt to affect change through foreign aid must be cognizant of the political and economic conditions in
specific countries at specific times. Without recognizing the colonial legacy in Vietnam, Buttinger argues,
American military policy and economic assistance is bound to fail.
Within commercial literary culture, Buttinger's essay is remarkable in its length and scope; his detailed
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commercial and academic analyses of Vietnam War literature. He goes to such lengths because he
believes The Ugly American has political significance, that "its questionable accuracy and controversial
political value have now become major issues in our debates on foreign policy and on the merits of
foreign aid" (366367). By refuting it, Buttinger hopes to defend the principle behind U.S. foreign aid and
to provide space for a more serious criticism of the nature of this aid.
As necessary and informed as his attack on The Ugly American is, Buttinger overlooks an important
aspect of American foreign policythe use of terror and the support of repressive regimes. He declares the
results of American policy in Vietnam a "momentous historical result" because Vietnam "is the first
country in Asia where the West, by replacing imperialism with policies of aid, has stopped the 'Russians'
without firing a shot" (339). In truth, U.S. aid helped train and equip Diem's brutal police and military
forces. While the West may not have fired a shot in the three years between the end of the American-
supported French war and the publication of The Ugly American, the Diem regime certainly did.
Buttinger rejoices "over the fact that the dollars that go to Indochina are no longer spent on French
airplanes and tanks but are now used to increase the number of Vietnamese doctors, nurses, technicians,
administrators, teachers, and schools" (340); in reality, as Frances Fitzgerald explains, the United States
was ''spending some 80 percent of the entire aid budget each year on the development of the former
French colonial forces and on the creation of a civil guard and other security and intelligence services"
(221). The results of Diem's policies hardly amounted to an elimination of imperialism, since, according
to Fitzgerald, Diem's "government resembled nothing so much as an attenuated French colonial regime"
(123).
However historically innacurate and aesthetically uninteresting it might be, The Ugly American is an
important cultural artifact. Far more successful than The Quiet American, The Ugly American was a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection, was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post (whose editors did not
consider it to be, like Greene's book, "a bitter tirade presented as a novel"), was on the bestseller list for
78 weeks, was presented to every member of the U.S. Senate by Senators John Kennedy and Clair Engle,
sold over four million copies, and was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando. To John Hellman,
"The Ugly American stands beside Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and The Jungle (1906) as a work of

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fiction catalyzing American political debate" (15); likewise to Richard Slotkin, The Ugly American "was
the Uncle Tom's Cabin of counterinsurgency: it put into vivid novelistic prose a convincing interpretation
of the crisis of Communist expansion in Asia and offered an appealing scenario of how we might master
the situation" (Gunfighter Nation, 447). Yet it has rarely been examined by literary and cultural critics.
One of the few academics to look at The Ugly American Richard Drinon in Facing West sees the novel
not merely as cold war propaganda but as a contemporary version of the white man's burden. Drinnon
finds the depictions of Asians The Ugly American racist, as he does the whole notion of an American
civilizing mission. To Drinnon, the difference between the policy Lederer and Burdick critique and the
policy they promote is the difference between "overt and covert racism" (375). "Never for a moment,"
Drinnon writes, "was the superiority of the norms of the West questioned. Natives existed to be
manipulated and hoodwinked" (379). Drinnon sees the racism in The Ugly American and in U.S. policy in
Asia following "a straight line of march" from ''the Massachusetts Bay Colony across the Alleghenies to
the Mississippi; on across the Rockies to the Pacific slope" (xiii). Looking at American Westward
expansion, Drinnon sees "the metaphysics of Indian-hating, those deadly subtleties of white hostility that
reduced native peoples to the level of the rest of the fauna and flora" (xvi). The roots of this racism,
according to Drinnon, lie "deep in the Western psyche intertwined with more general repressive attitudes
toward nature and the body, and with concomitant associations of dark skin color with filth, death, and
radical evil generally. Out of this psychosexual complex arose the generic native, that despised, earthy,
animalic, suppressed 'shadow self' projected by the Western mind" (xvii). Ultimately, this racism became
"in a real sense the enabling experience of the rising American empire" (xvii).
The role of racism in promoting territorial expansion, labor exploitation, violence, even genocide, is
unquestionable. But it is important to distinguish between racism as justification and cause of American
expansion. The United States waged war in Vietnam not because its diseased Western psyche despised
these particular natives. Rather, the war was fought to maintain U.S. and capitalist hegemony against the
perceived threat of global communism. Racism was effective in promoting (or in Drinnon's words,
"enabling") brutality by U.S. troops, but it had little if anything to do with why the United States invaded
Vietnam, as distinct from any other Asian nation. Although the connection between race and

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imperialism is important, without further connecting this dynamic to a materialist critique, arguments like
Drinnon's help mystify the causes and conduct of imperialism. A property of the Western mind, racism
(and thus imperialism) is, on Drinnon's account, intrinsic to Westerners' psyches and can never be undone,
or perhaps can be undone through some form of therapy or racial enlightenment. Also, Drinnon's argument
implies that if racism is overcome, there will be no more exploitative nationalist and capitalist expansion.
Recent history suggests otherwise: the global expansion of capitalism often goes hand in hand with racial
tolerance. The business press is filled with an awareness of cultural difference and a concern for cross-
cultural tolerance and cooperation. As Crystal Bartolovich explains, sensitivity to cultural difference has
become a major consideration for transnational corporations. Thus one business periodical urges "people
to be less ethnocentric by helping them understand the nature of culture" (quoted in Bartolovich, 118),
while Business Week, in a report on corporate development on the United States-Mexico border, writes
of "this dynamic region where First and Third worlds meet," of "two sides of the border so harnessed that
they can only move forward together" (Smith and Malkin). Without a grounding in ideological critique (in
other words, without a critique of capitalism), a focus on ethnic particularity and cultural difference does
not necessarily oppose (and may even facilitate) neo-imperialism and capitalist exploitation.
In Gunfighter Nation, Richard Slotkin too finds a connection between The Ugly American and America's
racist past. For Slotkin, "Lederer and Burdick treat 'Asians' as Hollywood (for the most part) treated
'Indians'as if they had a unitary racial character transcending differences of culture and nationality" (448).
Slotkin deftly articulates the simplistic formula guiding Lederer and Burdick's prescription for American
foreign policy as a "new display of American character [that] is effected through the novel in the stories
of a series of counterpart pairs"an honest, unaffected, mentoring American and sympathetic Asian. In The
Ugly American, Slotkin writes, "Each [American] finds his native counterpart in an Asian who is
representative of racial character but who is exceptional in his possession of a latent gift for American-
style progress. He has an instinctive affinity for capitalism and an appreciation for technology"
(Gunfighter Nation, 449). Rather than connecting this insight about the propagandistic nature of The Ugly
American to a cold-war justification for U.S. militarism in the pursuit of capitalist

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hegemony, though, Slotkin argues that "This kind of relationship conforms to the pairings of frontier
heroes and Indian companions in the mythic tradition" (Gunfighter Nation, 449). He even describes two
of Lederer and Burdick's counterpart characters as "an OSS Hawkeye and his Asian Chingachgook"
(Gunfighter Nation, 448).
More than most American Studies scholars, Slotkin sees cultural myth as a form of ideology rather than an
expression of the national psyche. "Myth," according to Slotkin, "does not argue its ideology, it
exemplifies it. It projects models of good and heroic behavior that reinforce the values of ideology, and
affirm as good the distribution of authority and power that ideology rationalizes" (Fatal 19). To Slotkin,
the frontier myth, which has been "one of the primary organizing principles of our historical memory"
(Fatal Environment, 16), has become so ingrained that it has become part of the framework through
which U.S. policy makers view the world and according to which they implement policy: "Historical
precedents are encoded and recalled in the form of myths, and policy-makers canvass them for the same
reasons that [movie] scenarists review the generic repertoire: to sample a range of interpretive models
and alternative resolutions'' (Gunfighter Nation, 408). The frontier myth likewise was prominent in
American soldiers' perceptions of the Vietnam War. As Frances Fitzgerald explains, "In Vietnam
American officers liked to call the area outside GVN control 'Indian country.' it put the Vietnam War into
a definite historical and mythological perspective: the Americans were once again embarked upon a
heroic and (for themselves) almost painless conquest of an inferior race" (491492).
1
In American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam John Hellmann also places The Ugly American in an
American cultural tradition, connecting it to 1950s-era popular social critiques like David Reisman's The
Lonely Crowd, William Whyte's The Organization Man, and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent
Society. "Underlying these critiques," Hellmann writes, "was a shared suspicion that Americans were
becoming too 'soft,' immoral, and greedy to survive the Soviets' dedicated pursuit of world communism"
(19). The Ugly American, according to Hellmann, "presented Americans with confirmation of these fears
in melodramatic terms charged with American mythic conceptions" (20).
But instead of examining the true nature of U.S. foreign policy (support for authoritarian and colonial
regimes, use of subversion and military force), Hellmann, like Drinnon and Slotkin, concentrates almost
exclusively on "American mythic conceptions." He sees The Ugly American

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as an updating of the Puritan jeremiad, an allegory of imminent doom and an attempt to reawaken America
to its glorious purpose through apocalyptic vision. Hellmann presents a detailed explication of this
contemporary allegory: "the Asian villagers are the American Indians or the Chinese, living in a terra
profana, to be converted to the Forces of Darkness; the Viet Minh guerrillas the 'savage' Indians
manipulated by the Dark Forces; the British and French colonial officials the 'dead hand of the European
past'; the 'ugly' Americans the Chosen who have fallen away from the errand; and the few 'non-ugly'
Americans the traditional heroes of American mythic history" (22). Hellman further sees in The Ugly
American a moral geography that pits city vs. country and civilization vs. the wilderness. Lederer and
Burdick have constructed a novel that cries out for a return to the frontier virtues lost in a conformist and
materialist postwar America, a novel that also suggests the way out of this spiritual morass is to turn to, in
Hellmann's words, "the example of the fathers" (26). We should look to those non-ugly Americans who
exhibit the best American virtues: "self-reliance, democratic idealism, homespun practicality,
adaptability, ingenuity, humor, and generosity'' (27). Hellmann attributes the success of The Ugly
American to "its presentation of the struggle in Indochina, and by extension the global Cold War, in
images holding mythic resonance" (23). And he spells out exactly what this mythic resonance entails:
"The Ugly American offered its readers an Indochina representing a frontier where Americans could
return to the remembered virtues of their heritage and at the same time free themselves from the burden of
the past on this frontier, however, they would protect the dark man rather than destroy or enslave him, and
improve rather than destroy his natural landscape" (35). Hellmann reveals a broad knowledge of
American cultural myth and refers to numerous historical figures, mythic heroes, and artists. Absent from
his analysis of a novelistic critique of American foreign policy in Indochina in the 1950s, however, are
such figures as Ngo Dinh Diem, Ho Chi Minh, Allen Dulles, and Edward Lansdale. While discussing
popular social critiques, the Frontier myth, and Puritan eschatology, Hellmann ignores the people and
politics of Indochina. Asserting that The Ugly American "imposes upon an exotic but generalized
Southeast Asian topography and demography the 'moral geography' characterizing American thought since
the colonial period" (23), Hellmann looks at neither the land that has been imposed upon by Lederer and
Burdick nor the "moral geography" of American policy during the cold war.

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Drinnon's argument that The Ugly American is a form of Indian-hating central to the American psyche,
Slotkin's argument that The Ugly American conforms to the mythic pairings of frontier heroes and Indians,
and Hellmann's argument that The Ugly American updates the Puritan jeremiad derive from American
Studies' focus on national myth. Although discussion of such myths is often critical of certain aspects of
American life (in the manner of Trilling's adversarial culture), it nonetheless is centered on identifying
that which is uniquely American. According to Sacvan Bercovitch, American Studies scholars sought "to
reconstitute history itself as American" and often did so by "represent[ing] [the adverse facts of American
history] as a violation of the nation's promise and original intent" (12). For all of its adversarial and
critical nature, the American Studies tradition (out of which Drinnon, Slotkin, and Hellmann draw their
analyses) is essentially nationalist reaffirmation.
One problem with this emphasis when trying to understand U.S. behavior in Vietnam is that it shifts focus
from contemporary political, economic, and military concerns to the explication of cultural myth. Almost
inevitably there is a slippage, from seeing mythology as influencing policy decisions to seeing it as
inseparable from, or even as determining them. In other words, by concentrating on the frontier myth,
literary and cultural critics point to the seemingly immutable American belief in pushing westward,
expanding the frontier, delivering the wilderness from the savages for the sake of an exceptional, God-
inspired social order. This myth can, of course, be read as ideology, as a disguise of the real motivations
behind American expansion. Entranced by the details, variations, and aesthetics of these myths, however,
critics often overlook the material facts behind them.
Another problem with this focus on American cultural myth is that it further marginalizes Vietnamese
perspectives on the war. A recent and welcome corrective to this ethnocentrism is Renny Christopher's
The Viet Nam War/The American War. Christopher criticizes Vietnam War authors and critics for
Americanizing the war by emphasizing individualism and personal experience and thereby reinforcing an
ethnocentric view that focuses on "the war solely as a U.S. political conflict, rather than as a political and
shooting war in the country of Viet Nam" (4). In her look at The Ugly American Christopher, like
Drinnon, asserts that "in life as well as in fiction Americans see Asians as dehumanized puppets and
objects that can be manipulated" (192). But Christopher does not attempt to trace the history of American
racism to its Western psychological roots,

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nor does she attempt to read the cold war through American cultural mythology.
Christopher offers a more concertedly materialist critique. Discussing the far-fetched plan to teach the
Sarkhanese "to use milk and its byproducts" (Lederer and Burdick, 22), Christopher points out that "
[m]ost Asians are lactose-intolerant by adolescence" (198). To the notion that U.S. policy should start
with small projects like this, "with the little things which are Sarkhanese" (Lederer and Burdick, 154),
Christopher responds, "to call a project in which someone first changes local dietary habits, then imports
a foreign animal to supply them as 'Sarkhanese' illustrates the kind of globalist thinking that steamrolls
over local niceties'' (199). Similarly, she repudiates the notion that the bent-over backs of elderly
Sarkhanse can be eliminated through the introduction of a long-handled broom. "It is a lifetime of hard
labor in the rice fields and probably osteoporosis from a calcium-deficient" diet that has caused this
disfigurement; no "facile alteration of supposed tradition by a superior American intellect," Christopher
writes, "will fix a problem caused by poverty" (200). Most importantly, Christopher expands the focus of
Vietnam War literature to include Vietnamese exile writers, whom she sees as challenging "the nationalist
and ethnocentric definitions of American experience implicit in [U.S.] discourse" about the war (28).
Christopher is unsparing in her critique of Asian stereotypes and America-centrism, and she consistently
grounds her critique in Vietnamese history and culture. If this concern with ethnic identity at times causes
her to dismiss geopolitical analyses as "globalist thinking" that "serves the perennial circular exchange
between left and right" (3), her analysis is nonetheless a welcome corrective to the nationalist biases and
amorphous humanist concerns that have long dominated American literary culture.
Published in 1965, Robin Moore's The Green Berets can be read as an updated, militarized version of
The Ugly American. Like Lederer and Burdick, Moore presents a series of vignettes intended to correct a
flawed U.S. policy that threatens to lose southeast Asia to Communism. Taking his cue from Lederer and
Burdick's suggestion that the U.S. military familiarize themselves with Mao's book on guerrilla warfare,
Moore praises the counterinsurgency tactics of the Green Berets and their practice of "training civilians to
fight the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas as anti-guerrillas" (18). This new strategy is necessary because
from now on, according to Moore, the United States will "either be fighting against

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guerrillas or we'll be guerrillasmaybe in Cuba or Eastern Europe, probably pretty soon now in North
Vietnam" (59). Christopher identifies the fundamental similarity between The Ugly American and The
Green Berets when she writes that they "share the same globalist worldview, in which the Asian
participants are simply pawns in the chess game (or, perhaps, domino game) played by the superpowers"
(209). One important difference is that the failure of U.S. policy, for Lederer and Burdick, can be traced
to the self-interest of American officials, while for Moore this failure is due to an excessive U.S. concern
for the sensibilities of the corrupt and cowardly South Vietnamese.
Like Lederer and Burdick and many other cold warriors, Moore sees a homogenous, global communist
threat. Although he criticizes Diem and subsequent South Vietnamese regimes, there is no sense that the
Viet Cong are responding to the tyranny of these U.S.-supported anti-communist regimes. He makes no
distinction between the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese and uses Viet Cong and "Communist"
interchangeably: "Machine-gun and rifle fire from our walls raked the first wave of Viet Cong, dropping
them in the tangled maze of barbed wire. Another Communist section charged the outer perimeter. The
mortars were firing at minimum range now but the Communists came forward" (63). By identifying the
Viet Cong as communists, Moore makes them seem part of the global red menace rather than an
indigenous force fighting American invaders.
Although thwarting this menace is not easy, the tactics involved, according to Moore, are well understood
by trained professionals like the Green Berets. In his novel, when the Green Berets are not hindered by
political consideration for the sensibilities of the South Vietnamese, they easily outsmart the Viet Cong on
the battlefield, exploit advanced technologies (such as air power and plastic and remote-controlled
explosives), and quickly and humanely retrieve accurate information from prisoners through the use of lie
detectors and sodium pentothal. For Moore, as for Lederer and Burdick, the keys to U.S. success against
communism in southeast Asia are found in overcoming political corruption and self-interest, trusting in the
wisdom of trained experts, and using the latest in American technology. Their assessments of the situation
in southeast Asia reflect the confident pragmatism of the Kennedy administration, what Kolko labels the
"new technocratic political mind," the belief that "foreign policy, military strategy, budgets, weapons, and
forces were all related problems and could be analyzed rationally and

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quantified [and] objectives could be attained efficiently" (Anatomy of a War, 144).
Yet despite these essential similarities, The Ugly American and The Green Berets were received quite
differently by critics. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Gordon Harrison looks at Moore's
book, along with Malcolm Browne's The New Faces of War and John S. Pustay's Counterinsurgency
Warfare. In praising The New Faces of War as a curious and skeptical inquiry into U.S. policy in
Vietnam, Harrison notes that the war "is essentially a revolution solidly grounded in the discontent of
peasants" and that the NLF "is estimated to number about five million in a population of 14 million" (12),
observations at odds with Moore's depiction of the Viet Cong as an extension of global communism. In
criticizing Counterinsurgency Warfare, Harrison is "boggle[d] at the book's takeoff point: the unargued,
bland assumption that suppressing revolution throughout the world is our national business'' (12). And in
reading The Green Berets, Harrison feels "that the crusade against Communism has led us into the
ultimate political quicksands in Southeast Asia," out of which "the gimmicks of military technology are
unlikely to extricate us" (12).
Here is evidence, however incomplete, of the changing politics of literary culture (this is, after all, the
same magazine that in reviewing The Quiet American worried about the terrible surrender to Communism
of the church and Western civilization). To Harrison, writing nearly a year after the Gulf of Tonkin
incident and three months after both the official entry of U.S. ground combat units into Vietnam and the
onset of Operation Rolling Thunder (the sustained U.S. bombing of North Vietnam that would continue
until 1968), American militarism toward Communist insurgencies is troubling, perhaps even unjustified.
Still, Harrison equates the Green Berets and the Viet Cong, suggesting that Moore conveys an enduring
impression "of an addiction to cruelty that makes Vietnamese and Americans in the jungle kin" (12). To
Moore, however, the Green Berets are without exception fair, brave, honest, and skilled; the South
Vietnamese are corrupt, fearful and racist; and the Viet Cong are thugs. The Green Berets are "dedicated
men" (21) and "a potent new weapon" for "performing important missions" (332) "wherever Americans
must fight to keep the perimeter of the free world from shrinking further" (21). The South Vietnamese, on
the other hand, are "cowardly" (35) "pinhead[s]" (119) for whom "child slavery was not uncommon"
(225) and who "drool at the thought of torturing prisoners" (235). The Viet Cong are simply inhuman,
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acts of sheer terror. "The first thing the Viet Cong did after an attack," Moore asserts, "was make an
example of the village chief, his wife, and children if any" (111). The Viet Cong "drag pregnant women
into the town square where their stomachs were slit open and their foetuses pulled out" (110). When not
controlling the peasantry through terror, the Viet Cong do so by ''kidnap[ping] the most intelligent leaders
and send[ing] them north to be brainwashed" (224).
The one strategy the Viet Cong do not use in The Green Berets is to appeal to the peasants' genuine
outrage at and fear of the repressive and corrupt South Vietnamese government. Moore entirely overlooks
the importance of land reform in recruiting peasants to the NLF. As Kolko explains, land reform "was a
fundamental factor in the recruiting of soldiers, whose morale and tenacity under the most difficult
conditions was never surpassed. It made thousands of villages bases for the NLF and satisfied the most
cherished of all peasant goalsland ownership" (Anatomy of a War, 130). Even though he repeatedly
shows the brutality of ARVN soldiers toward the peasantry and suggests the racism and elitism of the
South Vietnamese ruling class, Moore does not connect this exploitation with the success of the Viet
Cong. Indeed, Americans generally ignored the significance of land reform. As one American expert
concluded in 1968, "U.S. officials did not believe that land-based grievances were important" (quoted in
Kolko, Anatomy of a War, 131). With perhaps a third of the population of South Vietnam belonging to the
NLF, it seems unlikely that their success was due to the use of terror. Land and other social reforms were
essential to the military and political strategies of the NLF. As one Marine lieutenant colonel noted, "The
Vietnamese peasant hopes the Vietcong will win because he imagines a Vietcong victory will eradicate
the conditions he currently faces" (quoted in Kolko, Anatomy of a War, 136).
Besides misrepresenting Moore's depiction of the war, Harrison's suggestion that the Vietnamese and
Americans are "jungle kin" addicted to cruelty flattens the differences between U.S., South Vietnamese,
and Viet Cong troops. The U.S. military, after all, was an invading army using the latest hardware to
maintain global hegemony, the Viet Cong an indigenous peasant army fighting for independence. The U.S.
military pursued its own strategy of terror meant to force North Vietnam to negotiate on American terms.
By 1965 the United States had initiated the policy of "free-fire zones," areas claimed to be NLF-
controlled in which, as Young writes, "anything that moved, anything at all, was a fair target"

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(129); the United States had also begun to use napalm, white phosphorous, and cluster bombs. The Viet
Cong, and even the NVA, had no similar weapons or strategiesthey were hardly jungle kin. In addition, to
equate U.S. and Viet Cong warfare in 1965 is to misrepresent the fundamental difference in the strategies
of the two sides. Kolko explains:
the NLF thought that military action without a strong political base was premature, [Whereas] the United States and Diem had to rely
increasingly on military means precisely to compensate for their already profound and growing political weaknesses. [T]he approaches
of both the United States and Diem were predicated on indifference toward the population's desires, an attitude which turned to
hostility once it was clear that only the NLF had a mass following. (Anatomy of a War, 142)
Nonetheless, despite its fundamental misrepresentation of the war, Harrison's notion that the U.S. troops
and the Vietnamese are addicted to a cruelty borne of the jungle has become a central theme in Vietnam
War fiction and criticism and in interpretations of the war generally. Novelists and critics have
repeatedly argued that the brutality of American soldiers was a kind of jungle fever brought on by the
harsh conditions of war in Vietnam, a perception that diminishes the role of senior policy makers and
makes military policy the product of individual soldiers' psychological disorders (much as cultural
historians attribute racism to a diseased Western psyche).
To Time's reviewer, it is not Moore's glorification of the Green Berets that misrepresents the war but his
exclusive focus on their military role and lack of focus on their benevolent work, "the humdrum public
health and education programs and antiguerilla training" ("One Man's War," 109). But most of Time's
review reports on the Pentagon's dispute with Moore over his assertion that The Green Berets was based
on fact. As a result of this dispute, a yellow band was placed on the cover to declare this book ''fiction
stranger than fact," while at the same time the Pentagon alleged it contained sixteen security violations.
Claiming that Moore's goal of "show[ing] that the Special Forces are largely made up of brave and
dedicated men who have the right formula for victory" is admirable, Time nevertheless concludes that the
novel is flawed because "its sly commingling of fact and fiction becomes an insult to the intelligence of
the reader" (110). In particular, Time points to Moore's fabrication of a Special Forces raid "deep into
North Viet Nam to destroy bridges and to kidnap or assassinate Communist leaders." According to Time,
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the SF has never gone into North Viet Nam" (109). Of course, Vietnamese agents of the United States had
been infiltrating North Vietnam since the mid-1950s, and the United States had been conducting covert
actions in North Vietnam since February 1964. These operations "ranged from flights over North Vietnam
by U-2 spy planes and kidnappings of North Vietnamese citizens for intelligence information, to
parachuting sabotage and psychological-warfare teams into the North, commando raids from the sea to
blow up rail and highway bridges and the bombardment of North Vietnamese coastal installations by PT
boats" (Sheehan et al., 238).
That Pentagon denials were uncritically accepted and repeated by Time is understandable, given that its
coverage of the war in 1965 was little short of overt propaganda. For instance, in the same issue in which
The Green Berets is reviewed, Time reports that in the city of Dongxoai "the Viet Cong slaughtered
women and children hiding in nearby dugouts. [before] fading like smoke into the jungle, leaving behind
700 dead. [including] twelve disemboweled children. severed heads [and] bodies of South Vietnamese
soldiers used as human shields [which] lay bound and eviscerated" ("Those Who Must Die," 29). Time
goes on to discuss heroic ARVN soldiers like "Laughing Larry Luong," who fights for the South
Vietnamese and against the Viet Cong "because the Communists killed his peasant father by burying him
up to his neck for several days before decapitating him." As to ARVN terror, Time explains that although
"Larry customarily shoots Viet Cong prisoners, giggling the while,'' he does so "not because he is cruel,
but because he knows that if he hands them over to local authorities, they would only be released to rejoin
the Communists" ("Those Who Must Die," 29). Ultimately, Time concludes that there is a vital need for
American combat troops in Vietnam, since "What South Viet Nam's fighting men need is relief" and "Only
the U.S. and its allies can provide that respite" ("Those Who Must Die," 30). Killing prisoners, evidently,
is a tiring business.
Time's jingoism and anticommunism, however, areanachronisms, reflecting the politics of Henry Luce
more than liberal belief circa 1965. By this time, cold war liberalism had begun to be supplanted by a
more critical liberalism that questioned the U.S. mission against communism and had serious misgivings
about U.S. policy in Vietnamas was shown in an antiwar demonstration led by Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) that drew twenty-five thousand protesters to Washington (in April 1965) and a national
Vietnam Teach-in that took place in May. These events suggest that what Kolko labels "The foreign policy
consensus

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between Washington, key power constituencies, and the public which existed after 1950" (Anatomy of a
War, 170) was beginning to come apart. Within literary culture the move away from cold war liberalism
can be seen in Emile Capouya's passionate denunciation of The Green Berets in Commonweal. To
Capouya, Moore is a "grown-up Boy Scout" who has a "boyish enthusiasm for the trickery and butchery
he reports," and The Green Berets is a ''gabble of cheerful idiocy." Capouya is most offended by Moore's
uncritical depiction of "every conceivable crudity and stupidity that might possibly be charged against
American soldiers by their worst enemies" and his assumption that "Americans want to find palatable
each and every atrocity that our soldiers may be committing." Capouya speculates that Moore will go
unrebuked "until America fully recovers consciousness. Right now, she is shell-shocked from so much
official chanting of democratic watchwords to an obligato of rapine and murder. [with senators] ratifying
the use of high explosive, petroleum jelly, and harmless nauseating gas on the benighted foreigners."
Although Capouya is justifiably outraged by the brutality Moore depicts and U.S. politicians support, his
argument suffers from his belief that this brutality is an aberration, that it can only occur if America is not
fully conscious. The notion that the use of force to maintain power and wealth is something outside of
rather than common to our national experience is the defining feature of American exceptionalism. Only
three months before Capouya's review appeared, the United States sent 23,000 troops to the Dominican
Republic to thwart a coup intended to reinstate the democratically elected government of Juan Bosch.
George Black notes that the mission of the Green Berets sent to the Dominican Republic was changed
from protecting U.S. citizens to spying on them, once it was learned that many of "the Peace Corps
volunteers actively sympathized with the pro-Bosch resistance" (120). Black goes on to suggest that the
next role of the Green Berets in Latin America was to help Bolivian soldiers track down and kill Che
Guevara. A former Green Beret explained: "He was caught and executed on the spot. The Bolivians
pulled the trigger. They needed to get the credit" (quoted in Black, 121122). To suggest, then, that
America is too shell-shocked by democratic rhetoric to notice the evil being done by its leaders is to
overlook how often such rhetoric has appeared in conjunction with U.S. militarist support for totalitarian
regimes.
The Green Berets was hugely successful, the fifth best selling book of 1965 and still the best selling
American novel about the Vietnam War.

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According to John Hellmann, The Green Berets "induced so many enlistments of young men that the
Selective Service was able to suspend draft calls during the first four months of 1966" (53). Together
with "The Ballad of the Green Berets" (a number one hit for five weeks in 1966) by Sergeant Barry
Sadler (whose picture adorned the cover of the Avon paperback The Green Berets) and the 1968 John
Wayne movie, Moore's novel helped promote popular notions about the resourcefulness and essential
goodness of U.S. special forces. This mythos in turn served as the basis for later movies and books about
the undercover adventures of U.S. special forces in southeast Asia, such as Gene Hackman's Uncommon
Valor, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, Chuck Norris's Missing in Action, and J. C. Pollock's novel Mission
M.I.A.not to mention Jack Buchanan's mass market paperback novel series M.I.A. Hunter, whose hero,
Mark Stone, is a former Green Beret and whose opening epigraph is taken from the "Special Forces
Prayer""Go with us as we seek to defend the defenseless and to free the enslaved."
Given its influence on American cultural representations of the Vietnam War, surprisingly little attention
has been given to Moore's novel. In American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam, the first of his
two books on Vietnam War literature, Philip Beidler argues that since the war was unique and almost
indecipherable, its representation requires a new aesthetic, but one that also "recall[s] that sense of grand
and enduring mythic centrality often associated with so much of our classic tradition" (25).
Surprisingly, for someone interested in aesthetic innovation who recognizes that Moore's novel is a
"documentary potboiler" (34) written with "steamy amateurishness" (35), Beidler praises The Green
Berets. Although "conceived of as a popular, adulatory, and above all truthful account of a new breed of
soldier in a new kind of war" (34), The Green Berets, writes Beidler, "comes off now as a remarkable,
albeit unconscious exercise in fictive concision telling just about all the truth about Vietnam, experiential
and imaginative" (35). Beidler sees Vietnam overwhelming Moore's polemic (much as the war would
overwhelm the best laid American plans): ''In attempting to accredit a contemporary warrior mythos,
Moore would also wind up exposing it as a source of savage, surreal grotesquerie. His Vietnam would
turn out to be a combination of cartoon-character super-heroism with some nasty little drama of the
absurd, country-wide guerrilla theater with live ammunition, a new revelation in strange foreign places of
an old, familiar, eternally innocent

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brand of righteous American overreaching" (35). Beidler ironically praises Moore because, in retrospect,
his novel (like the John Wayne film) seems surreal and cartoonish. Because no one as sophisticated as
Beidler can be presumed to take this novel seriously, it may be looked at ironically, as a sort of
unconscious self-parody, an unintentional satire of conventional militarism. In so doing, Beidler
overlooks the considerable impact The Green Beret had, and he fails to recognize the continuing
popularity of similarly jingoistic tales that promote a contemporary warrior mythos.
Beidler is also unaware of his own dependence upon the myth of American innocence. A reading of the
documentary record reveals not innocent overreaching but a sterile military calculus. One would be hard
pressed to define the considered, genocidal strategy revealed in The Pentagon Papers as innocent. As
Chomsky pointedly observes, in The Pentagon Papers there is no "word of comment on the wreckage of
the village society of Vietnam, or on life in the densely packed urban slums to which villagers have fled
because [as a U.S. Army colonel declared,] 'they don't like our artillery and air strikes,' or because they
are starving, or because they have been moved by force. Such sentimentality is far from the minds of the
men whose thoughts are recorded in the Pentagon study" (For Reasons of State, 6). Another problem with
Beidler's argument is that his reading against Moore's text slips into a reading of it. Because Moore
asserts the truthfulness of his fiction and because he calls his collection of vignettes a novel, Beidler sees
it as prefiguring the postmodern Vietnam War novel. He argues that "the initial focus of concern is not
with the war as subject but instead with identifying in generic terms the appropriate manner of its
depiction. [T]his book about Vietnam focuses itself on the nature of literary process, the idea of sense-
making itself" (37). A curious assertion to make about a "documentary potboiler,'' Beidler's argument
reveals literary cultures' continuing fixation on technique, themes, history, and so forth, a fixation that
causes a historically significant and aesthetically uninteresting novel to be looked at aesthetically, not
historically. Thus for Beidler the main flaw of The Green Berets is the tenor and technique of its prose.
Rather than the absurd and ironic approach of later writers, Moore's text is too literal; it suffers from
"reality overkill" (40). Beidler here rehearses the postmodern concerns of later critics by emphasizing
text over context, fabulation over history, aesthetic over ideology. If recent reconstructions and erasures
of the war have taught us anything, it is that we suffer not from reality overkill

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about Vietnam but from an insufficient exposure to what really happened there. Literary culture's aesthetic
preoccupations have done little to counter this historical amnesia.
Renny Christopher is far more to the point in her discussion of the ideology of The Green Berets. She
alleges that Moore sees the war in terms of "cold war globalist consciousness" and perpetuates the
falsehood that "the Communist presence in the Republic of Viet Nam is an invasion by a 'neighbor,' not a
civil-uprising" (203). Because of his ethnocentric and globalist attitudes, Moore is unable "to see the NLF
as primarily Asians, rather than primarily Communists" (206). She goes on to argue that it is ideologically
necessary for Moore to distinguish between Asian South Vietnamese and Communist Viet Cong because
if he did notif, that is, he understood that America's allies were drawn from the same population as the
''ferocious, suicidal Communists " (67)he would be forced to question the basis of U.S. militarism in
Vietnam, would be forced to make, in Christopher's words, "a potentially disturbing political analysis"
(206).
Unlike Beidler and commercial reviewers, Christopher critiques Moore's use of Asian stereotypes,
particularly his construction of the Vietnamese as "unrelentingly primitive." She notes that this
primitivism, which Moore "attributes to some sort of intrinsic, stubborn backwardness," was caused by
"poverty and the history of colonialism" (204). Christopher is correct in pointing to the racism in The
Green Berets, since Moore describes Asians "bounc[ing] around happily, chattering to each other and
displaying bloody ears" (44), taking part in "frequent animal sacrifices and drinking parties to hold in
check [their] blood lust" (185). "Gibbon-taunting" (128) and speaking "monkey chatter" (129), the
Vietnamese are barely human. Moore's attitude toward the Vietnamese is summed up in the response a
Green Beret makes to an ARVN soldier's desire to torture the enemy after information has been extracted:
"we get the Oriental mind at work. God save us from getting like them" (54). The Moore persona/narrator
speaks of "the deviousness of the Vietnamese mind" (85), a notion shared by many American troops and
policy makers. For instance, to one American intelligence officer, "Only the fear of force gets results. It's
the Asian mind. It's completely different from what we know as the Western mind" (quoted in Schell,
112). Similarly, Moore repeatedly refers to Asians' fear of losing face, what one character calls "this
Oriental face thing" (110). It is particularly ironic, that Moore and others describe the fear of losing face
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trait, since exactly this fearthat withdrawal from Vietnam would irrevocably harm America's
reputationwas offered as a justification for continuing the war. A worried Lyndon Johnson speculated, "if
I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my
nation would be seen as an appeaser" (quoted in Young, 106). Quantifying U.S. aims in Vietnam,
Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton ascribed 70 percent to avoiding "a humiliating U. S.
defeat (to our reptutation as a guarantor)" (quoted in Young, 135).
Unlike Beidler, who focuses on Moore's literary aesthetic, Christopher points to the ethnocentrism and
racism that have dominated American literary culture's understanding of the Vietnam War. By critiquing
American accounts of the war, and by offering readings of Vietnamese exile narratives, Christopher
shows the limits of and attempts to broaden the canon of Vietnam War literature. Her book serves as a
vital correction to this canon, and it raises serious questions about how canons are constructed. Besides
revealing the racism and ethnocentrism of American Vietnam War narratives, Christopher traces the
history of Asian stereotypes within American literature and culture, a history that prefigure and
determines how American authors represent the Vietnamese. These racist images, she argues, did not stem
from disordered Western psyches but grew out of material conditions in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Chinese stereotypes developed at the same time that masses of Chinese immigrants were
working on the transcontinental railroad. These stereotypes were exacerbated by the nationwide
depression of the 1870s. Japanese stereotypes began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century when,
Chinese immigration having been outlawed, Japanese farm workers began to arrive en masse in
California. While aware that the use of such stereotypes is always historically contingent (the Chinese, for
instance, were depicted as heroic in contrast to the barbaric Japanese during the second world war),
Christopher asserts that the whole repertoire of Asian stereotypes has become a permanent framework
through which the majority of Western writers, particularly Euro-Americans writing about the Vietnam
War, view the East. "These cultural perspectives," she writes, "have caused American popular
representations of Asians and Asian Americans to follow a set of unexamined stereotypes since the
middle of the nineteenth century" (112). How, then, since "This particular history of representation has
closed off any possibilities for perceptions that lie outside the sphere of traditional

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representations" (114), are Westerners to overcome their racist views of Asians? Christopher gives no
direct answer to this dilemma, suggesting instead that one must make "a shift of perception, " must "leap
beyond the culturally constructed paradigm" (115). Curiously, she does not suggest what seems implied
by her own argumentthat this leap can be induced through political/historical education, through learning
how racism has consistently been used to maintain class division by scapegoating, by hindering labor-
organizing and mass resistance, and, in the case of Vietnam, by promoting imperialist war. Despite this
weakness, Christopher's book is a welcome response to an academic and commercial culture that has
ignored and stereotyped the Vietnamese people and has misrepresented the war.
Another insightful critique of The Green Berets is made by James Wilson in Vietnam in Prose and Film.
Wilson's aim is to identify and correct the official distortions of the war and "to clarify important
historical, moral, and political questions" (6). Aware of the importance of his task, since he is writing as
"a new spirit of militarization [threatens to] erase all memory of what happened there" (2), Wilson argues
that, like American officials and the news media, Moore ignores the history of the war in Indochina.
Moore goes back only to 1955, when Vietnam was divided and Diem came to powerand, Wilson
explains, he completely ignores the circumstances surrounding the division of Vietnam into North and
South, overlooks how Diem came to power, and does not mention the "radical social revolution [that]
follow[ed] the collapse of the French empire in Indochina" (37). These omissions are crucial if Moore is
to sustain his depiction of the war as "outside aggression on the part of 'ferocious, suicidal Communists,'
descending from the North like a latter-day army of Genghis Kahn a Manichean conflict, in which the
forces of good struggle with the forces of evil" (37).
Like other critics, Wilson sees Moore's depiction of the Green Berets as juvenile fantasy. But Wilson
identifies some of the ideological reasons behind Moore's obfuscation and distortion. In his proud tracing
of the lineage of the Green Berets to the OSS, for instance, Moore fails to mention that "OSS troops
trained and fought alongside, Ho Chi Minh's own guerrillas in the waning days of World War II" (38).
Moore must omit this history because it would needlessly complicate the Manichean world of The Green
Berets. It might raise questions about why the United States allied itself with Ho Chi Minh during the war
but turned its back on Vietnamese nationalists afterward in order to support the French.

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Moore must avoid anything that might complicate his neat moral tale. Wilson concludes his assessment of
The Green Berets by declaring that it fails "to provide a critical perspective that would make the events
[it] describe[s] intelligible allow[ing] and in fact reinforc[ing] official distortions of the war" (42).
Wilson's is the most politically informed analysis of The Green Berets. Published by the obscure
McFarland & Company of Jefferson, North Carolina, it is also a book that has been overlooked by
literary culture, even by those writing about Vietnam War literature. Perhaps this is due to poor timing:
Wilson's book was published before Vietnam War literature became an acceptable (though far from
fashionable) area of study. It might also be that Vietnam in Prose and Film has been overlooked because
it does not focus on race and psychology and cultural myth. While the fate of Wilson's book alone is not
proof of the ideological biases and centrist politics of literary culture, its marginalization suggests that at
best radical materialist critique fits uneasily within literary culture.
Victor Kolpacoff's The Prisoners of Quai Dong, published in 1967, was one of the first serious
American novels about the Vietnam War. Kolpacoff tells the story of ex-Lieutenant Kreuger, demoted and
forced to do hard labor in a military stockade in Quai Dong for refusing to lead an ambush. Since Kreuger
speaks Vietnamese, he is ordered to help interrogate an eighteen-year-old peasant believed to be an
enemy guerrilla. Most of the novel details the interrogation and torture of this prisoner within a
suffocatingly hot and windowless shed. By book's end, the prisoner, who has steadfastly refused to give
incriminating evidence, kills himself; Kreuger names a village he alleges the prisoner identified; and the
Army attacks this village with helicopter gunships. The Prisoners of Quai Dong is meant to be a rough
allegory of the war. Kolpacoff suggests that Americans and Vietnamese are both imprisoned. The main
interrogator and torturer, an ARVN soldier named Nguyen, is forced to follow the orders of his American
superiorssuggesting that the Vietnamese are at war with one another at the instigation and under the
watchful eye of Americans. The torture, with its incessant stabbing of the prisoner in back, groin, and
stomach, suggests the brutal military policy of the United States throughout Vietnam, the prisoner's body
representing the Vietnamese landscape and people. Similarly, both the horrific ineptitude of this torture
and Kreuger's naming of a Vietnamese village (and the subsequent attack upon this village) suggest the
murderous absurdities and desperation of U.S. military strategy.

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The allegorical nature of The Prisoners of Quai Dong was recognized by nearly all reviewers. For the
Times Literary Supplement, Kolpacoff uses "a common metaphor for the American involvement in
Vietnam" ("Know Any Good Tortures?"); for Saul Maloff in Newsweek, "he is composing parable and
fable, moral drama"; for Leonard Kriegel in the Nation, it is "a contemporary allegorical drama" (408);
and for Robert Kirsch in the New York Times Book Review, it ''takes no great discernment to catch the
irony of the title; we are, all of us, the prisoners of Quai Dong and the moral corrosion it represents."
Although their beliefs about the book's success or failure differ, critics consistently focused on this
literary element to the exclusion of the real events behind the allegory.
According to Kirsch, The Prisoners of Quai Dong is seriously flawed because a "sense of involvement is
forced upon us by the events of our time rather than by Kolpacoff's fiction." In other words, the notion of
U.S. soldiers as torturers is not integrated into the development of the novel but exists prior to it. Though
quick to point out that he does not dispute this notion and even finds a good "possibility or even
probability that some American soldiers, even as Gestapo men in World War II or French officers in
Algeria, might have carried out the sustained and brutal torture of a prisoner," Kirsch criticizes Kolpacoff
for "start[ing] off with a credit of belief." Kirsch's criticism, that a novel should not depend upon "the
events of our time" to force upon us a "sense of involvement," is peculiar. For a book about the Vietnam
War written during the height of the war, this dependence, after all, seems not only understandable but
laudable.
Even on the level of formalist critique, however, Kirsch's understanding of The Prisoners of Quai Dong
is flawed. He criticizes Kolpacoff for "deliver[ing] the telling into the words of Kreuger, who is if not a
moral cretin, a man so devoid of self-knowledge that his account gives little more than the surface of
action and speech and setting." As depicted by Kolpacoff, though, Kreuger is far from "a moral cretin."
He is reluctant to take part in the interrogation and, concerned for the prisoner's welfare, tries to convince
the prisoner to provide some information, any information: "I told the boy that I would not hurt him,"
Kreuger says, "that I did not care whether he confessed or not, but that he must say something so that the
others could see that he understood me. Otherwise they would use the electrical generator" (130131).
While Kirsch is correct to suggest that Kreuger lacks sufficient self-knowledge, he is wrong to assert that
having such a character serve as narrator weakens the

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novel. One of Kolpacoff's objectives is to show how difficult it is for an ordinary soldier first to define
what is morally proper and second to act upon this recognition, given the pressures imposed upon him by
military command and given the military's sanctioning of torture. The novel dramatizes the dilemma of
acting morally in a war where American strategy was inherently immoral. In May 1967, the same year
The Prisoners of Quai Dong was published, the "International War Crimes Tribunal" led by Bertrand
Russell found the United States guilty of "aggression, civilian bombardment, the use of experimental
weapons, the torture and mutilation of prisoners and genocide involving forced labour, mass burial,
concentration camps and saturation bombing of unparalleled intensity" (quoted in Wells, 141142). In the
context of such overwhelming brutality, Kreuger's confusion about the morality of torture is
understandable, his reluctance to take part in such commendable.
Kirsch further misreads the novel by asserting that neither reader nor narrator knows why Kreuger refused
to follow orders and allowed a Viet Cong force to escape. Kreuger explains that the company he
commanded was ready with "machine guns, grenades, flame throwers, automatic rifles, and finally
bayonets" and that after the ambush "There would be no survivors, unless we took one or two prisoners
for questioning" (34). While waiting for the enemy to move into position, Kreuger ''began to see, not the
enemy, but faces. Only faces" (35). The reason Kreuger refused to follow orders is rather obvious: he
experienced the kind of paradigmatic leap Christopher writes of, began to perceive the Viet Cong as
individuals rather than subhuman Orientals. His refusal to follow through on the ambush is an act of
humanity, a recognition of the real people and real suffering the military abstracted into body counts.
Kirsch also alleges that Kreuger's fabrication of an enemy base camp, which "turns out to be true, [is] a
typically existential ending." The results of the assault upon this village, whose name Kreuger supplied in
an attempt to save the prisoner, are reported by Sergeant McGruder: "our patrols drew fire when they got
near the village, and they called down the cobras. One of them was hit, but the rest flattened the place
with rockets. When it was over our guys went in and cleared it up. We heard it on the radio there was
something at Bien Thieu" (157). Rather than an existential ending, as Kirsch reads it, this incident is
meant to represent the ludicrous barbarism of American military policy. A village is named, allegedly, by
a prisoner. Consequently, the United States sends in five helicopter gunships, which are fired upon. In
response, the village

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and presumably its civilian population are flattened. As a result, American analysis concludes there had
been something in the village. This flimsy evidence, violent overreaction, and uncertain conclusion are
typical of U.S. military tactics in Vietnam. Kirsch's inability to connect this incident to actual events in
Vietnam and his reading of it instead as "typically existential" reveal the distorting and politically
obfuscating effects of commercial literary culture's inchoate aestheticism. Kirsch's reading is also
reminiscent of the analyses that saw Greene's blatant denunciations of U.S. imperialism as a tale of
Sartrean existentialism.
However, it would be misleading to read Kirsch's analysis as exemplary of the apoliticism of the New
York Times Book Review, for in the same edition Jonathan Mirsky, reviewing Mary McCarthy's Vietnam
and Cecil Woolf and John Baggules's Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, identifies the background which
Kirsch ignores and which is essential to an understanding of The Prisoners of Quai Dong: a "peculiarly
corrupting atmosphere [in] which southerners [become] 'hostile civilians'" and where "for every N.L.F. or
North Vietnamese soldier killed in action, two to six civilians die" (13). The difference in political
awareness of Kirsch and Mirsky is evidence of the differing levels of politicization within the
intelligentsia circa 1967. Mirsky, in fact, alludes to this war between a politically informed and an
apolitical scholarship. ''Some intellectuals are still struggling," he writes, "to stay off the hook. Under
growing pressure from the Administration, which questions their patriotism, integrity, and knowledge,
they retreat to their studies, averting their eyes. What faculty Senate has not seen angry colleagues voting
down resolutions on Vietnam or even discussion of resolutions?" (14). The difference between Kirsch's
and Mirsky's reviews also reveals how disciplinarity confines political analysis within its "proper"
spherereviews of nonfiction. Because "serious" literature is viewed as depicting the human condition,
above and beyond the narrow confines of contemporary history and politics, it is rarely looked at for how
it depicts, critiques, and analyzes contemporary social issuesunless, like The Quiet American, it
egregiously exceeds the confines of literary culture's unstated consensus and is too prominent a book to
ignore. Much of the reason for the contentiousness surrounding the recent debate over the construction of
the literary canon and over academic literary culture's move toward political readings of texts (however
much these readings accord with liberal-pluralist ideology) is due to the nearly ubiquitous belief that
works of literature should

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be valued as timeless examinations of the human condition and celebrations of the human spirit.
Mirsky's essay also reveals something of the intelligentsia's disagreement over American policy in
Vietnam. Mirsky cites an essay by General (and former ambassador to Vietnam) Maxwell Taylor that
appeared in an earlier New York Times Magazine. Taylor wrote of "our long-suffering allies, the South
Vietnamese, hundreds of thousands of whom have preferred to abandon all they own and have accepted
the life of a refugee rather than live under Communist rule" (quoted in Mirsky, 13), to which Mirsky
responds, "While it is true that there are many refugeesmaybe 4 million most, as every American in
Vietnam will tell you, have been driven from their homes by Americans" (1314). Young identifies the
extent of the refugee problem: "By 1968, the urban population of South Vietnam had increased from 15 to
40 percent of the total population (it would be 65 percent urban in 1974); out of a population of 17
million, 5 million people were officially classed as refugees" (177). That Mirsky not only challenged
Taylor in an unrelated book review but criticized what had appeared in another section of the Times
suggests a growing establishment dispute over the war.
Evidence of this disagreement can be found in the issue of Newsweek in which The Prisoners of Quai
Dong was reviewed. Newsweek reported that "two pillars of the moderate Republican Establishment"
(Kentucky Senator Thurston B. Morton and New Jersey Senator Clifford Case) "together came forward
with bitter critiques of the Administration's war policyand in so doing signaled the cresting of a fresh
wave of antiwar sentiment." Newsweek also noted the recent formation of a "group of middle-level
businessmen called 'Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace.'" Indeed, by September almost 600
business executives had signed an open letter asking President Johnson to stop the war (Wells, 137).
According to Newsweek, support for the war had dwindled from 72 to 58 percent in four months
("Politics '68," 23). As Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton wrote in a memo to McNamara,
"A feeling is widely and strongly held that 'the Establishment' is out of its mind. Related to this feeling is
the increased polarization that is taking place in the United States with seeds of the worst split in our
people in more than a century'' (quoted in Young, 206).
Given this background, Saul Maloff's review in Newsweek is surprisingly apolitical. Rather than
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that Kolpacoff explores, Maloff, in speaking of the novel as parable and fable, declares it "a judgment of
moral disintegration." It is Kolpacoff's intention, asserts Maloff, "to register, in the ghostly light of his
tableau, the nearly invisible gestures of the human spirit under conditions of maximum pressure" (101). In
October 1967, with U.S. troop strength close to half a million and with dissent growing in all sectors of
American society, Maloff severs Kolpacoff's book from the war and speaks of the gestures of the human
spirit. As critics consistently did with The Quiet American, so Maloff universalizes and thus
depoliticizes The Prisoners of Quai Dong. Even when favorably comparing it to The Green Berets,
Maloff mystifies Kolpacoff's critique of American policy in Vietnam: "Moore's book," Maloff writes,
"bears as much relation to Kolpacoff's as a mail-order firearms advertisement does to a serious work of
art and a profoundly moving, unsettling achievement of the human imagination" (101). While the culture as
a whole had begun to disagree about the war and while this disagreement had begun to appear in the mass
media, commercial literary culture lagged behind. Even novels specifically critical of U.S. policy were
dehistoricized.
Nowhere is the mystification common to reviews more apparent than in Stanley Kauffmann's review in the
New Republic. Kauffmann begins by asking what the point of war fiction is. After all, he notes, "A new
war may be briefly interesting for its new setting and new slang, but after that what is there left to say?"
To Kauffmann, Kolpacoff shows that "there is no point in a Vietnam novel if it is a Vietnam novel, if it is
only about the immorality of the American actions there. His book is equally applicable to the North
Vietnamese, to the French in Algeria and the Algerians in Algeria, to the British in Palestine and also to
the Irgun, and so on. Kolpacoff's novel could as well be called The Prisoners of Planet Earth." Like
Kirsch, Kauffmann links the treatment of prisoners in The Prisoners of Quai Dong to the French Algeria.
In a Marxist critique, these events are linked; they are both instances of Western imperialism, of the
consequences of trying to keep a third-world nation within the capitalist sphere. However, neither Kirsch
nor Kauffmann seems to be making exactly this point. On the contrary, these references seem intended to
remove some of the blame from the United States by showing how consistently other nations have suffered
through colonial wars. Similarly, Kauffmann's easy equation of American and North Vietnamese, French
and Algerian immorality ignores the much greater suffering inflicted by the Americans and the French, not
to mention the significant moral distinction

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between fighting to maintain imperial control and fighting to gain the right of self-determination. (Imagine
if Kauffman had written that there is no point in a World War II novel if it is only about the immorality of
Nazi actions or that a novel called "The Prisoners of Treblinka" could as well be called "The Prisoners
of the Earth"). To write in 1967 that a Vietnam novel has no point if it is only about the immorality of U.S.
policy ignores the vital importance of such information in countering administration propaganda and
furthering opposition to the war.
For what, then, does Kauffmann praise The Prisoners of Quai Dong? For its simple and carefully
designed structure, its unconcealed, formal, innocent, and classic artifice, its "purity in form that perfectly
fits the basic purpose of the book." Ultimately, "its being is in ritual, not revelation" (22). Kauffmann thus
completely severs form from content. The novel becomes pure artifice, utterly disconnected from
historical referent. Written at a time when the United States was bombing North and South Vietnam daily,
forcibly relocating entire villages, and using weaponry ranging from herbicides to cluster bombs to
napalm, Kauffmann's review was published alongside an advertisement for a march on
Washington"Confront the Warmakers in Washington, D.C. a peaceful sit-in to block the halls and
entrances of the Pentagon"that would draw 100,000 and be documented by Chomsky in the New York
Review of Books and Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night. It is worth noting that this advertisement
("Support our men in Vietnam! Bring them home nowalive!") questions conventional belief that antiwar
activists had no interest in the plight of American soldiers, and its uneasy placement next to Kauffmann's
review reveals the moral emptiness and political complicity of much traditional literary criticism.
The dominance of an amorphous humanist criticism within commercial literary culture is perhaps most
apparent in Irving Howe's review in the New York Review of Books. At the time Howe was evaluating
this novel, the NYRB was publishing radical critiques of the war. A month after Howe's review, in fact,
the NYRB published an account of the march on the Pentagon in which Chomsky denounces the
irresponsibility shown "by Senator Mansfield and others who stand by quietly and vote appropriations as
the cities and villages of North Vietnam are demolished, as millions of refugees in the South are driven
from their homes by American bombardment" ("On Resistance," 4). Chomsky goes on to argue for draft
resistance, which might "succeed in raising the issues of passive

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complicity in the war" and might enable some "to free themselves from the mind-destroying ideological
pressures of American life, and to ask some serious questions about America's role in the world" ("On
Resistance," 8).
2
Similarly, the NYRB published an essay in which Paul Goodman writes of "the military
industrial of the United States [as] the most dangerous body of men at present in the world," men who in
Vietnam are engaged in genocide" (14), who manufacture "napalm, fragmentation bombs, the planes that
destroy rice. [and who] have killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam and [who] will kill other hundreds
of thousands in other Vietnams'' (18).
Against this background, Howe declares The Prisoners of Quai Dong "a brilliant novel" because "it
focuses on a subject of large contemporary interest; it is compactly formed; and it is written with a verbal
discipline that, in this moment of cultural yawp, seems remarkable" (28). Presumably this cultural yawp
refers to the rhetoric of the New Left, from whom Howe felt disaffected.
3
This notion is made clearer
when Howe writes that The Prisoners of Quai Dong "is conceived without any blatant propagandistic
intent: there are no sentimentalities about 'the heroic resistance' or that unanalyzed 'revolution' which
disaffected Americans like to invoke these days." Few would argue that great literature consists of
"blatant propaganda" about a "heroic resistance" or "sentimentalities" about "unanalyzed revolutions."
Since traditionally literary texts have been appreciated as timeless expressions of the human condition,
though, any gesture toward a more specific political critique can be read as blatantly propagandistic. In
seeking a novel that is unsentimental about the Vietnamese resistance and that fully analyzes the
revolutionary ideas invoked by disaffected Americans, Howe seems to be seeking a novel that either
ignores or repudiates these concerns. The ideology of nonideological literary appreciation is nowhere
more clearly demonstrated than in Howe's assessment that "because of this restraint, the impact of the
book seems all the greater, both as an indictment of the American role in Vietnam and as a dramatization
of the helplessness of men under the weight of absolute power." Howe's praise of Kolpacoff's restraint is
clearly directed more at the excesses of the New Left than at The Prisoners of Quai Dong. And his
reference to men held helpless by absolute power abstracts Kolpacoff's critique of U.S. military policy.
Although he identifies Kolpacoff's criticism of America's role in Vietnam, Howe ultimately sees the novel
as transcending such petty concerns. It is in reality a critique of "the structure of power as an agency
making men

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feel that because moral sentiments seem irrelevant human beings are insignificant" (29). "Power," for
Howe, has its own agency. Human beings like this American soldier and Viet Cong prisoner are made
insignificant not by the authority and practices of the U.S. military but by a vague unidentified "power."
Even in a journal like the NYRB, which was publishing important, radical critiques of the war, literary
criticism remained aloof, ambivalent, and abstract.
In the Nation Leonard Kriegel reviewed The Prisoners of Quai Dong with four other literary accounts of
the warWilliam Wilson's The LBJ Brigade, Daniel Ford's Incident at Muc Wa, Thomas Taylor's A-18,
and John Sack's M. Kriegel considers the development of a body of literature about the war, "foresee[ing]
the day when one of [his] graduate students will enter [his] office and announce that he wants to do a
doctoral dissertation on American novels about the Vietnam War" (406). Ironically, Kriegel's essay
foreshadows some of the main tendencies of such academic work. The collapsing distinction between fact
and fiction, memoir and novel that will be a dominant feature in prose representations of the Vietnam War
is already apparent in Sack's M, which Kriegel notes "is not technically a novel but a book of reportage
one of the finest examples of what has come to be called the 'documentary novel.'" Kriegel also argues
that although traditionally "the novel has forced the writer to shift his focus from the general to the
particular in dealing with Vietnam novelists must face up to the opposite task. They must be willing to
give up realism for the kind of allegory that will take the reader beyond the immediacy of the horror in
order to see clearly what it has done to us." Here Kriegel anticipates the most consistent feature of
Vietnam War literary criticismthat a realist text is incapable of capturing the truth of Vietnam and that this
war requires something new. Or as Kriegel opines, "The novel's problem is to create a narrative order so
that we may see the horror itself in a new and broader dimension." Although the term ''postmodern" was
not available to him (the closest term Kriegel can find is "black humor" [407]), his essay clearly forecasts
the dominant critical understanding of Vietnam War literature. The ethnocentrism of so many Vietnam War
novels and memoirs is anticipated as well in Kriegel's concern for what the war "has done to us."
Unlike Kauffmann and Howe, Kriegel praises The Prisoners of Quai Dong as "an effective microcosm
for the metaphoric hell of America." It is a novel that "envelops the American reader with what he has
done in the here and now. Kreuger is America, but he is also America's victim, just

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as the humanitarian Dr. Mason is its victim; Nguyen, the quiet South Vietnamese interrogator is its victim;
Lieutenant Buckley, the efficiency expert gone to war, is its victim" (408). Kriegel does not shy away
from blaming the United States, yet he does not elaborate on how Americans and Vietnamese are
victimized. The book's detailed account of torture does not cause Kriegel to discuss American conduct in
the war. Because he focuses on the allegorical nature of The Prisoners of Quai Dong, Kriegel is not
interested in exploring the factual basis of Kolpacoff's account. In other words, the novel's artifice (and,
as we will see, the artifice in many subsequent texts about the war) supplants historical background.
The problem with the kind of vague critique offered by Kriegel will be more apparent from the 1980s
onward as the war is actively misremembered and revised, particularly as regards the almost
iconographic image of tortured Americans. It is important to note, therefore, that the torture of prisoners
was much worse than Kolpacoff documents. An American advisor listed tortures routinely used by ARVN
Rangers:
1. Wrap in barbed wire.
2. Strip skin off back.
3. Rack by use of vehicle or water buffalo.
4. Head in mud1 minutes.
5. Shoot thru ear.
6.
Hook up to EE8. [EE8 was the designation of the American-supplied battery-powered field telephone. The
common method was to tape the ends of two wires from the phone to the genitals of a man or to a woman's vagina
and a breast.]
7. Sit on entrenching tool.
8. Knife strapped to back.
9.
Water treatment. [Water was forced into the mouth until the stomach swelled painfully, when it was beaten to
induce more pain.]
10.Calves beaten.
11.Knee in back, face down, dislocate shoulders.
12.Beat stomach until it collapses and indiv. vomits it out. (Quoted in Sheehan, 102103; brackets in original)
As in The Prisoners of Quai Dong, Americans were as likely to torture prisoners as were the South
Vietnamese military. Testifying before Congress in 1971, K. Barton Osborne, a military intelligence
officer in Vietnam, described Marine Counterintelligence's "use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into
the canal of one of [his] detainee's ears and the tapping through the brain until he died. The starving to
death [in a cage] of a Vietnamese woman the use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones

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attached to both the women's vagina and the men's testicles" (quoted in Young, 213).
Discussion of this important background to Kolpacoff's novel is absent as well from academic literary
evaluations, since, quite simply, The Prisoners of Quai Dong has been almost completely ignored by the
academy. In American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam, Beidler devotes one sentence to this
novel: "There was also one compelling attempt at philosophical fable in Victor Kolpacoff's The
Prisoners of Quai Dong, a vision of the prison camp and interrogation roomtorturers and tortured and
witnesses alike all 'prisoners' of the waras master symbol of what one interpreter has called 'the
metaphysical darkness of our times' at large" (48). Beidler repeats the familiar focus on the novel as
metaphysical allegory. He uncritically agrees with the notion that everyone in Vietnam was a prisoner, a
notion that accords with the view of the war as tragedy and that coheres with the popular POW/MIA myth.
And he assents to the existentialist perception of the darkness of our times, a perception that since The
Quiet American has served to flatten historical specificity and erase American complicity.
The only substantial academic analysis of The Prisoners of Quai Dong appears in Wilson's Vietnam in
Prose and Film. To Wilson, The Prisoners of Quai Dong is one of the few novels or memoirs to confront
the question of moral responsibility in Vietnam. Wilson notes that Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien, Philip
Caputo, and "most American writers deny the possibility of moral responsibility in a war as problematic
as Vietnam" (62). But the essence of Kolpacoff's book is to show that all American soldiers in Vietnam
must carry some blame, must be held morally accountable. "Whoever enters the dark room, whoever
enters Vietnam," Wilson writes, ''sinks into the quagmire of guilt." According to Wilson, Kolpacoff
reveals "the collective guilt, the moral responsibility of all Inquisitors. Whether one participates in or
merely observes (or even tries to stop) the Inquisition makes no difference: everyone is guilty of
everything. To avoid guilt, one must not enter Vietnam; and to avoid further guilt, one must get out as
quickly as possible" (65). Wilson convincingly shows that above all else The Prisoners of Quai Dong is
an argument for collective moral responsibility. (Yet there are degrees of responsibility. The nineteen-
year-old working-class draftee is not as responsible or as guilty as Walt Rostow or Dean Rusk or any of
the other highly educated and well-paid government officials, academics, and business executives who
planned and profited by the war.)

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There are numerous exigencies that can explain the critical neglect of The Prisoners of Quai Dong.
Nonetheless, it is striking that a novel that received consistent praise from reviewers and was one of the
first serious works of literature about the war has been so overlooked. This neglect is due to academics'
preoccupation with more formally experimental novels, with the work of Vietnam veterans, and with
those texts that appeared from the mid-1970s onward, as American culture at largewith Vietnam slowly
receding into an untroubling pastbegan to reexamine and rewrite the war.
The Laotian Fragments (1974), by ex-Lieutenant Colonel John Clark Pratt, is a novel about America's
clandestine mercenary war in Laos, circa 1970, as experienced by Air Force Major William Blake. Blake
is in charge of the Forward Air Controllers (a.k.a. "Ravens")American pilots whose duty is to search for
the enemy and to target bombing missions. The "fragments" of the book's title refers to Blake's
experiences, to his piecemeal understanding of the war and to the internecine struggle between the Air
Force, the CIA, and various factions of the Laotian military and government. And these fragments refer to
the manner in which the novel is told: we are presented with Blake's wartime journal, in which he has
collected official memos, briefing notes, transcripts of taped conversations, personal letters, poems,
maps, and newspaper articles. These fragments also document the personal disintegrationthe
fragmentationthat Blake undergoes due to the stress and uncertainty of his position, his growing awareness
of the absurdity of the war, and the dissolution of his marriage.
"Fragging" was a term that referred to the murder of officers by enlisted men, often by fragmentation
grenade. Blake is not murdered, but he is, in a sense, fragged: at the end of the novel, in a seemingly
suicidal mission, Blake's plane is shot down and he bails out. The last reference to his fate is offered by
his co-pilot, Dante Hamilton: "I did not see exactly where Major Blake came down" (233). Uncertain
about and frustrated by the war, Blake's position is never clear; no one, readers included, can say where
exactly he ever came down.
Timely, innovative, historically and politically informed, and published by a major publishing house, The
Laotian Fragments was almost completely neglected by commercial literary culture. I found only four
reviews, two in the book-trade press (Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal), the New York Times
Book Review, and Newsweek. (As a mark of its neglect by literary culture, the Avon paperback quotes a
blurb from the

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USAF Academy Association of Graduates Magazine.) In its capsule review Publisher's Weekly asserts
that the novel consists of two distinct elements, Blake's diary entries and assorted official documents. The
former is seen as the more successful: "these musings on a disintegrating marriage, frictions among
officers, and the ultimate worth of America's clandestine involvement in Laos are genuine enough." But
the latter "blunts their impact," causing the reader to feel little sense of loss over Blake's death. In Library
Journal Kenneth Kister also criticizes Pratt's "welter of dull paper and admixture of four-letter blubber."
It is true, as these reviewers suggest, that the use of documentary sources creates a certain emotional
detachment, not to mention confusion, within the novel; however, rather than a flaw, this reliance upon
documentary sources is central to the novel. Pratt hopes to convey the personal consequences of the
bureaucratic calculations made by strategists and policy makers, as exemplified by this piece from
Blake's journal:
Teletype message, AOC 20A to OUSAIRA, Vientiane, 25 February.
SUBJECT: Special BDA Report
Concentrated airstrike flown this morning on coordinates as briefed on suspected truck park and storage areas, TX 202425 and
204137. Although initial BDA assessment dcfwas NVR due to smoke and haze, follow-up FAC reports one truck destroyed and one
damaged, sixteen road cuts, and one military structure destroyed. (154)
Ultimately, Blake's character is inseparable from this collection of acronyms, codes, map coordinates,
and dispassionate military calculations. His personal life is equally fragmented and incomprehensible.
Since the journal is Blake's own construction (and thus is meant as a personal statement, an autobiography
of sorts), it reveals not only how he has been depersonalized by the military but how he has contributed to
his own fragmentation. His identity is so entangled with military strategy and political calculation that
when the Hmong mercenaries and their U.S. allies are routed by the Pathet Lao and the NVA in February
1970, it is as if Blake himself is defeated and his death inevitable. Losing individual identity and purpose,
Blake must be lost in the warhe must ultimately exist only in a welter of dull paper and four-letter
blubber.
Kister suggests that Pratt's use of documentary sources in The Laotian Fragments might charitably be
"viewed as a symbol of the stupidity of war. Think of Catch-22 devoid of its abrasive comedy and
penetrating insight and you have Lt. Colonel Pratt's novelanother dismal by-product

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of our Asian misadventure." Although written about World War II and published before the Vietnam War,
Catch-22 is often perceived as a novel that captures the spirit of Vietnam. It could be argued, though, that
in its horror (however dark) and its humanist central character Yossarian, Catch-22 does not quite fit the
immorality and savagery of American military actions in Vietnam. Perhaps Pratt's novel is a closer
approximation of the war, since what he is getting at is not so much the absurdity of war as its banality.
Instead of looking to Catch-22 as a model, Kister should be looking to The Pentagon Papers, as Pratt
makes clear in his introductory note from the fictional editor York Harding: "Although certain readers of
this manuscript have seen the need for a glossary of terms and military acronyms, I believe that the
comprehensive appendix of any edition of The Pentagon Papers should provide sufficient
identifications" (9). As its very title suggests, The Laotian Fragments can be read as something of a
postmodern rewriting of The Pentagon Papers. Ironically, Kister criticizes The Laotian Fragments as a
dismal byproduct of our Asian misadventure, when it is exactly Pratt's intent to create a novel that
exemplifies this dismal misadventure.
Peter Prescott in Newsweek is more sympathetic, finding Pratt's use of documentary sources "unusually
intriguing" if "more than a little cumbersome" (83). Prescott notes that each of the fragmented U.S. and
Laotian forces "thinks that he alone has an accurate view of the war, and the tragedy, if there is one, is that
local effectiveness decreases as one becomes involved with the 'Big Picture'" (82). This focus on the
fragmentary and unknowable nature of the war is elaborated upon by Martin Levin in the New York Times
Book Review. To Levin, The Laotian Fragments reveals "Two constants of war, mud and confusion."
The war is ''imponderable"; it is an "intricate mess" whose ambiguities are conveyed through "The bits
and pieces [that] make up [Pratt's] cautionary montage." Anticipated here is what will become literary
culture's dominant perception of the Vietnam War as a self-interrogating, self-deconstructing pastiche that
refutes ideology, problematizes history, and ultimately denies comprehension.
Following the precedent set by commercial literary culture, academic critics have likewise ignored The
Laotian Fragments. In the only article devoted exclusively to it, James Aubrey traces Conrad's Heart of
Darkness as a pattern for Pratt's narrative. The use of York Harding as editor of Blake's papers,
according to Aubrey, resembles Conrad's use of an anonymous narrator to document Marlow's
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of Saigon and Vientiane are likewise found to mirror Heart of Darkness. When Blake arrives in Vietnam,
notes Aubrey,
he compares the reception room to "a Toonerville railroad station" (9). The word "station" is an echo from Conrad, and Saigon is
Pratt's equivalent of Conrad's "outer station" in Heart of Darkness, with "Vietnamese clustered quietly" much like the black slaves at
the coastal station in the Congo (2021). In an homage to Conradian details such as grass growing through the ribs of Fresleven or ''a
boiler wallowing in the grass" along with other "pieces of decaying machinery" (19), Pratt describes the Vientiane airport with "grass
growing through cracks in the concrete and what looked like old hulks of airplanes sagging off to the sidesC-46s and C-45s, some
without wingsin the weeds." (28)
Similarly, according to Aubrey, the term "company," which Pratt uses to refer to the CIA, is used by
Conrad to refer to Belgian colonial headquarters in Brussels. Aubrey also finds a striking similarity
between the conclusions of these two books.
But these works do not mirror each other exactly. For one thing there is no one in Pratt's book who can be
clearly identified with either Marlow or Kurtz. Aubrey solves this problem by suggesting that Blake is
both Marlow and Kurtz and by arguing that in combining these two characters Pratt "implicates Blake in
'darkness' more fully than Conrad does Marlow. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow says he was able to pull
back from the void and cling to his saving illusions. When Pratt's Blake disappears, he becomes literally
lost in the heart of Laotian darkness, as Kurtz loses his moral bearings in the Congo" (119). To Aubrey,
the Conradian parallels have the effect of implying that "the whole Southeastern war effort [was] the
moral equivalent of colonialism" (119). The fact that both the Belgian commercial enterprise in the Congo
and the U.S. military enterprise in Laos are headed by "the company" further suggests these are morally
equivalent episodes of colonial exploitation.
Although Heart of Darkness is often critical of colonialism, Aubrey overlooks the manner in which
Conrad naturalizes colonialism and imperialism. To Conrad, the barbarism of Kurtz and of the Belgian
enterprise in the Congo is the result of being stripped of one's civilization and exposed to primitive
Africa. Conrad argues that even the most civilized of us, when removed from civilization, will revert to
the savagery of Africans. Reading the Vietnam War through Heart of Darkness can thus serve to excuse
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results of a calculated policy but the product of a hostile and uncivilized landscape and people, a jungle
fever in which Americans degenerate to the level of Vietnamese. This is a common understanding of the
war, both in popular entertainments like Apocalypse Now and in Vietnam War novels and memoirs. For
instance, to Philip Caputo in A Rumor of War, "It was the dawn of creation in the Indochina bush, an
ethical as well as a geographical wilderness. Out there, lacking restraints, sanctioned to kill, confronted
by a hostile country and a relentless enemy, we sank into a brutish state" (xx). It is this brutishness that
Kurtz recognizes in himself when he scribbles at the end of his report on the suppression of savage
customs, "exterminate the brutes."
Aubrey goes on to note that "The idea that truth is inaccessible, if it even exists, is an important theme in
Pratt's book, as it is in Conrad's" (115). In this argument Aubrey anachronistically ascribes a
contemporary academic world view to Conrad. It is also curious to assert the inaccessibility of truth in an
essay that claims The Laotian Fragments comes "close to the classic Marxist critique of the U.S. war
effort as capitalist imperialism" (119). To read a novel that documents the starvation, torture,
enslavement, and mass murder of Africans for the sake of Belgian capitalists and another novel that
documents the hypocrisy and immorality of the secret U.S. war in Laos as demonstrating the
inaccessibility of truth is to undercut their documentary power for the sake of postmodern skepticism.
Aubrey also argues that ''Pratt acknowledges the inadequacy of language" when he deconstructs line by
line an excerpt from Time magazine, "revealing hidden or invalid assumptions as well as inaccuracies,
concluding that 'no matter who's telling the story, you've got to read between the lines" (115). But to
recognize that discourse, especially mass media discourse, carries hidden assumptions and a disguised
agenda is not so much evidence of the inadequacy of language as it is evidence of the ideology of Time, as
well as the ideological framework that shapes and limits the mass media.
In The Wars We Took to Vietnam, Milton Bates continues this postmodern questioning of knowledge and
truth. Bates sees Pratt "nudg[ing] his reader toward an abyss of indeterminacy. the reader is invited to
construct his or her own narrative, to refigure the story, from the documentary fragments" (230). Major
William Blake makes this point explicitly in the novel when he writes, "How little we really know about
other human beings from the inconclusive fragments that they let us see. Yet how much we think we know.
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we mistake bits and pieces for fact. Too much information thus massive ignorance" (188). Critics are
right to read The Laotian Fragments as problematizing the connection between documentation and truth, a
connection, according to Bates, that "reduces the phenomena of an era to a 'system of homogeneous
relations' organized around a single cause or principle." Bates repudiates any such total history or
metanarrative where "history is a single plane in which modes of knowing relate laterally to a presumed
center" (4).
However, in arguing that knowledge of the war is indeterminate is a jumble of warring facts and fictions
Bates glosses over an interesting footnote to the publication of The Laotian Fragments. As he briefly
mentions, the Air Force was troubled by Pratt's manuscript. According to Timothy Lomperis, "they
slapped a top secret cover sheet on it. It took ten months for the air force to clear the 'facts' for publication
as fiction" (Lomperis and Pratt, 9091). Prescott alluded to this as well in the last sentence of his review,
noting that The Laotian Fragments seems "to have upset the Pentagon for several months" (83). I think it
safe to assume that the Pentagon was not upset by what Bates describes as Pratt's "radical subversion of
the document, and hence of the authority traditionally invested in documents, archives and monuments''
(230). It was not his problematizing of fact but the facts themselves that disturbed the military about
Pratt's account of U.S. clandestine warfare in Laos. For Pratt reveals the extensive involvement of the
CIA in this war. He shows that U.S. Air Force officers like Blake, while disguised as civilians, were
involved in air combat against the Pathet Lao and NVA. And he alludes to the corruption and drug-running
of America's Laotian allies. In one instance, he cites a Washington Post article about USAID coordinator
Edgar "Pop" Buell in which the Hmong tribesmen who serve as America's proxy army are said to have "a
definite liking for growing opium poppy" (162), and he mentions the CIA's concern over Senator
Fullbright's raising "his annual stink about opium on Air America" (15).
In writing about The Laotian Fragments literary critics could follow these leads to explain the novel's
background, especially a novel about such a relatively unknown conflict. Critics could identify Buell as
an actual historical figure, an agricultural volunteer whose operations, writes Alfred McCoy, "were an
integral part of the CIA program" (307) among the Hmong and whose "agricultural skills [were] used to
improve Hmong techniques for planting and cultivating opium" (308). Likewise, critics could explain, as
McCoy does, that "in 1965, the CIA's airline, Air

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America, began flying Hmong opium out of the hills" (288) and that eventually, much of this opium would
be processed as heroin and sold to American GIs in Vietnam. Critics could even question some of the
representations of the war as presented by Pratt. In The Laotian Fragments, for example, Vang Pao,
commanding general of Hmong forces, is a heroic figure bravely defending the city of Long Tieng. There
is little sense in Pratt's account that the Hmong "resented [Vang Pao's] more flamboyant excesses
personally executing his own soldiers, grafting from the military payroll, and his willingness to take
heavy casualities" (McCoy, 320) or that Vang Pao was a central figure in the Laotian narcotics trade.
Since he had an opium processing plant in Long Tieng, his determination to defend this city may have had
more to do with heroin than heroism.
Similarly, the air war in Laos, as documented in The Laotian Fragments, seems insubstantial. Fighting
inclement weather and a military command whose priority is Vietnam, not Laos, Blake is frustrated by his
inability to provide the air support needed to halt a Pathet Lao/NVA offensive. Pratt repeats familiar
complaints about restrictions on the use of U.S. military might in Indochina. Blake notes that the Air Force
is restricted from "people targets" and so must concentrate on "selected interdiction as if the NVA will
come marching down in columns four abreast" (125). Another character laments, "The NVA can hit
wherever it wants to at a time of its own choosing, and there's not a goddamn thing we can do about it not
the way we're fighting now. These fucking rules of engagement we can't bomb here and can't bomb there
and if we blew up a hut it becomes a village and we're slaughtering civilians" (122). Yet as of 1970,
according to the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, "two-thirds of the territory of Laos, with a
population of close to half the country's 3 million people, ha[d] been subjected by the American military
to the most intensive aerial bombardment in history. An estimated 600,000 refugees ha[d] been created.
The people of the area. live[d] in caves or hid in the forests, farming at dusk" (4445). John Lewallen
further explains U.S. military strategy in Laos: ''At the end of 1968 the United States began saturation
bombing of all man-made structures in northeastern Laos. Many refugees now report that they moved to
escape not the Pathet Lao but repeated American bombing raids on their villages. The United States
government appears to be willing to pound the land and people of northeastern Laos into dust in order to
save the Clandestine Army and Royal Laotian Government from defeat" (363).

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In what little has been written about The Laotian Fragments literary critics have been far more interested
in Pratt's deconstruction of the notion of documentary truth than in what he reveals about U.S. destruction
of, in the words of the New York Times, "the rebel economy and social fabric" of Laos (quoted in
Committee, 101). Ignoring an important reading of contemporary history that might help, however slightly,
to question the American militarism of recent years (a militarism built on just this erasure of history),
critics have instead devoted their energies to aesthetic and philosophical speculations about the nature of
truth. Instead of correcting a documentary record aggressively rewritten by the Right, academic critics
have questioned the validity of documentary evidence itself and have seen this questioning as itself
radically subversive.
The critical reception of these four novels suggests that the politics within commercial literary culture
changed somewhat from 1957 to 1974, moving from a cold war liberalism that instinctively defended
America's anticommunist foreign policy to a critical liberalism that at times questioned the premises of
American policy. And yet in evaluations of literary texts reviewers focused almost exclusively on
aesthetics, thereby diminishing whatever these texts may have revealed about American military policy in
southeast Asia at the very time the war was being waged.
Academic literary culture, on the other hand, has scarcely looked at these novels. Cultural historians have
considered The Ugly American and The Green Berets but have tended to emphasize the continuity of
American racial violence, beginning with the Puritans. This focus has flattened historical difference,
reading racial violence as the property of a transhistorical national psychic disorder, rather than as the
result of specific, historically and socially contingent struggles. One result of this focus is that critics have
turned away from an examination of what these texts reveal or obscure about U.S. policy in Vietnam. In
other words, while investigating the psychological disorder that has motivated American and Western
racism, critics have overlooked the effects of U.S. militarism upon the Vietnamese and have avoided
asking questions about the responsibility of elite policy makers. Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson,
William Westmoreland, et al. can hardly be held accountable, after all, if their policies result from a
deep-seated American cultural disorder.
The other focus of academic critics has been on what can loosely be called "postmodernism." These
critics have repeatedly asserted the unknowability of Vietnam and have argued that Vietnam War texts
should

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have a literary aesthetic that matches the war itself. Realism is seen as an entirely inappropriate means of
writing about the war, since Vietnam brings into question all notions of verisimilitude, of historical
accuracy and explanation. Commercial reviewers and academic critics alike have looked at Vietnam War
narratives from a narrow, largely apolitical perspective and have been woefully negligent in combating
official distortions at the very moment these distortions have been entering the national consciousness as
common sense.

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5
Rock-and-Roll War

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Published only three years after The Laotian Fragments, Michael Herr's Dispatches was received by a
literary culture far more sympathetic to literary representations of the war. Dispatches was reviewed
widely and favorably and remains central to most discussions of Vietnam War literature. One could
argue, however, that Dispatches lacks the scope of The Laotian Fragments; the verisimilitude of Philip
Caputo's A Rumor of War, Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters, and John Del Vecchio's The 13th Valley;
the imagination of Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried; the conviction of
Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July. Why, then, has Dispatches been read as the most successful of
Vietnam War narratives? Because it was thought to have successfully matched form and content.
Eschewing many of the conventions of traditional narrative, Herr was believed to have constructed a
book whose nonlinear structure and kinetic prose in some vital way seemed to mirror the war itself.
Dispatches is a compilation of pieces that Herr first wrote on assignment for Esquire in 19671968 and
which, during the next decade, he rewrote and reworked into a more or less cohesive whole. It is a
twenty-seven-year-old writer's account of his travels through war-torn Vietnam, an account of the grim
humor of nearly traumatized GIs and the absurd optimism of American commanders stitched into a broad,
almost impressionistic picture of the war. The book is broken into six sections: "Breathing In" and
"Breathing Out," which serve as introductory and concluding chapters; "Hell Sucks," an account of the
battle for Hue during the Tet offensive; "Khe Sanh," which details life in the besieged Marine outpost;
''Illumination Rounds," a collection of vignettes demonstrating the absurdity of the war; and "Colleagues,"
a series of anecdotes about Herr's journalistic colleagues, as well as a critique of conventional
journalistic practice in Vietnam. Episodes within each of these sections are frequently organized around
broad themes the committing of atrocities, the racism of American troops, the voyeuristic attraction of
war, and so forth. With little sense of narrative progression or coherence, Dispatches ultimately comes
across as a voyeuristic, drug-addled remembrance

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of war, the random associations, feverish speculations, and lingering guilt of a long, strange, sometimes
nightmarish trip in Vietnam.
From its initial reception, critics noted that with this book the Vietnam War at last had its own literature.
For C.D.B. Bryan, in a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review, "Dispatches is the best
book to have been written about the Vietnam War. nothing else so far has even come close to conveying
how different this war was from any we fought or how utterly different were the methods and men who
fought for us." Similarly, Jo Ann Learman in the Progressive claims, "No other writer has been able to
capture so intimately what it must have been like to fight in Vietnam" (54), while Elizabeth Pochoda in the
Nation declares Dispatches "the first book to convincingly address itself to that place" (345).
Exactly how Dispatches succeeds in capturing the essence of the Vietnam War is less clear since
reviewers frequently cited long passages with little or no discussion, as if the connection between Herr's
prose and the war were self-evident. Bryan gives a brief explanation: "Vietnam required new
technologies in writing. an entirely new language, imagery and style were needed so that we could
understand and feel. Until Michael Herr, no reporter or writer seemed to capture it. The previous books
seem to have been trapped in styles left over from previous wars" (1, 54). In part, it is Herr's prose that
makes Dispatches the first real Vietnam book. Herr's style, Bryan explains, "derives from the era of acid
rock, the Beatles' films, or that druggy, Hunter Thompson once-removed-from-reality appreciation of the
Great Cosmic Joke" (54). Likewise, Pochoda praises Herr's "salad of jargon and slang" (346), and Paul
Gray in Time his ''taut, high strung prose" (119). Placing Herr's prose in the tradition of "the souped-up,
seemingly offhand, freaked-out writing [of] Tom Wolfe," Raymond Sokolov in Newsweek explains that
Herr "took the sensibility of the New Journalism (and of his generation) to Saigon and the Viet boonies"
(102) and thus succeeded in writing "in the style of the place and the time" (104).
Not only its prose but the form of Dispatches was identified as true to Vietnam. To Bryan, "Herr's
dispatches are as formless as the war they covered" (54). And to Pochoda, it "was a war with no center,
no decisive battles; it was all circumference and it is therefore difficult to filter the thing through unified
plot and point of view." Herr was able to avoid the pitfalls of conventional narrative by finding, in
Pochoda's words, "a method that is both personal and public enough to convey his war's odd combination
of familiarity and weirdness." Specifically, Herr built the

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book "around the wearisome convention of the acid trip" yet managed to avoid the solipsism of one
individual, suggesting instead "that individual's tapping into a general psychosis" (Pochoda, 345). Or as
Gray explains, Vietnam was an "irrational place," and the war was "beyond the grasp of logic" (120).
However, any assertion that there is a natural and direct connection between Herr's aesthetic and the war,
that there exists a correspondence between narrative strategy and historical period is itself shaped by
historical and cultural imperatives. Critics' assessments of Dispatches raise the question of how one
literary aesthetic rather than another is found to capture more precisely the nature of a historical moment.
The answers to this question are many. Perhaps artists have a preternatural sensitivity to the tenor of their
times and thus accurately mirror their era through aesthetic form while, amid disagreements and revisions,
critics ultimately recognize and champion these forms. Perhaps, too, there is a semi-logic built into
artistic paradigms, a cycle of growth and exhaustion that almost inevitably leads to a newer, more
historically fitting aesthetic. On a Bloomian view, artistic movements change in reaction to the influence
of the previous paradigm, with artists desperately seeking to establish their own cultural identity through
new forms and aesthetics. Artists and critics may also consciously promote their particular aesthetics
through a variety of formal and informal means. In order to gain such influence, writers, reviewers, and
critics must have access to the means of cultural distribution, which in the current setting means the mass
media and the academy. Thus institutional pressures and biases are likely to influence the shaping of an
era's dominant aesthetic in this case, postmodernism. To evaluate Dispatches in, say, the New York Times
Book Review, one must not stray too far from the dominant ideology of the Times (and the times). Writing
in the New Republic, Zalin Grant explains how the Vietnam War narrative changed to reflect dominant
belief, beginning with books that saw the war as "an agonizing moral dilemma" (22) and turning
"conclusively antiwar in 1968" after the Tet offensive what he labels "the 'bad American-good
Vietnamese' interpretation of the war." The literary community in particular, according to Grant, "was
often exposed to an extreme version, largely as the result of the ascendance in the late 1960s of the New
York Review of Books and its chief polemicist, Noam Chomsky." Reaching ''its most influential point in
1971, when Neil Sheehan wrote a lead article for the NY Times Book Review, entitled 'Should We Have
War Crime Trials?'" (Grant, 23), this Chomskian interpretation "prevailed,

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in one form or other, until the publication of Dispatches" (22). Ultimately, Chomsky's view, according to
Grant, "was unsatisfactorytoo filled with self-righteousness and finger-pointing, [and] inappropriate now
that the war was over" (23).
By 1977 the prevailing interpretation was that Vietnam was "simply a time of temporary national
madness" (Grant, 21). Herr's spin on the war (and Hollywood's as well), asserts Grant, "contained
elements that the whole country had already begun to agree upon: the concept of the veteran as a victim of
the war's madness. If we could not give them our admiration as in past wars, we could at least treat them
solicitously like outpatients of an insane asylum" (24). For Grant, the dismissal of Chomskian analysis
was necessary since such self-righteous moralizing was crudely polemical. In dismissing the moralistic
denunciation of U.S. militarism in Indochina, however, Grant fails to consider the ideological usefulness
of this dismissal. (He also fails to mention Chomsky's being shut out of the pages of the New York Review
of Books.) Grant does not recognize that the dismissal of Chomskian analysis fits well with the desire of
elites to reestablish social control, to thwart the perceived ''crisis of democracy" of the late 1960s and
early 1970s.
Newspapers and magazines at the time were filled with worries about excessive social justice. The New
York Times addressed this issue when it pointed to the Carter administration's struggle to "rebuild
business confidence and still renewed anxieties over inflation" without causing "yet another devastating
mass explosion of black rage in the urban ghetto of the type that swept the nation a little over a decade
ago" (Raskin, 4). In a cover story entitled "Is America Turning Right?" Newsweek spoke of "the view that
the government has given too much welfare to the minority poor" (Gelman et al., 35). Newsweek attributed
this view not to the wealthy or to corporations but to the economically squeezed middle class, while at the
same time acknowledging that "the majority of Americans favor more public spending on the environment,
schooling, medical care, the elderly, and the unemployed" (Gelman et al., 34). The sympathetic manner in
which it reported the notion that too much was being spent on welfare suggests that, although attributing
these to the middle class, Newsweek was enunciating its own beliefs. Likewise, Newsweek was
sympathetic to what it labeled the neoconservative interpretation of the 1960s, the belief that "On the
campuses, legitimate dissent boiled over into movements that disrupted and undermined academic life. In
the ghettos, grievances exploded into brutal riots. On the

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left, reformists turned into revolutionaries who attacked middle-class values. To many blue-collar
workers and academics alike, the breakdown of order was the end result of excessive moral
permissiveness and lax law enforcementliberalism gone berserk" (Gelman et al., 36). This reactionary
narrative was to Newsweek hardly even ideological because "Today's new conservatives lie very much
within [America's] pragmatic tradition." Rather than attempting to reassert elite authority,
neoconservatives, according to Newsweek, were merely "drawing attention to solutions that often do not
work" (44). Although labeled pragmatic (read: nonideological), the neoconservative attack on the 1960s
was specifically ideological and nothing like the pragmatic populism depicted by Newsweek.
Newsweek's rendering of 1960s activism as "liberalism gone berserk" and 1970s neoconservatism as
mere pragmatism coheres with the concerted efforts of corporate and policy elites throughout the 1970s to
rewrite recent history and to disable most forms of progressive politics and social activism. Chomsky
explains the logic behind this strategy:
The popular movement of opposition to the war was doubly threatening to U.S. elites. In the first place, the movement developed out
of the control of its "natural leaders," thus posing a grave threat to order and stability. What is more, the general passivity and
obedience on the part of the population that is a basic requirement in a state committed to counterrevolutionary intervention was
overcome in significant measure, and dangerous feelings of sympathy developed towards movements of national liberation in the Third
World. It is an important task for the intelligentsia in the postwar period to reconstruct the ideological system and to reinstate the
patterns of conformism that were shattered by the opposition and resistance to the U.S. war in Indochina. (After the Cataclysm, 17)
This reconstruction of the ideological system was aided by an extensive corporate propaganda campaign.
Between 1971 and 1977, spending on "advocacy advertising" ("designed," in Michael Parenti's words,
"to sell the entire capitalist system rather than just one of its products") more than doubled; by 1986 one-
third of all corporate advertising was spent on nonproduct-related advertising (Inventing Reality, 67). In
addition, according to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, nearly 40 percent of news comes "virtually
unedited from public relations offices'' (2). The incessant trumpeting of capitalism's virtues within
contemporary culture, a culture in which nothing is allowed even a temporary reprieve from the "logic" of
the market, is not a natural phenomenon but is the result of a

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long, expensive, and ongoing propaganda campaign fought out in a media system increasingly unable and
unwilling to distinguish between corporate public relations and news.
The attempt to reinstate conformity to the ideological system is readily apparent in newspapers and
magazines from the 1970s. For instance, an ad for First National State Bank that appeared in the New York
Times during the same month it reviewed Dispatches declared that "the evolution of capitalism has left us
with a system that would set Adam Smith's quill to shaking. an unceasing flow of new laws and
regulations floods the desks of financial managers." Another ad, for Sentry Insurance, sought to rewrite
the consumer movement, explaining that the biggest worry of consumers was not environmental
destruction, health and safety violations by businesses, or excessive corporate profit, but "high prices."
Sentry worriedly asked, ''What industries are the next targets for the consumerists?" (note the similarity
between "consumerist" and "communist"). Sentry concedes that the consumer movement "has become an
integral part of our free enterprise system" but explains with some relief that at least it was "no longer the
cause of a handful of activists." At about the same time the Wall Street Journal spoke out against
legislative attempts to restrict "the public's right to hear and consider the view of corporations" on
electoral matters. "We don't want any body of men," the Journal announced, "be it a legislature, board of
censors, revolutionary command council, supreme soviet, committee on public safety or what-have-you,
empowered to restrict the promotion of those views" (Ulman). Just as consumerists are linked to
communists, so a committee on public safety is linked to the supreme soviet (much as conservatives
would later link politically correct academics to Red Guards and Stalinists).
From the early 1970s onward, there developed an array of business coalitions, foundations, and
conservative think tanks intent on reducing the welfare state, lowering tax and regulatory burdens,
weakening labor, and promoting a massive military buildup and an imperial foreign policy. Faced with
what Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers describe as "the longest and deepest economic downturn since
the Great Depression" (78), U.S. business leaders, writes Sarah Diamond, "were eager to take
preemptive action, both economically, by seeking to squeeze labor with wage cuts, and ideologically, by
funding a slew of 'free market' policy think tanks" (132). This elaborate and well-funded system of private
institutions developed a counter-intellingentsia that conducted and disseminated research studies, wrote
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books and journals, served as policy advisers and became "experts." It is against this background, in the
midst of an aggressive campaign to rewrite the 1960s, that reviewers in mainstream periodicals evaluated
Michael Herr's Dispatches. Within this milieu, and under significant institutional pressure to conform (but
without consciously doing so), many reviewers praised Dispatches for its view of the war as unknowable
madness and its sympathy for the plight of individual soldiers, views that fit well with a nonthreatening
version of the war.
The perception of the war as an individual and a collective national breakdown"a tapping into a general
psychosis" (Pochoda, 345), a "concentrated madness" (Sales, 35), "an irrational place" that is "beyond
the grasp of logic'' (Gray, 120) does not fully cohere with this revisionist view. Thus Grant objects to
Herr's (and Hollywood's) failure to consider the "good, decent Americans who served in Vietnam [and
who] deserved much better" (24). In this context, Herr's depiction of the war as violent psychosis may, if
elaborated through a materialist critique, offer insight into the running of and reporting on the war. (It is
no surprise that in National Review Joseph Rehyansky describes Dispatches as "left-wing agit-prop"
[356].) But the notion that the war was part of a general psychosis, without further historical or
ideological questioning, makes it seem an aberration rather than an extension of cold war militarism,
irrationality rather than a coldly calculated policy of aggression. Just as critics saw violent racism as a
product of the West's diseased psyche, so reviewers found Dispatches, an accurate representation of the
madness that was Vietnam. In addition, this emphasis on american veterans' (and Herr's own) psychosis
shifted concern away from the Vietnamese and constructed the war (as Hollywood would profitably
exploit) as a quintessentially American rock-and-roll adventure.
At the time of the publication of Dispatches, Vietnam was trying desperately to recover from the war. To
the World Health Organization in 1976, South Vietnam was "a land of widespread malaria, bubonic
plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, venereal disease and 300,000 prostitutes one of the few places where
leprosy was spreading and bubonic plauge was still taking lives" (quoted in Chomsky, After the
Cataclysm, 83), conditions that in significant ways were repeated in Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. In
1978 John Pilger, writing in the New Statesman, described "much of North Vietnam [as] a moonscape
from which visible signs of lifehouses, factories, schools, hospitals, pagodas, churcheshave been
obliterated. In some forests there are no longer birds and animals; and

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there are lorry drivers who will not respond to the hooting of a horn because of the incessant sound of
bombs" (quoted in Chomsky, After the Cataclysm, 15). In their appreciation of Dispatches, however,
critics ignore Herr's almost complete erasure of Vietnam. And they seem completely unaware of the
mystification involved in identifying Vietnam as an irrational place beyond the grasp of logic. Herr's
account seems almost to take place within a psychic rather than a real landscape. In Dispatches the
Vietnamese are mere shadows in Herr's psychic drama, hobgoblins in America's bad trip.
When reviewers mentioned the Vietnamese it was usually to inflate the suffering of Americans. For
instance, to Gray the war was bookmarked by two "memorable images": "self-immolating monks and
returning American POWs." Besides the obvious discrepancy (Buddhist monks were pacifists protesting
violence; American POWs were mostly downed pilots and crewmen), there is an implied historical
trajectory herethe war began with the suffering of innocent Vietnamese and ended with the suffering of
innocent Americans. Between these memorable images, according to Gray, "there stretched a decade of
contradictory violence and rhetoric that splintered the country" (119). Vietnam might have been where the
war took place, but the country that is splintered, on Gray's account, is the United States. This staggering
revision is asserted casually and unselfconsciouslyand is entirely in keeping with Herr's depiction of the
war as U.S. psychodrama.
Grant, too, mentions American POWs, declaring their captivity narratives "the most notable works of the
post-ceasefire period" and suggesting that "Their reports of torture in Hanoi did much to suggest that the
Vietnamese were not necessarily possessed of the full thousand virtues" (23). That a country at war,
especially a country mercilessly assaulted by the world's strongest military power, tortured captured
enemy soldiersor as Chomsky explains, "that the North Vietnamese jailers were capable of considerable
brutality towards men who came to destroy their homes and murder their families" (Towards a New Cold
War, 125)should be no surprise. That this mistreatment of prisoners and consequent deromanticizing of
the North Vietnamese should be read as demonstrating the moral equivalence between opposing forces is
an instance of historical revisionism that has been spurred on by intensive efforts to reconstruct the
ideological system.
Actually, the view that there was a moral equivalence between North Vietnamese and the Americans has
been the left-most position within the

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mass media. For many commentators, the North Vietnamese demonstrated far greater cruelty than did the
Americans. To the New York Times, this mistreatment of prisoners was a "damning indictment of the
Vietnamese Communists, one that cannot be erased by the pious denials of the North Vietnamese or their
apologists in this country. A compelling case can and should be made against the North Vietnamese for
their clear violations of the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, the record is not unflawed. South
Vietnam's 'tiger cages' for political prisoners at Con Son, the Mylai massacre and similar, if lesser,
incidents involving American troops, the bombing and shelling of civilian areas, torture of prisoners in
the field and the use of chemical weapons are all violations of the spirit if not the letter of international
law, for which the highest United States authorities cannot escape responsibility, even if the violations
were not expressions of official policy" (quoted in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, 127128,
emphasis added). The Times's account provides a noteworthy example of the manner by which U.S. guilt
can be simultaneously acknowledged and elided. First, the Times refers to the record," rather than to an
elite class of U.S. policy makers. And this record, rather than horrific or inhumane, is described as "not
unflawed." For the Timesand for the American establishment this colossal understatement, this
acknowledgment that American policy is not always exceptional, is a significant concession. The most
perverse aspect of this concession is its comparison of U.S. and North Vietnamese actions. Whereas the
torture of American prisoners by the North Vietnamese, according to the Times, is a damning indictment,
the bombing of civilians and the use of chemical weapons are mere flaws. A military strategy that
involved saturation bombing, free-fire zones, the Phoenix assassination program, the large-scale
destruction of rural life and creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the dumping of tons of
Agent Orange is alleged to violate merely the spirit of international law. North Vietnam's much less
serious offenses, on the other hand, are clear violations of the Geneva Convention.
This U.S./Vietnamese "equivalence" (an equivalence in which U.S. actions are depicted as more legal
and more humane) was apparent in President Carter's assertion (in March 1977) that the United States had
no reason "to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability" since in Vietnam
"the destruction was mutual" (quoted in Chomsky, After the Cataclysm, 320 n. 22). Even on the level of
treatment of prisoners, however, there was no equivalence between the behavior of

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the North Vietnamese and that of the United States and its allies. Including MIAs, there were never more
than 1,500 American POWs held in North Vietnam (Franklin, 70), while between 1968 and 1971 the
CIA-led Phoenix program (designed to target and eliminate "the Viet Cong infrastructure") assassinated
20,000 Vietnamese (Young, 213)100,000 by Vietnamese count (Chomsky, After the Cataclysm, 71). This
systematic assassination of Vietnamese prisoners remains unknown to most Americans, but the torture and
fictional continued imprisonment of Americans has become nearly totemic as a result of a propaganda
campaign begun in 1969. H. Bruce Franklin explains:
Throughout President Nixon's first term, the issue of POWs and MIAs would serve mainly as an indispensable device for continuing
the war, functioning on the domestic front as a potent counterforce to the anti-war movement while providing an ingenious tool for
building insurmountable roadblocks within the peace talks. And then the issue would be transmuted into a major obstacle to normalized
relations for more than eighteen years after the 1973 accords. The campaign was promoted by a medley of astute publicity schemes
staged by the Nixon White House, POW family organizations, Congress, and Texas multimillionaire H. Ross Perot. America's vision
of the war was being transformed. The actual photographs and TV footage of massacred villagers, napalmed children, Vietnamese
prisoners being tortured and murdered, wounded GIs screaming in agony, and body bags being loaded by the dozen for shipment back
home were being replaced by simulated images of American POWs in the savage hands of Asian Communists. (4854)
The ideological usefulness of the POW issue is apparent in Gray's and Grant's reviews, both of which
cohere with a rendering of the war as American tragedy. Although Dispatches is far removed from the
fantasy of the POW/MIA myth, reviewers' sympathetic readings of Herr's often solipsistic and
ethnocentric detailing of the war are in keeping with the general perception behind this myththat U.S. and
Vietnamese suffering were equivalent.
Also, the idea that the war was a form of mental illness makes it more difficult to see U.S. militarism in
Indochina as a logical extension of U.S. policy. If the war is by definition irrational, how can it be
understoodother than through Herr's vague, impressionistic retelling? In sympathizing with Herr's account,
reviewers often dismissed previous attempts to make sense of the war. Pochoda, for instance, discounts
"memoirs like Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War" because such texts are too "eager to overexplain and
digest the experience for their readers" (345). Compared

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to Dispatches, Gloria Emerson's Winners and Losers seems flawed, according to Learman, because "she
tends to moralize [thus] the only readers who finish her book are those who began with the same point of
view" (54). "Alongside Dispatches," writes Roger Sales, Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake, "with its
clarity, its balanced views, its intelligent laying out of the evidence seem[s], in its neat detachment,
obscene" (35). In praising Dispatches, critics were almost literally rewriting the war, supplanting more
conventionally rendered histories with Herr's fragmented account. Unfortunately, what these critics
identified as the drawbacks of Caputo's, Emerson s, and Fitzgerald's approachesexplanation, moralizing,
clarityare precisely what has been missing from all too many cultural interpretations of the war, allowing
the war to be rewritten.
Although reviewers' evaluations of Dispatches (and Dispatches itself) were shaped by and contributed to
a rewriting of the warwere, in other words, inescapably ideologicalthese evaluations nonetheless
frequently praised Herr for avoiding ideology. According to Gray, Herr "preaches no sermons, draws no
morals, enters no ideological disputes" (119); to Sales, "Herr at his best hurls one into his experience,
insists an uninitiated reader be comforted with no politics, no certain morality, no clear outline of history"
(35); to Sokolov, Herr is "no ideologue" (102); to Pochoda, Herr ''cover[s] the war and leave[s] the
significance up for grabs" (345). Such comments reveal the nonideological ideology (a concern for the
transcendent human condition and a focus on textual complexities and sophistication) that has long defined
literary culture. This retreat from ideology reveals as well literary culture's complicity in rewriting the
war. For to champion Herr's nonideology at a time when the Right is insistently attacking the 1960s and
the legacy of Vietnam is to cede ideological ground. The reception of Vietnam War literature provides
space, however limited and marginalized, for an examination of the war itself. Within the liberal culture
of book reviewing, though, such important work was ignored in favor of wispy appreciations of literary
merit. In the struggle over historical memory commercial literary culture's sympathy for complexity,
indirection, and fragmentation has offered little opposition to the jingoistic rewriting of the war.
The impact a book's initial reception may have upon its subsequent scholarly reception can be seen by
comparing Dispatches and The Laotian Fragments. Pratt's book has much in common with Herr's,
particularly its fragmented structure and sense of war-induced psychological disintegration. But even if
one were to grant that Dispatches is a better book, it

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would be difficult to argue that the disparity in the academic reputations of these books reflects their
relative merits. The Laotian Fragments was almost completely ignored by commercial literary culture
and has been discussed in only two scholarly articles, whereas Dispatches received widespread praise
and has become the central text in discussions of Vietnam War literature.
More evidence of the impact of commercial literary culture on academics is seen in their frequent citing
of the opinions of reviewers. To justify writing about Dispatches, academic critics repeatedly note its
positive reception within commercial literary culture. Mia Bonn tells us that Dispatches was nominated
for the National Book Award, that it earned national recognition and "has come to enjoy a privileged
place in the Vietnam War canon" (29). Matthew Stewart explains that it "was quickly recognized by
several reviewers as one of the finest works about the Vietnam War" ("Style in Dispatches," 189). John
Hellmann quotes from William Plummer and Peter Prescott's reviews and declares that ''the critical
reception seemed to extend almost beyond acclaim to gratitude " (126). And Dale Jones mentions that
"More than one reviewer has cited Dispatches as being the best book on Vietnam" (320, n. 1). Since the
importance of a contemporary literary work is always uncertain and since critics must justify their
examinations of these works, it is understandable that they lean on the opinions of reviewers. But more
than merely influencing whether or not a book will achieve scholarly attention, reviewers can affect the
content of scholarship. Notwithstanding the difference between commercial and academic literary
cultures, reviews of contemporary novels and memoirs often prefigure, albeit in more abbreviated and
less theoretical fashion, the interpretations of academics. Virtually all of the academic readings of Herr's
book build upon what was written initially by commercial reviewers, in particular the notion that in its
style and form Dispatches presents a more accurate rendering of the Vietnam War than conventional
narratives.
Echoing reviewers' praise for Herr's "druggy, Hunter Thompson once-removed-from-reality" style, his
"souped-up, seemingly offhand, freaked-out writing" la Tom Wolfe, Matthew Stewart contrasts Herr's
new journalism with conventional, objective reporting. This new journalism is seen as stretching
discursive boundaries, allowing for a more subjective hence truer depiction of the war. According to
Stewart, a "monolithic system set up to 'handle' the media" and "a framework of consciousness shaped by
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trap those who hope to depict Vietnam "within pre-packaged images and programmed responses which
nullify or detract from their ability to engage their experiences as unmediated, authentic versions of
reality" ("Style in Dispatches," 190191). In other words, traditional journalistic practice and mass media
representations of previous wars are significant obstacles to honest reporting. As Herr explains, "because
they worked in the news media, for organizations that were ultimately reverential toward the institutions
involved: the Office of the President, the Military, America at war and, most of all, the empty technology
that characterized Vietnam " (228), even the best of conventional journalists were frustrated in their
attempts to report honestly on the war. Herr is able to overcome the mystifications of journalism and
popular culture through his "stylistic ground breaking and his departures from the journalistic norm''
("Style in Dispatches," 191). In particular, it is Herr's "adoption of his generation's language," his focus
on the " 'grunt's eye' view of Vietnam" ("Style in Dispatches," 192), that overcomes media-generated
structures of meaning and allows the war to be truthfully recorded. Stewart suggests as well that a work
like Dispatches, through its ground-breaking style and new journalism, has ideological import: it can
begin to reorganize the very structures of consciousness that make the war unknowable.
In a similar vein, John Hellmann argues that Herr's "combination of a first-person journalistic contract
and innovative fictional techniques" lets him "develop a form that would present the actual experience of
the Vietnam conflict" (Fables of Fact, 127, emphasis added). Just as Stewart sees the "pre-packaged
images and programmed responses" of popular culture as an impediment to the presentation of actual
experience, so Hellmann notes that Herr "had to strip his consciousness of prepackaged images and ideas
assimilated from 'Television City' before he could understand the actual experience, see it and not a
media-supplied fiction of his culture" (Fables of Fact, 133). For Hellmann as for Stewart, Herr escapes
these strictures through language, through words "chosen in an arduous attempt to capture the quality of
actual experience, without recourse to the stock language provided by a culture that is ever ready to tame
experience by transmitting it in familiar formulas" (Fables of Fact, 130).
However, whereas Stewart reads the prose in Dispatches as "consistent with Bakhtin's conception of
jostling languages" ("Style in Dispatches," 192), of heteroglossia and multivocality, Hellmann reads it as
"closely related to, and perhaps influenced by, the fabulist experiments of such writers as Kosinski and
Barthelme" (Fables of Fact, 128). Another difference

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is that for Stewart Herr's style is "replete with both the historically charged slang of the late sixties and
the special lingo of the men in the field" ("Style in Dispatches," 192) and therefore "undercut[s]
authoritarian discourse and reveal[s] the callous and cynical falsities such discourse contained during the
Vietnam era" ("Style in Dispatches," 199). Hellmann, on the other hand, focuses on Herr's self-
reflexivity, on the importance of reliving ''experience through memory and art, shaping the facts into a
personally constructed form that will embody a meaning not available in the fictive forms already
imposed upon the experiencing mind by one's culture" (132).
Recognizing that Herr's self-reflection and self-conscious style tend toward solipsism, Hellmann suggests
that this self-reflection looks outward: it is emblematic of a national "journey toward self-discovery." To
Hellmann, this national self-discovery consists of learning not to "overlay the senseless death of war with
[the] melodramatic ritual [of video fantasies. [and] the stock wisdom of past wars with Indians or Nazis"
(Fables of Fact, 136). According to Hellmann, Herr teaches us to avoid popular melodrama and
nationalist myth when attempting to understand what happened in Vietnam. Both Stewart and Hellmann
find in Dispatches a means by which readers can come to grips with the Vietnam War. Stewart finds in
Herr's use of 1960s slang and grunt lingo a means of subverting authoritarian discourse; Hellmann reads
Herr's self-reflexivity as analogous to America's postwar self-investigation. Both Stewart's and
Hellmann's analyses are typical of academic literary culture's considerations of Dispatches and reveal
something of the ideology of contemporary literary scholarship.
This belief that a slang-filled, self-reflexive style in and of itself can begin to reorganize a popular
consensus that has been shaped by the mass media seems more wish-fulfillment than an actual
consideration of the power and reach of media institutions and other ideological state apparatuses.
Richard Slotkin explains the perception missing from analyses like Stewart's or Hellmann's:
we should see [popular culture] as the myth medium of the victorious party in an extended historical struggle. It has come to represent
the mythology and ideology of those groups or classes whose political and economic concerns and cultural predilections have by and
large dominated and directed the course of American social, economic, and political developmententrepeneurs and corporate directors,
salesmen and promoters, entertainers and purveyors of grand ideas. (Fatal Environment, 30)

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Neither Hellmann, nor Stewart, nor Herr discusses the forces behind the construction and perpetuation of
these myths. Although Hellmann argues that "even the most terrible facts will not provide sufficient
information for one to grasp truth, unless the structures of consciousness organizing those facts are
changed" (Fables of Fact, 137), he does not refer to the political and economic interests that promote
these structures of consciousness. Nor does he consider that a book like Dispatches, which was published
by the Hearst Corporation, and an author like Herr, who helped write the screenplays of Apocalypse Now
and Full Metal Jacket, face institutional pressures to reinforce prevailing "structures of consciousness. "
But the main problem with Hellmann's argument is his notion that these structures of consciousness can be
changed through fabulist experimentation.
The false structures of consciousness Hellmann alludes to, I believe, can best be changed through
political education. In the case of the Vietnam War this means learning, among other things, that the United
States thwarted democratic elections in Vietnam, refused to work seriously toward a negotiated
settlement, followed a strategy of attrition that meant the killing of countless civilians and the destruction
of rural Vietnam, and implemented a military draft that fatally exploited the working class. To Hellmann,
on the other hand, it is Herr's "keeping his mind open to the experiences he was actually having, and
developing a literary form that would communicate them" that "has contributed to our comprehension of
the Vietnam war as, in part, a product of the American consciousness" (Fables of Fact, 138). Note that
the war is not attributed to the economic and political needs of capital, nor even to the policies of Lyndon
Johnson and Robert McNamara, but to a vague ''American consciousness." How, with the war severed
from history and with materialist critique disabled, is this consciousness to be changed? Predictably,
Hellmann offers a vague aesthetic solution to this question of literature's ability to raise consciousness
and affect change: the answer lies in "the act of shaping memory and art," in affirming "the power of a
new journalism that is a genre of the new fiction" (Fables of Fact, 132, 138).
Calculating its relative merit and its position within the developing Vietnam War canon, several critics
compared Dispatches to other Vietnam War books. To Gordon Taylor, all "American books fan out
radially in search of new forms of literary leverage an resistant material, from a center [Graham] Greene
seems at once still to occupy and no longer usefully to provide" (296). Dispatches, he argues, "calls The
Quiet American

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most clearly into question as the literary base line from which American writers might triangulate the
subject of the war" (298). Noting Herr's speculation that "Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina
when Alden Pyle's body washed up under the bridge at Dakao" (51), Taylor sees The Quiet American "as
an active element [within Dispatches], not a passively acknowledged influence" (299). Like many others,
Taylor concentrates on Herr's attempts to find ''forms commensurate with the extremity of the experience,
yet capable of transcribing its atonalities" (301), declaring finally that Dispatches is profoundly different
than The Quiet American. Whereas "Greene's Vietnam is recognizably in the actual world" (301), Herr's
Vietnam is "a place [where] the historical and topographical reality has become hallucinatory" (302).
Taylor finds that Herr's "words come from the other side of a line, or from deep within a warp, which
Greene's characters never really cross or enter" (307). For all of the focus on the truthfulness of Herr's
aesthetic (even to the point, as here, of dismissing The Quiet American), critics flatten historical and
cultural particularity. Vietnam, in Taylor's view, seems to exist in another dimension beyond our
comprehension. Although Taylor alleges that "American writers [are] now beg[ining] to make of the war
what they must, in order to tell us what Graham Greene could not" (308), he, like most critics, is vague
about what must be told, other than that it should convey the atonal hallucinatory reality found on the other
side of a line and deep within a warp.
This repeated critical fascination with Herr's verbal pyrotechnics, this notion that his aesthetic is a nearly
perfect match of form and contenthis fragmented, hallucinatory, rock-and-roll prose fitting the war almost
exactlyis made most famously by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. (It is a telling indictment of academic literary culture that Jameson is the only major figure in
contemporary theory to have written on Vietnam War literature, and he does so only briefly.) Because of
his prominent place within this culture, Jameson's pronouncements have given special weight to the notion
that there is a connection between the war and postmodernity and that Vietnam War narratives should
demonstrate and even embody this connection.
Jameson speaks of Herr's "extraordinary linguistic innovations," his fusion of "a whole range of
contemporary idiolects" (43). To Jameson this fusion is dictated by the problems of content: "This first
terrible post-modernist war cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or
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paradigms is, along with the breakdown of any shared language through which a veteran might convey
such experience, among the principle [sic] subjects of the book and may be said to open up the place of a
whole new reflexivity" (4445). This sense that there was something new about the war that required a
new way of telling is the dominant critical attitude toward imaginative prose about the Vietnam War. For
Jameson and many others, this novelty was not an exclusive property of the war; rather, the war heralded
a new consciousness, "a new systematic cultural norm" (Jameson, 6)what has come to be known as
postmodernism. "Postmodern culture," according to Jameson, "is the internal and superstructural
expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world"
(5). Although Jameson sees postmodernism as the cultural manifestation of contemporary capitalism and
U.S. hegemony, many critics focus on the aesthetics of postmodernism rather than the political economy
behind it. They examine the superstructural expression rather than the military and economic domination
underlying its expressionwhat Jameson calls "the underside of culture blood, torture, death, and terror"
(5).
For Jean Baudrillard, the underside of culture barely exists in a world that has been overwhelmed by
simulation. To explain this erasure of the real, Baudrillard cites an allegory of Borges in which "the
cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but
where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still
discernible in the desertsthe metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction) ends up being confused with
the real thing and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra" (166). In the
contemporary world, Baudrillard argues, all that remains is simulation, representation, the hyperreal. Any
attempt to trace the real is but "the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map
and the territory" (167).
1
Suggesting the impossibility of faithfully depicting the reality of Vietnam, Herr opens Dispatches in a
similar manner, referring to an old map of Vietnam on the wall of his Saigon apartment: "That map was a
marvel, especially now that it wasn't real anymore. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there
years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman. The paper had buckled in its frame after years in
the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. Vietnam was divided into its
older territories of Tonkin, Annam and Cochin

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China, and to the west past Laos and Cambodge sat Siam, a kingdom. That's old, I'd tell visitors, that's a
really old map" (1). Herr soon thereafter describes an encounter, at the end of his first week in Vietnam,
with a U.S. information officer "who showed me on his map and then from his chopper what they'd done
to the Ho Bo Woods, the vanished Ho Bo Woods, taken off by giant Rome plows and chemicals and long,
slow fire, wasting hundreds of acres of cultivated plantation and wild forest alike, 'denying the enemy
valuable resources and cover.'" "If in the months following that operation," Herr writes, "incidences of
enemy activity in the larger area of War Zone C had increased 'significantly,' and American losses had
doubled and then doubled again, none of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo Woods" (2). The madness
of U.S. policy is seen as stemming from just this futile attempt to control and understand the chaos of
Vietnam, to pursue "the cartographer's mad project." The implication of this opening, with two maps that
do not correspond to the territory they supposedly chart, is that Vietnam is unknowable and
unrepresentable. Conventional methods of ordering and understanding do not apply. Hellmann links this
notion to the indeterminacy of language, seeing the relationship of a map to a territory as ''a common
semantic analogy for that of language to reality" and finding Herr's use of the map suggestive of "not only
the literal alteration of the landscape by American technology but also the self-deceiving alteration of that
destructive reality by a deceptive language" (129). In the same way, Maria Bonn sees Herr "embark[ing]
upon the project of creating a new kind of language, a new map, a project which he is fully aware is
perilous from the start, because he is in a country where all borders, all definitions refuse to stay put"
("Lust of the Eye," 31).
Because of this focus on epistemological and linguistic indeterminacy, critics have neglected much of the
history Herr documents in Dispatches; they have written endlessly on the alteration of reality by a
deceptive language while ignoring the alteration of the landscape by American technology. It is easy
enough to use Herr's mention of the destruction of the Ho Bo Woods not as evidence of the discrepancy
between language and fact (where, as Bonn writes, "Vietnam itself becomes a sign without referent"
[32]), but as evidence of the ruin brought about through the American strategy of "pacification," the goal
of which was to destroy the social and natural fabric of rural Vietnam in an attempt to destroy the rural
support of the NLF. In a 1968 article in Foreign Affairs political

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scientist Samuel Huntington identified the goal of pacification as the "produc[tion of] a massive migration
from countryside to city" by the "direct application of mechanical and conventional power" (quoted in
Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, 216)or as Chomsky restates it, the ''mass murder and physical
destruction of a defenseless rural society" (Towards a New Cold War, 216). The result was, according to
Tom Buckley in the New York Times, "bomb craters beyond counting, the dead gray and black fields,
forests that have been defoliated and scorched by napalm, land that has been plowed flat to destroy
Vietcong hiding places. And everywhere can be seen the piles of ashes forming the outlines of huts and
houses, to show where hamlets once stood" (quoted in Chomsky, At War with Asia, 94).
Like Bonn and Hellmann, Thomas Myers in Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam ignores this
background, arguing instead that Herr provides "a new map of the cultural enterprise in Vietnam" and
that he "discovers through the power of memory and imagination the emotional and spiritual terrain of
the war" (147, emphasis added). Severing Dispatches from its historical referent, Myers sees Herr
mapping not the war itself but the literary representation of the war. The landscape of the Ho Bo Woods
is replaced by Herr's emotional and spiritual terrain. Myers praises Herr for "attempt[ing] to discover
within the materials of individual consciousness a historical lexicon and syntax with enough originality
and power to do battle with those of the master narrative." For Myers, the war cannot be "understood with
classical categories of objectivity" (148); it is a "historical configuration of broken puzzle pieces" (150),
"concentrated mythic space" (162), "a shifting play of light and shadow" (154), a "fearsome, uncontrolled
acid dream" (152), a "national neurosis" transformed "into the most debilitating form of compulsive
historical behavior" (153). The Vietnam War, in Myers's view, has no connection to lived history; it is
nothing but simulacra. "As historian," Myers writes, "Herr confronts the unimaginable." What about the
war was unimaginable? It is not the uprooting of the Vietnamese peasantry, the bombing of civilians, or
the torture and murder of prisoners. To Myers, Vietnam is unimaginable because it is "a war of almost
pure style" (155). Consequently, there is little need to explain the history upon which Dispatches or any
other Vietnam War narrative is based. Since the message of Vietnam "resides largely in its form," critical
attention should be given to Herr's rendering of "a textual analogue of its deepest rhythms and structures"
(148). To speak of the war as having deep rhythms and structures

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is to understand it as text, as fundamentally a linguistic construct. Terry Eagleton identifies the mistake
that underwrites such an analysis:
The category of discourse is inflated to the point where it imperializes the whole world, eliding the distinctions between thought and
material reality. The effect of this is to undercut the critique of ideologyfor if ideas and material reality are given indissolubly together,
there can be no question of asking where social ideas actually hail from. The new "transcendental" hero is discourse itself, which is
apparently prior to everything else. It is surely a little immodest of academics, professionally concerned with discourse as they are, to
project their own preoccupations onto the whole world, in that ideology known as (post-) structuralism. (Ideology: An Introduction,
219)
In analyzing Dispatches critics have read Herr's skepticism toward official pronouncements as analogous
to skepticism about the connection between sign and referent. Herr writes of how "The jargon of Progress
got blown into your head like bullets, and by the time you waded through all the Washington stories and
all the Saigon stories, all the Other War stories and the corruption stories and the stories about brisk new
gains in ARVN effectiveness, the suffering was somehow unimpressive" (229). And he describes the
daily war briefing as "an Orwellian grope through the day's events as seen by the Mission" (105). Herr is
right to criticize the military's distortions and journalists' reliance upon conventional narratives. But the
fact that military officials disguised their actions through lies and euphemisms and that many journalists
parroted this official line is not a confirmation of epistemological indeterminacy, is not evidence that an
accurate accounting of the war is impossible. It was the military's self-interestand not the nature of
languagethat caused the truth about the war to be hidden. Likewise, the problem with conventional
journalism was not, as literary critics suggest, its empiricism, its excessive reliance upon coherence,
evidence, and objectivity. Journalists misreported the war not because of their nave faith in the ability of
language to convey truth but because of their reliance on and their credence in the pronouncements of
military and government officials. This sympathy was the result of the institutional biases and interests of
the mass media. Critics' insistence upon reading the discrepancy between the war itself and official
accounts of the war as evidence of the epistemological rupture central to much postmodern/poststructural
theory (rather than as evidence of institutional sympathy and ideological complicity) suggests literary
culture's unfamiliarity with (or reluctance to apply) institutional critique. Since literary culture is itself a
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institution (and its members are part of the professional-managerial class), this absence of institutional
analysis is no surprise. Why, after all, should members of a somewhat privileged class be expected to
interrogate the very institutions that help maintain this privilege?
A striking example of the ahistoricism and political neutrality that can result from
postmodern/poststructural skepticism is found in Thomas Carmichael's "Postmodernism and American
Cultural Difference: Dispatches, Mystery Train, and The Art of Japanese Management." Carmichael's
aim is to consider the "possibility of representing the other and the form that this impossible/possibility
takes in the representation and appropriation of Asian difference in postmodern America" (222).
Carmichael argues, in other words, that not just Vietnam, but all Asian differenceand all forms of cultural
differenceare impossible to represent. He sees the film Mystery Train as ''repeatedly suggest[ing] that
one's own dream is always either someone else's or a signifying field to which one's responses are
already appropriated and encoded" (227). The business text The Art of Japanese Management proves
this point in its insistence "that the other, and specifically the Japanese other, is a figure who ultimately
must be denied in order to be retrieved to a specifically American context" (229). To Carmichael, Herr is
well aware of this inability to represent the Other. Citing Herr's explanation that "even the most detailed
maps didn't reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and
that was like trying to read the wind" (1), Carmichael argues that Dispatches "attempts to represent the
presence of the other as an image of the collapse of metanarratives in postmodern history" (231).
Like those critics who viewed the setting of The Quiet American as Vietnam but its intellectual milieu as
French, Carmichael reads Herr's representations of Vietnamese as emblems of postmodern epistemology.
In so doing, he completely overlooks the racism implicit in Herr's notion that Vietnamese faces are
unreadable, a point strikingly reminiscent of the stereotypical inscrutability of Asians. Actually, there is
little discussion of the Vietnamese in Dispatches. But for Carmichael this is a necessary omission which
shows "that the Vietnamese other is always only understood as he or she can be subsumed under the
familiar encodings of American popular culture" (231). According to Carmichael, Herr "wants us to see
his experience of the war in the field of the other as a revelation of the refusal to acknowledge difference"
(232). Rather than an ethnocentrism that has been useful in rewriting the war from an American
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Herr's refusal to consider the Vietnamese is seen by Carmichael as speaking to the impossibility of
representing the Asian other. Similarly, Carmichael does not object to the lack of historical background in
Dispatches but instead praises Herr for "refus[ing] to construct a master narrative of his own experiences
of the war." Herr's provisional, subjective narrative is commendable "in the face of a history whose
motivations can only be traced in America through an endless and ultimately empty chain of signification"
(231). Carmichael's postmodern sensibility leads him to deny the possibility of ideological critique, of
historical explanation, of cultural specificity, since all such attempts must founder upon the
meaninglessness of language. By Carmichael's logic, any attempt to explain why the United States fought a
decade-long war in Indochina will fail because it requires the imposition of a metanarrative onto the
chaos of history. Discussion of U.S. imperialism is also inappropriate because "Herr's postmodern
narrative consistently demonstrates that postmodern America is finally to be understood" not as a
commercial and military empire but ''as that paradoxical construction, the true empire of signs" (232). In
readings like Carmichael's, modern America is removed from materiality and replaced with a landscape
of signs without referents, a land of pure simulacra replete with "anxious displacements and deferrals" of
the Asian other. If America is to be read as an empire of empty signifiers, its actions in Vietnam cannot be
understood as stemming from imperial ambition and capitalist expansion. Thus Carmichael praises
Dispatches because Herr shows that the Vietnam War must be read "in the face of a history whose
motivations can only be traced in America through an endless and ultimately empty chain of signification"
(231).
Academic critics did find fault with some aspects of Dispatches. Dale Jones, for instance, compares
Dispatches to Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato and argues that O'Brien's magical realism affords him
"greater imaginative lattitude in which to explore the issues and questions raised by his own Vietnam
experience," helping him to "transcend the confusion and bloodshed of the conflict while Herr seems
mired in the war's violence and insanity" (310). Jones objects to Herr's depiction of the war as a crazy
and unknowable chaos. He argues that Herr's combination of fictional styles and factual material "makes
it difficult for the reader to discriminate between objectivity and subjectivity, reality and surreality, facts
and fictions" (314). Jones's argument is unusual within criticism of Vietnam War literature, since to most
critics this collapsing of borders is a vital part of any aesthetic that seeks to convey the otherwise

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unrepresentable nature of the war. Jones considers Dispatches "weakened by Herr's emphasis on
American insanity" (315). Like Zalin Grant's objection to the depiction of veterans as "outpatients of an
insane asylum," Jones criticizes "the media myth of the violent vet, [in which Vietnam is] present[ed] as a
'loony bin' with American soldiers as its inmates" (319).
For Jones, Going After Cacciato is a better book because it offers a much more profound moral probing
of "why one served in Vietnam and of the issues of courage and responsibility" (318). What Jones sees as
O'Brien's moral profundity, though, is not grounded in history or ideology but is a liberal humanist
understanding of the complexity of individual actions. This moral profundity is exemplified by the
narrator of Going After Cacciato, Paul Berlin, who, Jones explains,
did not know who was right, or what arguments were valid. Yet he went to war because he believed in his country, believed in law
and democracy, and he feared that not going would be to risk censure and bring embarrassment on his father and his community. As
Tim O'Brien himself had done, Paul Berlin goes to war less influenced by reason than by gravity, by the magnetic pull of his town,
teachers and family. But he comes to justify his participation in the war by elevating his sense of duty and responsibility to his family
and friends over his desire for individual freedom. (319)
O'Brien's explanation as to why Berlin goes to war was true for many American soldiers. A young man's
internalization of nationalist ideology and his inability to see the connection between military service and
class exploitation would likely be perceived as the magnetic pull of town, teachers, and family. The
problem here is that Jones views Berlin's confusion, his assertion that he went to war "not because of
strong convictions, but partly out of ignorance and partly for 'reasons that went beyond knowledge'"
(Jones, 318), as profound explanation rather than as mystification. In other words, Jones sees the
confusion, ambivalence, and fears of young men considering whether to serve their country militarily as a
complex matrix of motivations. This complexity, to Jones, is profound, whereas an ideological reading
that views such complexity as mystification is shallow and simplistic. As is common in literary
scholarshipand in liberal culture generallyideological commitment is crude, ideological incoherence
profound.
For Jones, Dispatches is flawed because it "leaves little room for genuine courage or responsibility" and
because it characterizes the war as "a world devoid of decency, sanity and heroism" (319). Given the
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nature of U.S. policy, it seems peculiar to criticize Herr for overlooking the war's decency. And given the
way the war has been rewritten to emphasize American soldiers' courage, responsibility, decency, and
heroism, Jones's criticism of Herr for overlooking these seems almost reactionary. Going After Cacciato
is a better and more profound book, according to Jones, not because it depicts the war more accurately
but because it "reaffirms the best of the human spirit" (320). Ultimately, Jones praises O'Brien's novel
precisely for its ability to mystify the war, to "transcend the confusion and bloodshed of the conflict."
Such transcendence is entirely in keeping with the effort to put Vietnam behind uswhat George Bush after
the Persian Gulf War spoke of as "finally kick[ing] the Vietnam syndrome" (quoted in Wiegman, 174).
Herr's aesthetic strategy is also faulted by Maria Bonn. She too recognizes that "by reordering syntax and
punctuation and using a language which draws upon popular culture and contemporary discourses, Herr
works towards constructing a language appropriate for representing his view of the war" (30). And she
repeats familiar arguments about Herr's showing that popular culture colors soldiers' experiences in
Vietnam. She even repeats the idea "that it is through heteroglossia that we must hear the Vietnam War"
(34). She sees Herr ironically appropriating an "American hypermasculinity," adopting the grunts' use of
"a language in which the sexual and military share terms" (36). Unfortunately, according to Bonn, ''those
terms come to take over his analysis, and his irony falls away into actuality" (37). She contrasts Herr's
endorsement of something very like traditional notions of heroism and glory with (in Winners and Losers)
Gloria Emerson's "inconsolable rage and grief" over U.S. militarism in Indochina (46). And she reads
Herr as much more congenial to Reagan-era revisionism, the redesign of Vietnam "so that it will fit into
the national mythic structure" (47), than Emerson, who "wants us to see Vietnam as unredeemable, a
cultural crisis from which the U.S. is still suffering" (47).
Bonn's argument seems to have been influenced by Susan Jeffords's in The Remasculinization of
America. To Jeffords, perhaps the most significant way to think of the Vietnam War "is as a construction
of gendered interests." Jeffords sees cultural representations of the war as part of the backlash against
feminism, what she labels "the remasculinization of American culture, the large-scale renegotiation and
regeneration of the interests, values, and projects of patriarchy now taking place in U.S. social relations"
(xi). She views Dispatches as complicit in this remasculinization.

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Herr's passage from uninitiated naf to experienced and confident war correspondent is, Jeffords explains,
"negotiated by gender" (42). Whereas early in Dispatches the nave Herr is described by a grunt as "Tits
on a bull" (Herr, 4), late in the novel a soldier concedes, ''I got to give it to you, you guys got balls" (Herr,
221). Jeffords sees this passage "From 'tits' to 'balls,' from feminine to masculine" as evidence that
"Herr's narrative is demarcated by signs of sexual identification." "The plot of his narration," she writes,
"is thus the story of how to enter the masculine" (42). One consequence of the remasculinization of
America, asserts Jeffords, is the perception of veterans as "a group of men who were themselves victims,
on a par with women, blacks, and other disenfranchised groups. Consequently, it could then be argued that
(white) men were not oppressors but instead, along with women and men of color, were themselves
victims of a third oppressor, in this case the government" (xiv).
The construction of white males as victims has indeed been useful in thwarting social justice and
obscuring exploitative practices. However, the fact that white male victimization has been used to this
end does not mean white males have not been victims. The working class soldiers who were drafted or
were unable to get college deferments and volunteered or whose false consciousness made them volunteer
out of patriotic duty were victims. Yet Jeffords's conceit that the war resulted in a remasculinization, a
reassertion of patriarchal values, causes her to discount, out of hand, male victims and to depict women
as the central victims of the war. Since this remasculinization is a specifically American phenomenon
(she says little about the experiences of Vietnamese women), Jeffords ends up arguing that the main
victims of the war have been American women. She ignores the many male veterans who continue to
suffer from wartime injuries, from exposure to Agent Orange, from posttraumatic stress syndrome, and
from haunting memories of inhuman violence. And she overlooks the more terrible suffering of the
Vietnamese. In so doing, she shifts the focus away from an understanding of how class, race, and gender
intersect within the political economy of war. It is this absence of class analysis that causes Jeffords to
foreground the suffering of women and see concerns for the suffering of veterans as part of a hegemonic,
reactionary patriarchy. In diminishing the suffering of white male veterans, Jeffords fails to perceive that
a main goal of this remasculinization is the continued exploitation of the working classmales and females,
whites and blacksthrough the further disintegration of class solidarity. Working-class males' adoption of
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values and anger at women and racial minorities will not, after all, lessen their exploitation. But it will
direct their anger away from the real cause of their suffering, fragmenting potential coalitions into
anatagonistic hierarchies of oppression. Ratherthan forming alliances to assault a cruel economic system
and an unequal access to power, these potential allies have frequently directed their anger and frustrations
at one another.
Jeffords's critique arises from her belief that gender is the defining category by which the history of the
war and the emancipatory politics of the 1960s have been rewritten; she sees patriarchy as the driving
force behind this revision. Jeffords seems to believe that the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, too, was the result
of patriarchy, declaring that "there can finally be no adequate understanding of that war and its place in
American culture without an understanding of its gendered relations" (182) and arguing that "wars are the
most historically visible specifications of patriarchal power relations" (181).
Jeffords's argument that the war has been revised in the form of remasculinization is to some degree true.
As she argues, this revision has included not only a reassertion of masculinity but a denunciation of what
is perceived as feminine, in particular liberal policies to help the weak and the poor. That militarism,
nationalism, and "free market" capitalism are coded male, and that peace, internationalism, and social
welfare are coded female does not mean, however, that the impetus behind the rewriting of the 1960s has
been patriarchy. It merely means that gender has been a useful way to reconstruct the ideological system
and to reproducematerially and ideologicallythe savage inequalities of capital. Perhaps the limitations of
Jeffords's conception of patriarchy are best explained by Theresa Ebert when she writes that "Patriarchy
is a historically shifting material practice through which men control women's sexuality and fertility and
also their labor, not because of some transhistorical attribute of men but because this control is necessary
for maintaining an acceptable rate of profit. Men do this, not as free agents, but as [in Marx's words]
'personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests'" (93). If
the war has been used to remasculinize American culture, it is because such remasculinization has been
useful in reinforcing class privilege and reasserting elite authority.
Among the academic responses to Dispatches there is one essay that makes a significant, materialist
critique of Herr's depiction of the warDavid James's "Rock and Roll Representations of the Invasion of

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Vietnam." This essay, with its focus on the uses of rock and roll in Dispatches and in Vietnam War
movies, may at first glance seem trivial. Like other critics, James notes that "The possibility of mass-
market literary and filmic treatments of the invasion depended primarily on the innovation of formal
vocabularies" (79). To James, however, these innovations were made not to reflect "the historical
realities of the invasion and its failure," as other critics insist, but to allow "interpretations that would
[fit] in the interlocking myths and apparatuses of the mass media" (7980). In Dispatches and in Vietnam
War movies, James notes, ''sixties rock and roll has been essential to formal strategies that, since the late
seventies, have made representations of the invasion pleasurable and hence financially feasible" (81).
Herr's adoption of a rock and roll aesthetic is not liberatory, as others suggest, but is, James argues, a
means of fitting the war into a comfortable and nostalgic past. Sixties rock and roll has become a
corporate soundtrack, a way to evoke easy emotions from baby boomers (as its ubiquitous use in TV
commercials demonstrates) and to erase the hard edges of that decade's political struggles.
James agrees with Herr that popular culture, particularly war movies, hinders understanding of the war.
Just as critics have found in Herr's style a means to overcome the obstacles of popular culture and the
war's unrepresentability, so James points to Herr's use of rock and roll to "solve the awkwardness of
Vietnam" (83). This incorporation of rock lyrics, rock slang, and a rock-and-roll sensibility into
Dispatches is in keeping with Herr's wish to be true to the language and experiences of gruntsas opposed
to the deadening and mystifying jargon of the military command and official journalism. If this war is so
different from other wars, its literary representation must use an entirely new vocabulary. And rock and
roll serves just this function. (James connects this perception to "the various ideologies of
postmodernism, most immediately with Jean-Franois Lyotard's rejection of the possibility of totalizing
languages and his demand for a recognition simultaneously of the unrepresentable" [85].)
But in Herr's use of rock and roll James finds historical erasure and ethnocentrism. He notes that after the
mention of the old French map, Dispatches
contains no account of the place of the invasion in the history of colonialismlet alone as an event in Vietnamese historyit contains no
narrative at all. Despite gestures toward geographic and chronological specificity the invasion is everywhere and always the same. It
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and the GIs exist only in the perpetual present of combat or keyed expectation of it that cannot be represented but can only be figured
as rock and roll. Herr's use of rock and roll to figure the unrepresentability of combat is the keystone in an arch of repressions that
allowed the invasion to become part of industrial culture. Reducing the invasion to the experience of the American GIthe same
strategy used by the Right to justify itit conceals the historical events by which soldiers came to be in Vietnam. (86)
This kind of politically sophisticated critique is an exception among analyses of Vietnam War
literatureand is far from predominant in academic literary culture. For in their examinations of
Dispatches, academic critics have routinely focused on discourse rather than ideology, seeing Vietnam as
"a sign without a referent" and America as "the true empire of signs." They have turned their attention
toward Herr's style and formal structure and away from the war itself. Even when viewing Dispatches as
complicit in the rewriting of recent history, critics have failed to flesh out this historyin its horrible
particularities and as an instance of U.S. imperialism. Published and received during a time when the war
was being revised to promote a new cold war and to discredit Left activism, Dispatches renders the war
as the essentially unknowable experience of individual grunts. Rather than challenging this perception,
academic literary critics have praised Herr's depiction of the war since it coheres so well with
postmodern and poststructural conceits. Far from radical, though, this view of the war as unknowable
reinforces an ideologically useful historical ignorance and confusion. As James Wilson explains,
After so many years of official propaganda, the war understandably seemed incomprehensible to many people. Rational analysis
collided with the government's massive public relations campaign to sell the war, a campaign built on exaggerated statistics and
falsified progress reports. When American officials could no longer conceal the truth about Vietnam, and when official fiction finally
collapsed, the political realities of the war had become so muddled that very few people were able to put the pieces back together in a
coherent whole. For one thing, few people possessed the historical knowledge needed to make sense of a war as steeped in historical
connection as Vietnam. The United States government made the war unintelligible, but for politically intelligible reasonsthat is, to sell a
war that needed selling. (44)
In their readings of Dispatches literary critics, rather than recognizing the U.S. government's efforts to
make the Vietnam war unintelligible, have seen it as by definition unintelligible and have thus linked the
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postmodern/poststructural epistemological skepticism. This first terrible postmodernist war, like any
experience dependent upon language, can never be understood. The politically intelligible reasons that the
United States sought to make the war seem incoherent are overlooked by critics enraptured with notions
of linguistic indeterminacy. For literary culture, the idea of piecing the war back together in a coherent
whole is, in Baudrillard's words, the mad project of an ideal coextensivity.

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6
America as Home

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Visiting a high school journalism class in 1976, poet, essayist, and Vietnam veteran W. D. Ehrhart was
shocked at how little students knew about the war, other than that the antiwar movement had hurt the
morale of American troops. Four years later, after seeing a group of students at a football game lynch an
effigy of the Ayatollah Khomeini and display a "Nuke Iran" banner, Ehrhart lamented, "It is as though the
events of the past fifteen years never happened. A catastrophic event that bent my life 180 degrees, a
crime so grotesque I had thought the flag-waving myth of Duty-Honor-Country could never again be
resurrected from its well-deserved grave, is as remote and irrelevant to the newest generation of potential
cannon-fodder as are the civilizations of ancient Crete and Mycenae" (In the Shadow of Vietnam, 18). To
Ehrhart this ignorance was due to "what [students had] been taughtat home, in school, in the newspapers,
on television, in church." We had, Ehrhart asserted, "allowed our children's perceptions of the world to
be dictated by The Deer Hunter and The Daily Intelligencer and the press releases of Jody Powell"
(Shadow of Vietnam, 19).
Writing four years after Ehrhart, Bobbie Ann Mason in In Country also spoke to this historical ignorance.
In the first paragraph of her novel's central narrative (after an opening frame), Mason pointedly identifies
the novel's time period and has her main character, Sam Hughes, detail the pervasive jingoism of that
year: "It was the summer of the Michael Jackson Victory tour and the Bruce Springsteen Born in the
U.S.A. tour, neither of which Sam got to go to. At her graduation, the commencement speaker, a Methodist
minister, had preached about keeping the country strong, stressing sacrifice. He made Sam nervous. She
started thinking about war, and it stayed on her mind all summer" (23). In Country is set in 1984, less
than a year after the invasion of Grenada and only two months before Reagan joked he had "signed
legislation that [would] outlaw Russia forever [and that we would] begin bombing in five minutes."
Before In Country was published in fall 1985, Nicaragua filed charges that the United States had secretly
funded the contras and mined its harbors. In this context, Sam's nervousness is justified.

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Written at a time when the lessons of Vietnam seemed forgotten and the nation appeared on the brink of a
new military adventure, In Country was intended as both a reminder of the real legacy of the war and a
protest against ongoing American militarism.
This novelwhich details the impact of the Vietnam War on Sam Hughes, an 18-year-old girl whose father,
Dwayne, died in combat before she was born, and on Emmett Smith, a veteran suffering from exposure to
Agent Orangeis very much an account of the erasure of historical memory, of how the horrors of the
Vietnam War have been repressed and of what the consequences of such ignorance might be. Throughout
the novel, Sam tries to learn what the war was really like but is frustrated by her elders' refusal to discuss
it and her boyfriend Lonnie's lack of historical curiosity. Sam's attempt to learn about the war that killed
her father and traumatized her surrogate father Emmett is, ultimately, an attempt to understand herself. But
even if this quest for self-knowledge can be read as a coming-of-age tale, it is equally a narrative about
how the Vietnam War shattered several generations of working-class families in rural Kentucky and about
how, with accurate knowledge of the war almost impossible to obtain, an uncritical militarism gained
popular favor during the Reagan era.
Part of what Sam learns is that wars are fought by the working class, by those too poor to escape military
service and too blinkered by patriotism to be critical of U.S. military policy. As her grandmother
explains, "[Dwayne] believed in his country, and he was ready to go over there and fight." When Sam
asks whether, given a second chance, she would let Dwayne go to Vietnam, her grandmother replies,
"People don't have choices like that" (197). In Country, then, is a novel about how the choices of the
working class are circumscribed and their knowledge limited and about how one person fights against
these constraints.
Criticism of In Country within commercial literary culture, however, barely touches on these issues,
centering instead on Mason's minimalist prose (her "K-Mart" realism) and her depiction of a rapidly
changing South. To some, this minimalism is a flaw because it precludes character development and a
rich explication of setting and because it serves as a too convenient shorthand that grossly simplifies,
even caricatures real lives. As Thomas de Pietro argues in Commonweal, "In Country seems bloated,
condescending to its characters, pretentious in its feigned naivet" (622). Likewise, Jonathan Yardley,
writing in the Washington Post, criticizes Mason's "unenticing characters and endless pointless

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chatter." Dianne Johnson in the New York Review of Books, on the other hand, considers Mason's prose
deceitful because it suggests "an almost photorealistic surface" while presenting "a strongly ameliorative
point of view" (16). Rather than "a work of fearless realism," In Country, Johnson writes, is a "romantic
pastoral charm in a long tradition which includes, among many books, Little Women."
To others, however, Mason's spare prose is a near perfect tool for rendering the spiritual, emotional, and
intellectual emptinesswhat in the New York Times Michiko Kakutani calls the "indifference and anomie"of
contemporary American life. To Anne Boston in the Times Literary Supplement, "Mason's deadpan,
unornamented prose and faultless dialogue are well tuned to pick out the limitations of the place and
people Sam is clinging to." Semiliterate and with little or no interior lives, Mason's characters lead lives,
according to these critics, that perfectly mirror the banality and mute confusion of late-capitalist, mass-
mediated America. Or as Thulani Davis writes in the Voice Literary Supplement, In Country has "a fitful
quality, as if the characters are trying to express anxiety over things they've experienced but don't
understand. The characters move through their days with no discernible internal life" (10).
Yet in examining Mason's depiction and critique of, in Patrick Parrinder's words, "a strictly contemporary
America," critics fail to explore the causes of this indifference and anomieother than to point to an
encroaching, homogenizing, modernizing mass culture. Parrinder in the London Review of Books declares
In Country "a genuine rural novel, concerned with characters disinherited from, and trying to come back
into connection with, the American land" (289), while Paul Gray in Time speaks of Mason's concern for
"vanishing American enclaves," an "electronic invasion [that] is changing old Kentucky manners." For
Gray, "the bleaching out of local color is the most vivid subject of In Country.'' Certainly Mason depicts
the loss of Hopewell's isolation and the erosion of its identity by consumer culture and the mass media;
she even tells us that as a response to this cultural invasion, "someone had blown up the cable man's
mailbox" (30). But to look at In Country as a regional novel, as these critics do, is to ignore the extent to
which the displacement and despair Mason documents was happening across the United States, not
because of the pernicious effects of HBO and the loss of Southern tradition but because of the recession of
19821984 and the steady decline in middle- and lower-class income since the 1970s. (According to
Michael Lind, "Between 1973 and 1992, while the richest 10 percent of American

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families experienced an 18 percent increase in real income, the real income of the poorest 10 percent
sank by 11 percent" [181].)
Sam understands that in Hopewell in 1984 little is certain; no amount of foresight offers protection from
this harsh economic climate. She knows that "It wasn't true that going to college guaranteed a better job.
She knew a guy who drove a Pepsi truck and made more than most people who went to college" (55).
Through Lonnie she begins to see the connection between class exploitation and war. Lonnie has been
laid off his job at a farm equipment plant and has quit his job bagging groceries. Sam knows that his
plans"to do something outdoors, where I'm my own boss" (27) or to open a camera-repair storeare
unrealistic. With no practical alternatives, Lonnie considers entering the service, declaring that "The
Navy's not a bad deal. Those big aircraft carriers have got video games and everything. They say it's like
being on a cruise ship" (184). Hearing in these statements an echo of her father, an ignorant country boy
who offered himself up as cannon fodder, Sam responds, "Would you rather go to Lebanon or Nicaragua
on your cruise ship?" (185). Just as her grandmother told her that Dwayne went to Vietnam because he
believed in his country, so Lonnie declares, ''if the country needed me, I'd go" (88). Thus Mason suggests
that economic exploitation and patriotic myth work hand in hand to overturn whatever lessons might be
found in Emmett's and other veterans' Vietnam experiences and to create a climate amenable to the
militarist pursuit of U.S. global interests. Sam realizes that "Lonnie was just like all the other kids at
school. 90 percent voted in favor of the invasion of Grenada. They were afraid of the Russians" (88). She,
however, has escaped this jingoistic mind-set and has begun to realize that men like her father and
Lonniepoor, uneducated, and eager to escape their unfulfilling lives in rural Kentuckyare called upon to
risk their lives for the sake of the rich and powerful.
Mason does have some interest in the transformation of rural Kentucky. But in drawing upon a traditional
view of Southern literaturewith its struggle between modernity and rural culture, commercialism and
traditionreviewers obscured Mason's contemporary social critique, and they showed the extent to which a
traditional, apolitical aestheticism persists within commercial literary culture. Their understanding of her
critique of the transformation of Southern culture is in keeping with the Agrarian notion that the Southern
way of life is under assault by the forces of progress. While seeking to identify what is new in

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Mason's depiction of the South, critics like Gray, Parrinder, and Davis continually force her fiction into a
regional framework that is inherently distorting and confining, that in effect replaces class with region,
economics with culture.
Similarly, Joel Connaroe, in the New York Times Book Review, gives only a passing nod to the real-
world problems Mason details. Instead, he declares that Mason works a "timely variation on the
traditionally male-centered Bildungsroman" and that Sam experiences a moral education in which "she
passes through the phases traditionally associated with such rites of passage, progressing from separation
to isolation (confronting a heart of darkness) and finally to integration." Mason uses "several quest
motifs" to show Sam's search for an "understanding of those mysteries that reside in the human heart." We
see here the familiar erasure of social/historical context in order to emphasize literary structure and
influence. We see that while academic literary culture was undergoing significant changes in its critical
practices, conventional, almost retrograde approaches like Connaroe's persisted in the foremost organ of
commercial literary culture. And we see a novel centered on the attempt to understand recent history
transformed into an individual's interior struggle, a struggle not to understand the details of U.S.
militarism in southeast Asia, the motivation behind U.S. policy, or the connection between class and
imperialist war, but to explore the mysteries of the human heart.
These reviews demonstrate that even in the era of a supposedly politicized literary culture, reviewers
continued to approach literary texts from the point of view of a hazy humanism. In the reception of In
Country there is surprisingly little attention given to what Mason says about the war. For Gray, the
bleaching out of local color is the novel's most vivid subject, while "Sam's quest to grasp the meaning of
the Viet Nam War" is "a bit predictable and repetitious." De Pietro agrees that Mason "begins with an
admirable goalto understand the aftershock of that horrible war and those parlous times at home" (622),
but spends most of his review criticizing her "post-modern hicks" and their "inarticulate dialogue'' (621).
Parrinder declares Mason "a writer unafraid of sentiment" who is "capable also of expressing a precise
and disciplined anger" (19), but does not discuss the wellspring of this anger. Boston's lone mention of
Vietnam is to speculate that because Mason "is herself of the 'Vietnam generation,'" in her effort "to
exorcise those troubled years, she perhaps over-emphasizes them in Sam's obsession."

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Some critics did discuss Mason's depiction of the war. Kakutani speaks of "the dislocations wrought on
ordinary, blue-collar lives by recent historyin this case recent history in the form of the Vietnam War."
Yet the centrist politics and aestheticism of commercial literary culture are apparent here as well.
Kakutani is more interested in Sam's indifference and anomie, her nostalgia "for the old rules and
certainties that no longer exist," than in what Mason says about the war. And she declares "Emmett's
possible contamination with Agent Orange a blunt, obvious metaphor for the insidious consequences of
Vietnam." While Emmett's contamination can certainly be read metaphorically, it is also an all too literal
consequence of the war, as was demonstrated in May 1984two months before the time period of the novel
and a year and a half before its publicationwhen Dow Chemical and six other manufacturers of Agent
Orange established a $180 million fund for Vietnam War veterans and their families.
Yet for Yardley, Mason's concern with the Vietnam War has a "dreary familiarity." "That many veterans
of Vietnam have been put through hell," he writes, "is indisputable, and that the honor they have lately
received is long overdue is equally so, but these points have been made many times before and nothing
Mason says adds anything to our understanding of them." One would hope that even if it does not add
anything new to our understanding, a book that documents the long-term damage caused by the war would
be considered worthwhile. Yardley's casual dismissal of In Country reveals his sympathy with the desire
to put the war behind us. The ideological import of this desire becomes more apparent when applied to a
Holocaust novel: "That Jews were put through hell is indisputable but these points have been made many
times before." Yardley's easy disregard for In Country ignores the importance of telling the truth about
the war in a culture actively seeking to revise and erase it. This impatience suggests that Yardley's real
desire is to avoid being confronted with information that may be ideologically unsettlingan interpretation
given further credence by his belief that the honor accorded American veterans is long overdue. Given
that, as Eric Norden explains, "The weapons in the American arsenal include[d] torture, systematic
bombing of civilian targets, the first use of poison gas since World War One, the shooting of prisoners
and the general devastation of the Vietnamese countryside by napalm and white phosphorous'' (265), and
given Mason's recreation of the violent racism of U.S. soldiers, Yardley's assertion that U.S. veterans
deserve honor, besides

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being a significant misreading of In Country, is evidence of how thoroughly the legacy of the war has
been revised.
1
(It could be argued that because it focuses on the suffering of an American veteran, In
Country is complicit in this revision. Vietnamese barely exist in this novel, and Vietnam, to Sam, is an
unimaginably exotic landscape of beauty and terror. What distinguishes In Country from other
ethnocentric novels about American suffering is its examination of the process of historical revision and
its understanding of how gender and class work together to erase the war's troubling history.)
Almost alone among reviewers, Marilyn Gardner in the Christian Science Monitor sees the war (not the
transformation of the American South or the struggle of the human heart) as Mason's main concern, calling
In Country "one of the best novels yet of Vietnam." However sensitive to Mason's documentation of the
consequences of the war, though, Gardner's analysis flattens its specifics. It is not the effects of the war
upon veterans, their families and communities that she writes of. Nor does she look at Mason's critique of
the remilitarization of the United States during the 1980s. Instead, Gardnerlike so many critics and pundits
and policy makerspoints to the harm the war caused the American psyche. The concept of an "American
psyche," of course, homogenizes cultures, subcultures, ideologies, ethnic groups, and historical periods.
For this very reason, belief in an identifiable American psyche persists: it is ideologically usefulit erases
difference, simplifies explanation, eliminates struggle, and transcends history. To view the war as
affecting the American psyche, as Gardner does, is to perpetuate the notion that the war was an
aberration, that it scarred the United States, and that its impact was felt by all Americans. Even if we
ignore the minor problem of identifying a war that killed millions of Asians as a blow to the American
psyche, it remains a troubling mystification to describe American victims of the war as a collective,
national psyche, since the war's actual casualties, according to Christian Appy, ''were overwhelmingly
drawn from the bottom half of the American social structure" (12) and since Mason repeatedly suggests
that Vietnam was a working-class war.
Only one reviewerMona Molarsky in the Nationconsistently discusses Mason's analysis of contemporary
historical revisionism. (Despite its occasional sympathy with traditional aesthetic criticism, the Nation
alone among periodicals with more than a modest circulation is willing to read literary texts from a
leftish, materialist perspective.) "When it comes

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to the past," Molarsky writes, "everyone Sam knows seems to go blank." Part of the reason they go blank
is they have virtually no access to historical knowledge other than what they see on TV. According to
Molarsky, "Hopewell sent its boys to fight a television warand no one there was, or is, equipped to deal
with either past or present horrors. Hopewell has become a collection of fast-food outlets and dilapidated
houses in which people sit dazed before their TV sets." Sam's difficulty learning about the war is directly
due to the misrepresentations TV offers and the insularity and resignation it induces. The point of Mason's
seemingly pointless dialogue is that, given their poverty and their embededness in consumer culture,
Hopewell's citizens lack the tools to analyze their lives, let alone the physical and financial wherewithal
to act upon such analysis. The world of Hopewell"this world of amnesia and paralysis," in Molarsky's
wordsis meant to represent the ahistoricism of American working class culture generally and is meant to
show how history is revised and simplified by popular culture.
2
Molarsky is not entirely critical of popular culture. She notes that "The same airwaves that bring Join-the-
Army jingles" and infect Lonnie with military fever "also bring the reflective and defiant Springsteen."
Without discussing how "defiant" Springsteen really is (or how defiant popular culture can ever be in a
capitalist economy), it is worth noting that of reviewers Molarsky alone foregrounds Mason's concern
with the political import of popular culture "as it exists not for the educated but for the majority of
Americans."
Molarsky also argues that Mason's fiction, particularly In Country, should be distinguished from her
minimalist contemporaries (like Raymond Carver) because of its "broader perspective or deeper
understanding" (58). Mason, according to Molarsky, "suggest[s] a context. [Her fictional characters] live
on a planet where landscapes are defoliated and napalm is dropped." Molarsky asks whether the two
realitiesthe world of Mason's K-Mart realism and this larger worldare connected. And she concludes that
in In Country they are: "Nave people are the ones shipped to the front. McDonald's golden arches,
prime-time comics and brand name products that loom larger than life are roadside attractions along the
way" (58). More than roadside attractions, the artifacts of consumer culture are important tools for
reproducing an ideologically useful history, a history that, in Ehrhart's words, "allow[s] another
generation of children to march to their deaths for the pride of powerful men and

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the dividends of IBM and Exxon and Gulf & Western and Transamerica and Lockheed and Dow and Du
Pont" (Shadow of Vietnam, 1819). Unfortunately (and predictably), the reception of In Country in
commercial literary culture barely addresses Mason's concern with just this possibilitythat another
generation may be about to march off to war. Placing this novel within Southern literary tradition,
identifying Mason's singular brand of realism, and pointing to the general anomie within contemporary
life, commercial reviewers ignored the book's insistent critique and its commentary on the persistence of
class exploitation.
While commercial literary culture was fairly traditional in its approaches to In Country, placing it in the
context of Southern fiction and seeking to explain Mason's particular brand of realism, academic literary
culture has looked at it through a poststructuralist/postmodernist and feminist framework. Yet commercial
reviewers and academic critics both have overlooked Mason's concerns with contemporary social
conditions, her focus on the class dynamics of the Vietnam War (and U.S. militarism generally), and her
depiction of the jingoist rewriting of the war.
A striking example of the continuity of apolitical aestheticism within contemporary criticism can be found
in David Booth's archetypal reading of In Country. For Booth, "In Country is a version of the grail
legend, significantly recast" (100). Booth sees many of the traditional symbols, motifs, and narrative
structures of the grail legend in Mason's novel, with three important changes: "the waste land is popular
culture after Vietnam. The wounded king is the male population wounded by the Vietnamese experience.
And the questor is an unsettled, restless girl on the brink of adulthood" (102). This focus serves to mystify
Mason's documentary realism and her quite explicit social criticism.
By linking popular culture and a waste land, Booth severs cultural products from their producers. And by
seeing popular culture as the diseased background against which Sam's and Emmett's struggles take place,
he obscures the specific ways this culture distorts. It is seen not as part of a hegemonic ideological
process but as a dying and spiritually sterile landscape that exemplifies the modern condition. There is no
sense here that popular cultureespecially that which deals with the Vietnam Wardeveloped within and
contributed to a renewed militarism and a revoking of the activist legacy of the 1960s. As Andrew Martin
explains, the 1980s saw "the emergence of a conservative block of interests and programs that came to
dominate the national agenda to the point where all currents of thought and practice were affected.
Certainly,

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television programmers and film producers quickly adjusted to what they perceived as the `new mood' of
the country" (121). By the time In Country appeared, films like Uncommon Valor, Missing in Action,
and, of course, Rambo had done their part to transform the war into a story of American imprisonment and
victimization, reflecting the desire of policy makers to rid the nation of the dread "Vietnam syndrome"the
notion that because of domestic protest and critical media coverage, the United States had become too
wary of using its military might, what Norman Podhoretz decried as "sickly inhibitions against the use of
military force" (quoted in Chomsky, World Orders, 94).
3
Booth repeatedly argues that the United States has been destroyed by the war: he writes of American
"culture['s] own devastation" (106), of "the blight of the war [that] engulfs [us] all" (108), of "the blight
we inflicted on ourselves by the war in Vietnam" (109). To suggest that the United States is a waste land
as a result of the war replaces the quite literal wasting of Vietnam with the metaphorical waste of
American popular culture, and the murder of Vietnamese with the spiritual malaise of Americans. It is this
modernist sense of malaise, of spiritual emptiness and cultural disintegration, that concerns Booth. Thus
he suggests that "western civilization since the time of Eliot's diagnosis has undergone incalculable
shocks: proxy wars, napalm, and agent orangethen, too, the sitcom and the shopping mall." Because Eliot
in The Wasteland and elsewhere is concerned primarily with Western cultural tradition, Booth reads
napalm and agent orange as shocks to Western Civilization, rather than as part of an attempt to destroy
Vietnamese civilization. Weapons of mass destruction are read as an affront to the modernist sensibility,
striking examples of how a decadent and diseased world has lost touch with the refinement, order, and
beauty of Western tradition. Therefore, Booth can equate these weaponsa flammable, jellied gasoline and
a dioxin-containing herbicidewith American popular culture. He even reiterates this point, declaring that
the "association of these particular things is not meant to be flip. The banality of American popular culture
in recent decades is as much a sign of moral and symbolic depletion as are those other moral and
symbolic failures'' (99).
From a Marxist perspective, napalm and American popular culture are linked: they are both creations of
U.S. industry useful in furthering American capitalist hegemony. To counter communism, napalm was used
against Koreans and Vietnamese; to maintain Western access to Middle Eastern oil, it was used against
Iraqis. Popular culture has been

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useful in anaesthetizing the American public, trivializing serious social grievances, rewriting history, and
generally creating a culture abuzz with noise and distraction. As an exemplar of the "American way of
life," it has helped promote capitalist values globally. And its material reproduction overseas has been
used to maximize corporate profits, to weaken labor unions and environmental regulations, and to
perpetuate a pool of cheap, surplus, third-world labor. In linking napalm and American popular culture,
though, Booth has none of this in mind. Instead, he sees both as examples of the moral bankruptcy and
spiritual emptiness of modern existence. Thus he is little different from earlier critics who read U.S.-
sanctioned terror in French Indochina as evidence of the modern human condition. And his criticism of
popular culture is reminiscent of recent conservative attacks on Hollywood and the music industry. His
linking of popular culture and Vietnam is also suggestive of conservative belief that the degenerate
practices of the 1960s have shaped popular culture and its steady assault on traditional values.
Booth's second pointthat "the wounded king is the male population wounded by the Vietnamese
experience"also accords with a reactionary rewriting of the war. For one thing, in positing the entire male
population as victims of the war, Booth negates the class dynamic of military service in Vietnam, a
dynamic Mason foregrounds throughout In Country. Ultimately, to Booth, it is not just the male population
but all of America that has been wounded. "Emmett's wounds," Booth asserts, ''concentrate the confusion
and ambivalence of the entire culture as it seeks a way forward out of the Vietnam experience and into a
fertile, vital future" (102). In addition to erasing the class dynamic of the war, Booth suggests that the
entire culture is confused and ambivalent about Vietnam. It seems to be beyond Booth's consideration to
see the war as a clearly understandable phenomenonas an all-too-predictable expression of U.S. capitalist
expansion and anticommunism, rather than an uncertain historical event that has aroused only confusion
and ambivalence. Such a view is beyond the pale for the mass media and most of the intellectual elite. As
political scientist Dennis Ray explains, within academic scholarship there has been virtually nothing
written on the role of corporations in American foreign relations:
My search through the respectable literature on international relations and U.S. foreign policy shows that less than 5 percent of some
two hundred books granted even passing attention to the role of corporations in American foreign relations. From this literature, one
might gather that American foreign policy is

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formulated in a social vacuum, where national interests are protected from external threats by the elaborate machinery of
governmental policymaking. There is virtually no acknowledgement in standard works within the field of international relations and
foreign policy of the existence and influence of corporations. (quoted in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, 104)
Booth's reading of the aftermath of "the Vietnamese experience" as a kind of cultural sterility is
particularly objectionable in light of Mason's discussion of the effects of exposure to Agent Orange on
veterans. Mason writes that "Sam had read that victims of Agent Orange sometimes had their metabolism
screwed up. Agent Orange could also act on the immune system" (68); she notes that one veteran's
daughter was now having surgery "to reroute her intestines somehow to keep 'em from twisting" (111);
and she has Sam ask, "Did you ever think that if my daddy had come back from Vietnam, [my mother]
might have had a baby with birth defects? The Army sprayed all kinds of chemicals over there. If they had
waited to have me, I might have been born without a spine, or maybe I'd have flippers'' (148). Sam's
speculations, however arch, are not far-fetched. In a study of 1,187 births to families of veterans living
near the Red River delta, Dr. Ton That Tung found 43 deformities. According to John Dux and P. J.
Young, these included "encephalitis, anophthalmia, limbs missing, harelip and cleft palate, congenital
diseases of the heart, mongolism, hydrocephalus and eye disfigurement. Nine of the children also suffered
defects of the central nervous system and spinal cord" (190). Summarizing his findings, Tung asked,
"What will be the future of a population facing ecological upheavals which do not spare, just as in atomic
war, the human chromosomic patrimony? Cancer, especially leukaemia and monstrosities, will certainly
be the most serious danger. At present, due to the alteration of their chromosomes, there exist two
populations who seem to suffer the same tragic fate: the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the
victims of defoliant-sprayed areas in South Vietnam" (quoted in Dux and Young, 186). Mason's analysis
of the use of Agent Orange by the U.S. military is not limited to citing the consequences of exposure. She
also has Sam begin to see how corporations and the military, working together in the pursuit of U.S.
imperialism, exploit the working class. Sam, who agrees with Tom's observation that "a million vets
could drop dead of cancer from Agent Orange and the government would say they don't have any proof
there's a connection" (77), imagines that the flea bomb Emmett set off in his trailer "could have a chemical
just as deadly [as

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dioxin]. These chemical companies didn't care" (208). Mason hints that the working class continues to be
put at risk by chemical companies when she tells us that another of Sam's uncles "worked at Union
Carbide" (195). With this reference Mason also suggests that Asians continue to experience the deadly
consequences of exposure to American chemicalsin December 1984 (after the time period of the novel but
well before it was published) more than three thousand people died as a result of an industrial accident at
the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India.
Booth's imposition of Jessie Weston's scheme in From Ritual to Romance onto Mason's realistic novel
shows quite clearly how a critical approach can erase a text's political content, no matter how overt and
impassioned its politics may be. His perception that Vietnam created a wasteland of American culture
from which all Americans now suffer and his belief that this confusion and ambivalence must be put
behind us fit well with elite denunciations of the Vietnam syndromea point he makes almost explicitly:
"So long as the scars of [veterans'] experience are unhealed, the culture can bring forth no new life"
(103). The new life Booth seeks is metaphorical, a cultural rebirth. His wasteland has nothing at all to do
with the scarred landscape of Vietnam, which British journalist John Pilger remembers was once thick
forest but which became "a shimmering horizon of wilderness which has been poisoned, perhaps for
generations. Eleven million gallons of the herbicide Agent Orange were dumped on Vietnam; its chief
ingredient, dioxin, is estimated to be a thousand times more destructive than thalidomide. Blind and
deformed babies are now common in those areas sprayed" (quoted in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold
War, 25).
Robert Brinkmeyer's "Finding One's History: Bobbie Ann Mason and Contemporary Southern Literature"
is a similarly traditional literary analysis. Brinkmeyer concentrates on Mason's updating of Southern
writers' attempts to maintain tradition against the forces of progress. Drawing on the Agrarian response to
a modernizing South, Brinkmeyer declares that "Mason's world fulfills [Allen] Tate's prophecy of the rise
of the provincial society cut off from tradition." To Brinkmeyer, Mason documents a "world of
aimlessness and confusion" where characters can only "turn for guidance to the spokespeople of
contemporary culture, the Phil Donahues and the Erma Bombecks," and where "they look to self-
fulfillment as the ultimate ideal'' (22). Like the Agrarians, Brinkmeyer laments "the failure of a historical
perspective rooted in Old South

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tradition and community to challenge and probe the contemporary consciousness" (26).
Yet for Mason Old South tradition offers no real grounds for challenging contemporary consciousness,
since, as he suggests in In Country, this tradition is racist, as is most apparent in Dwayne's diary, with its
unselfconscious references to "niggers" and "gooks."
4
Additionally, the essence of this tradition is to
mythologize history, to erase its brutal lessons and contradictions. Responding to Hopewell's lack of
interest in Vietnam, one veteran remarks, "everybody's looking backwardto old timey days. Antiques and
Civil War stuff." This observation leads Sam to wonder "if Hopewell was just now catching up to the
Civil War. When," she asks herself, ''would people start putting M-16s and pictures of missiles on their
living room walls" (80). Clearly, for Mason, Old South tradition and community are myths that do not
challenge contemporary consciousness, as Brinkmeyer suggests, but obscure the truths Sam desperately
seeks.
According to Brinkmeyer, Mason takes the "Southern insistence on keeping hold of history on immersing
oneself in the experience of defeat so to rise transfigured above it" and applies it to U.S. history in
Vietnam. She profoundly "prob[es] the darker sides of our national experience" so that in time we may
experience "the next Southernand Americanrenascence" (32). It does not occur to Brinkmeyer that rather
than leading to an understanding of one's Americanness and a transfiguration of U.S. defeat, recognition of
the genocidal nature of U.S. policy in Vietnam might instead lead to a profound questioning of
Americanness and nationalism. Moreover, the notion that this defeat must be transfigured and lead to an
American renasence parallels the view that the Vietnam syndrome must be overcome to lay the
groundwork for a renewed, triumphant America.
Brinkmeyer sees Mason creating "a counterpoint to the status quo" that can inform "deeper understandings
of self and society" (26). He sees Sam gaining "a deeper knowledge of the dark complexities that shadow
all human experience" and beginning to understand that "facing up to these complexities is the nature of
growth and regeneration" (30). This deeper understanding, unfortunately, has little to do with a detailed
understanding of the war. For Brinkmeyer, it is not knowledge about the war but transformation of this
knowledge into a lesson in the complexities of human life that is important. This transformation mystifies
the actual history Sam tries to learn. For if one discusses not the Vietnam

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War but what this war reveals about human evil, it little matters that the results of U.S. military policy
were, in Jean-Paul Sartre's words, "villages burned, the populace subjected to massive bombing,
livestock shot, vegetation destroyed by defoliants, crops ruined by toxic aerosols, and everywhere
indiscriminate shooting, murder, rape, and looting" (541). These become properties of an innate human
capacity for evil rather than a consciously designed military/political strategy. In seeing the war as an
aberration, as the dark side of American history, Brinkmeyer also obscures the consistency with which the
United States thwarted third-world independence movements. In seeing it as a shared "national
experience," he eliminates one of Mason's central pointsthat the war was a lethal form of class
exploitation. And in generalizing the war to all of human experience, he both reduces historical specificity
to ephemera and equalizes American and Vietnamese suffering. To Brinkmeyer, the war provides Sam not
with a means of questioning American nationalism and militarism but with a way to rise above doubt and
defeat to experience "the next Southernand Americanrenascence" (32).
The connection between the Southern view of history and the Vietnam War is also the central focus of
Owen Gilman's Vietnam and the Southern Imagination. Gilman argues that Southern writers are uniquely
qualified to write about the Vietnam War. "Because southerners have been working under the spell of
history for such a long time," he explains, "they are ideally suited to the task of placing Vietnam within
lasting time" (7). Sam's need to learn about the war is thus seen as deriving from "the southern need for
history," and In Country is thought to be "In the great tradition of Faulkner, particularly as represented by
the intensely sensual presence of the past in Absalom, Absalom. Mason brings the past into Sam's
consciousness by means of response to physical sensations so that the past is not so much understood as
felt'' (Gilman, 4950). This use of the senses to understand the past, Gilman suggests, is a particularly
Southern phenomenon. Gilman sees Sam's impressions of a hotel room in the opening of the novel"it has a
secret history of thousands of people, their vibrations and essences soaked in the walls and rug " (Mason,
12)as evidence that she has begun "her odyssey into the past with her senses in a receptive mode." Gilman
even asserts that Mason's use of concrete details to merge past and present is "an act of union [that] takes
place typically through the senses" and "the very sort of unity argued for by [Allen] Tate" in I'll Take My
Stand (56). But the main way Sam attempts to learn about the war through her senses is by

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spending a night in a nearby swamp in order to replicate a soldier's experience in country.
Gilman is correct to suggest that Sam often relies on her senses to get a feel for Vietnam. However, what
he celebrates as a Southern virtueSam's reliance on her sensesis meant to show the desperate, even
ridiculous lengths Sam must go to, since she has little access to information about the war. Mason wants
to show how difficult it is within contemporary America, especially for young people like Sam, to learn
about the recent past, particularly when this knowledge does not conform to conventional ideological
belief. Relying on popular music and a night at a nearby pond are hardly the best ways to learn about the
Vietnam War. In a society that seeks to erase historical unpleasantries and in a culture dominated by
diversionary entertainments, Sam has nowhere else to turn. Far from an endorsement of a sensual
appreciation of the past, Mason suggests that for the working class, especially working-class youth, the
recent past, although it has shaped their lives and limited their choices, is almost unknowable. This
ignorance must be maintained if, as seems likely to Sam in the summer of 1984, the United States is about
to send another generation of working-class young men to war.
Another problem with Gilman's argument is that it relies on the stereotype of Southerners as children of
nature. Although Sam is shown to be an intelligent and perceptive 18-year-old warring against a
narrowminded community and a simpleminded entertainment culture, Gilman ignores her intellect.
Although Mason repeatedly shows Sam's dislike of country life and lack of connection to the soil, Gilman
stresses her rootedness in nature. Ironically, although he intends to honor Southern tradition, Gilman
reaffirms the stereotypical view of Southerner as a primitive incapable of abstract thought and book
learning and dependent upon only what can be detected by one's senses.
Gilman so emphasizes the Southerner's special connection to the past that when he discusses Sam's
reading of her father's diary, he barely mentions what she finds so shockingthe racism and brutality of U.S.
soldiers. Instead, this diary, Gilman argues, "uproots her from the pastless [shopping] mall" (55); it
"open[s] [her] eyes to the past" (56). When he mentions the content of this diary it is as evidence not of
U.S. policy but of the broadly ahistorical "ugliness of war" (56). Gilman also ignores the suffering of
Emmett and other vets due to exposure to Agent Orange. Rather than finding in Mason's depiction of
contemporary America a critique of Reagan-era militarism and class exploitation, Gilman sees a

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continuation of the Southern preoccupation with history, what he describes as "the common denominator
in the play of the southern imagination upon the Vietnam conflict" (15). This preoccupation with history,
though, is little concerned with the Vietnamese or with the actions of the U.S. military or the decisions of
American policy makers. For Gilman, "when the southern writer surveys the Vietnam War and its impact,
he or she sees the South" (21).
Like Brinkmeyer and Gilman, Yonka Krasteva considers the novel in the context of geographical region,
but unlike them she draws upon poststructural theory. To Krasteva, Mason is actively engaged "in the
contemporary discourse on power, domination and the crisis of representation" (77). More significantly,
In Country "is a book about the construction of a female identity through a rigorous process of
deciphering the meaning of widely held national beliefs, mythic concepts and symbolic images that
construct both reality and the self" (78). Central to Krasteva's argument is the notion that Sam becomes a
skilled reader of cultural signs and that this ability helps her celebrate human bonds and community
instead of (like the traditional questing male hero) pursuing individual freedom and evading social
responsibility. Similarly, Krasteva finds the heroic wilderness experienceand its defining principle,
Manifest Destiny"critically examined and rejected throughout the book in favor of a collective search for
identity and community" (82). In Country, according to Krasteva, describes a feminist alternative to the
male wilderness myth, a postmodern rewriting that is aware of the constructedness of history and self, ''a
story about the beneficial encounter of a Southerner with 'otherness,' which makes her whole, confident
and competent, aware of the complex ironies of modern life" (79).
Krasteva's essay points to a major preoccupation of contemporary literary scholarsthe identification of
alternative discourses through which marginalized groups may counter dominant discourses, thereby
creating new, self-enabling narratives. To Krasteva Mason "not only decenters the dominant narrative
paradigm of discovery and conquest by substituting for it the paradigm of reading and home, she also
constructs a female rite of passage [which] requires a redefinition of the concept of knowledge, history
and self" (89). Krasteva's point is not much different from Connaroe's observation in the New York Times
Book Review that Mason works a "timely variation on the traditionally male-centered Bildungsroman."
Despite the seeming progressiveness of this analysis, Krasteva pays

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scant attention to Mason's examination of the Vietnam War and her critique of contemporary militarism.
Rather than discussing the connections Mason draws between class exploitation and imperialism,
Krasteva turns her attention to Mason's subversion of the frontier myth. It is true that in a complicated
interplay of class exploitation, male self-identity, and popular culture such myths help persuade men like
Emmett, Dwayne, and Lonnie to risk their lives. Too often, however, critics like Krasteva fail adequately
to examine this interplay, seeing these myths instead as almost free-floating discourses disconnected from
material circumstances. Yet Mason suggests these men's willingness to risk their lives has much more to
do with limited economic opportunity and lack of historical knowledge than with a centuries-old cultural
myth. Only Sam, through a difficult, obsessive quest, has sufficiently overcome this false consciousness in
order to see U.S. militarism as a murderous form of class exploitation. Krasteva, on the other hand, is so
preoccupied with myth and discourse that she discounts historical knowledge and declares that "the
stories we tell about history, the form in which we get history [i.e., the frontier myth] are more revealing
about human nature than the actual historical events" (81). This interest in discourse leads Krasteva to
transform Sam Hughes from an 18-year-old girl trying to understand the Vietnam War into the very model
of a modern academic. "As a result of her intensive training in reading signs and signifiers," writes
Krasteva, "Sam becomes fully aware of the postmodern crisis of representation" (88). With the lessons
Sam learns about class and war thus abstracted, Krasteva can conclude with the suggestion that ''the
mythic Journey of the heroic Westerner and the Southerner's guilty absorption with the past seem to have
come full circle. A new age is dawningthe final consecration of America as home" (8990). Only by
transforming a lesson in class exploitation and imperialism into a rewriting of cultural myth can Krasteva
reach such a navely cheerful conclusion consisting of nationalist wish-fulfillment and self-affirmation.
Ironically, this belief that a new age of America as home is dawning is strikingly similar in its optimism
and sense of renewal to Reagan's "morning in America" campaign of 1984the very climate Mason is at
pains to repudiate.
But the most striking example of nationalist sentiment appears in June Dwyer's essay in Modern
Language Studies. For Dwyer, as for so many critics, the Vietnam War was a singular event that
overturned

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conventional notions of heroism and war. Applying a poststructural framework to the war, Dwyer
declares, "The event was devastating and without shape: neither side was sure of its place, or of its role,
or of what had happened. Curiously, everyone seemed on the margin and no one in the center" (72). Thus
Dwyer unwittingly perpetuates the central theme of the rewriting of the Vietnam Warthat Vietnamese and
American suffering are comparable. Her suggestion that both sides were unsure of their place is similarly
obfuscatoryand is belied by the almost incomprehensible sacrifices of (and substantial popular support
for) the Vietnamese communists. And Dwyer's assertion that everyone was marginalized, besides
equating American and Vietnamese experiences, would seem to question the centrality of capital and the
culpability of U.S. policy makers by suggesting that no one is more to blame, be it a poor rice farmer or
Lyndon Johnson.
Sam has difficulty understanding the war, according to Dwyer, because "she has armed herself with old
historical expectations. She is looking for heroes and villains, strong leaders, clear causes. What she
finds is new historynot a chain of command but a web of connections" (72). To Dwyer, a history from
which lessons can be drawn, a history of cause, effect, and explanation, cannot be applied to Vietnam
because it relies upon a master narrative and a degree of linguistic certainty, both of which are brought
into question by postmodernism/poststructuralism. The metaphors Dwyer uses to describe old and new
historythe former as a chain of command, the latter as a web of contradictionsreveal her poststructuralist
premises. Reading history in the old, positivist way demands a chain of command, a hierarchy of true and
false, fact and fiction. Significantly, Dwyer uses military terminology, with its suggestion of
authoritarianism, to denote old history. New history, on the other hand, is complex and nonhierarchical, a
web of connections that can never be untangled. However new this history, though, it concludes with
oldfashioned nationalism: Sam "develops a more positive vision of America." Traditional belief sees
America as a land of opportunity; Dwyer sees Sam fulfilling America's endless possibility for
reinvention. Sam "becomes the new incarnation of American patriotism." "The new spirit of America,"
Dwyer writes, ''is transformed into a young woman called Sam, who is irreverent, independent, earnest
and questioning" (73). A novel about a young woman's potential radicalization through historical research
and experience with the personal consequences of imperialist

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war becomes, in Dwyer's account, a lesson in patriotism and the American spirit of renewal.
Just as for Krasteva Sam learns of the postmodern crisis of representation and just as for Dwyer "the
Vietnam War decentered the American soldier" (72), so for Barbara Ryan Sam's "actions lead her to a
realization of the poststructuralist, or decentered, authority at the heart of her world" (199). Sam's search
for knowledge about the war and about her father, according to Ryan, "is a psychic need for the Father,
the idealized paternal, the Word that was her beginning, that encompasses her, that will give her both
significance and coherence" (200). Sam's difficulty discovering the truth is not due to a commercial
culture that commodifies history or to a flawed educational system or to a hegemonic process actively
rewriting the war as a lesson in patriotism, but to the epistemological impossibility of Truth. For Ryan,
Sam seeks "the logically impossible, an exterior center, an involved objectivity, a nonparticipatory truth"
that could only be granted by ''the originative absent Logos" (201). Like Krasteva, who points to Sam's
intensive training in reading signs and signifiers, Ryan declares Sam "a poststructuralist reader" (206).
What Sam learns, suggests Ryan, is not that the poor were used as cannon fodder to further U.S. foreign
policy (an occurrence Sam fears will be repeated in the summer of 1984), but that "things really are not so
clear-cut that self both is and is not other" (209). In Country, writes Ryan, "reenact[s] the twentieth
century shift from the modernist quest for authority and coherence [that Booth writes of] to a
postmodernist recognition that neither exists in the way we had supposed" (199). Whether Booth's
modernist reading or Ryan's postmodernist one, critics seek to connect In Country (and Vietnam War
literature generally) to literary/philosophical epochs, an act that often obscures these texts' historical
roots and ideological concerns. At a time when the war is being revised to deride the political activism of
the 1960s and renew American militarismall in order to further the dominance of capitalthe academy has
focused upon discourse and epistemology and has done so in the guise of a radical politics. Just as earlier
critics transformed Greene's realistic account of nascent U.S. militarism into a novel concerned with
French existentialism, so Krasteva, Ryan, and others transform Mason's realistic account of ongoing U.S.
militarism into a novel concerned with French poststructuralism.
Krasteva and Ryan also rely on gender theory to understand In Country, Krasteva seeing it as "a narrative
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feminine identity" (89), Ryan seeing it as a struggle to achieve a "decentered and dialogic self" (211) that
sees past the desire for "the Father, the idealized paternal" (200). Likewise, Katherine Kinney sees
Mason interrogating ''the connection between sex, combat, and the female by digging at the roots of gender
constructionsthe apparently irreducible, even biological point of difference: men fight wars and women
have babies" (43). To Kinney, this traditional gender division is not so clear-cut, since there is a strong
relationship between war and childbirth, a connection made explicit in William Broyles's assertion that
"The love of war stems from the union, deep in the core of our being, between sex and destruction. It is,
for men, at some terrible level the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the
power of life and death" (quoted in Kinney, 45). Finding this common ground, Kinney suggests that Mason
uses combat and childbirth "as reciprocal metaphors. If motherhood is not wholly nurturant, combat is not
simply destructive." Consequently, Sam discovers "the simultaneous existence of difference and
sameness" (47).
Ellen Blais pursues a similar interrogation of gender definitions. While acknowledging that In Country
"appears to be concerned primarily with the effects of the Vietnam War," Blais nonetheless focuses on the
novel's concern with "the sudden fluidity, beginning in the sixties, in our concepts of what it means to be
masculine or feminine" (107). Blais mentions Mason's references to the singer Boy George and the
character Klinger on M*A*S*H as evidence that "ideas and ways of behaving are suddenly 'in the air' in
the larger American culture of the mid-eighties" (109). Grounding her analysis in a specific cultural
moment, Blais nonetheless fails to look at Mason's critique of Reagan-era militarism. She cites Sam's
belief that "Reagan wants to go to war" (18) but only in the context of Sam's enthusiasm for Geraldine
Ferraro, evidence, Blais suggests, of "a culture in which women are replacing men in some capacities and
in which they may bring to society values very different from those of their male counterparts" (108).
(Likewise, Dwyer suggests that "Ferraro's entry into the male-dominated sphere of high-level politics
shows Sam another avenue women may now travel to become patriots" [76].) Since In Country was
written as Margaret Thatcher was dismantling the social welfare state in Britain and since Ferraro's
establishment politics can hardly be said to offer very different values, Blais's argument seems too
navely to believe in the intrinsic humanitarianism of women and in the possibility that such humane
concerns can be affected within

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the capitalist system. The 18-year-old Sam Hughes reaches a similar conclusion, thinking at first that if it
were up to women there would be no war, but immediately realizing that "that was a nave thought. When
women got power, they were just like men. She thought of Indira Ghandi and Margaret Thatcher. She
wouldn't want to meet those women out in the swamp at night" (Mason, 208). In using Sam as her
narrative consciousness Mason does explore various feminist concerns, but academic critics' discussion
of gender in In Country frequently becomes an individualist lesson in self-assertion and self-affirmation.
There is little recognition of Sam's socioeconomic background, of how the lesson she learns may equally
be one of class solidarity. In the academic reception of In Country, we repeatedly see how feminist
analysis, when severed from class analysis, can become merely another literary-critical method endorsing
the liberal-pluralist status quo. This "Displacing [of] ideology by discourse is," according to Teresa
Ebert, "a move undertaken in order to replace social contradictions (explained by ideology) with social
'difference': a concept that isolates difference in a locality and cuts its relations to other differences and,
most importantly, to the cause of difference" (8).
Although most of the critical approaches used by contemporary critics to analyze In Country may seem
far removed from traditional humanist aestheticizing, they nonetheless perform a comparable erasure of
the novel's historical roots and social critique, pointing instead to the irreducible complexity of Mason's
novel and of the world. To Brinkmeyer, Sam learns about "the dark complexities that shadow all human
experience"; to Dwyer Sam finds "new historynot a chain of commands but a web of connections" (72); to
Krasteva Sam becomes aware of the "complex ironies of modern life"; to Ryan Sam achieves "a complex
dialogic relationship between the outer and the inner world" (211); to Kinney Sam finds that ''self and
other, male and female are not static, absolute terms but multiple, interactive constructions which can aid
as well as hinder imaginative identification" (47); and to Blais Sam achieves "a successful fusion of the
contradictions within her" (116). Because they see Sam learning a complex, ironic, dialogic, interactive,
contradictory lesson, these critics fail to critiqueand in fact are sympathetic tothe scene of reconciliation
and regeneration with which In Country concludes.
The novel ends with Sam, her grandmother, and her surrogate father Emmett arriving (and achieving some
form of resolution and catharsis) at

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the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Sam's grandmother touches Dwayne's name and says that the carnation
she sees blooming out of a crack in the Wall gives her hope and the sense that Dwayne is watching.
Finding the names of the soldiers killed in an ambush he alone survived, Emmett begins to come to terms
with his past. And Sam, finding her name memorialized"SAM A HUGHES. It is the first on a line. She
touches her own name. How odd it feels, as though all the names in America have been used to decorate
the wall" (244245)recognizes that she too is a victim of the war. But the conclusion to In Country is not
wholly reaffirming. Mason makes repeated reference to these characters' seeing themselves reflected in
the polished marble, thereby suggesting that they are unable completely to understand their connection to
the war. In the last line of the book she writes, "[Emmett] is sitting there cross-legged in front of the wall,
and slowly his face bursts into a smile like flames" (245). In his smile and meditative, Buddha-like pose
we are to see Emmett beginning to overcome his trauma. Yet the image of a face bursting into a smile like
flames is also suggestive of his continued suffering, perhaps even his mental instability. And it is
impossible to read this image without thinking of those Buddhist monks who set themselves ablaze in an
ultimate act of protest. Here Mason implies that, like these monks, Emmett is a victim of the war.
Despite this ambiguity, the scene at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is clearly intended to signal a process
of healing. Sam's sense that all the names in America have been used to decorate the Wall suggests that
every American is a victim. This erasure of the Vietnamese and of the class-specific suffering caused by
the war, this repudiation of her own analysis for the sake of nationalist sentimentalism, has aroused
almost no negative comment from academics. On the contrary, most sympathize with Mason's conclusion.
Krasteva writes, "At the end of the book Sam and Emmett are smiling; happiness is possible within the
frontier, the dream is the land itself. 'America the beautiful'this phrase keeps popping up in the heroine's
mind. The mythic journey of the heroic Westerner and the Southerner's guilty absorption with the past
seem to have come full circle. A new age is dawningthe final consecration of America as home" (8990).
For Blais, Sam comes "to terms with the results of her country's abortive war and ultimate defeat in
Vietnam," achieving "a moment of transcendence that nullifies the simpler categories of male and female,
war and peace, evil and good" (115, 116). The memorial, according to Dwyer, is "a catalyst for
reconciliation. In building it, America has finally acknowledged its love for those children

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it had turned its back on." It is a way for Sam and Emmett to "go to [their] country's home town and
commune with the members of [their] larger family, [their] American family" (65). Dwyer's argument in
particular supports the notion that America had abandoned its noble warriors. By infantilizing these
veterans ("those children [America] turned its back on"), Dwyer obscures their participation in a
genocidal war. And by transforming the individual struggles of people like Sam and Emmett into a cozy,
domestic, almost Capraesque scene in America's home town, Dwyer weakens the novel's powerful sense
of grievance and of exploitation.
The problem with the conclusion of In Country, this moment of personal and national healing, is that it is
false and sentimental and at odds with almost all that Sam has learned about the war. Yet only two critics
write of the problem of Mason's ending. Matthew Stewart praises Mason's portrayal of Vietnam vets,
declaring In Country "a social document worthy of attention because of its comprehensive representation
of troubled Vietnam veterans" ("Realism," 167). Stewart gives a detailed reading of the accuracy of
Mason's portrayal of veterans but finds Emmett's transformation unconvincing, arguing that "the novel
does nothing to suggest how Emmett has come to the state of enlightened inner peace and harmony which
this Buddha-like closing image invokes" ("Realism," 176). Stewart's problem with Mason's conclusion is
not that it is unfaithful to the book's political critique but that in its depiction of post-traumatic stress
disorder it fails the test of verisimilitude. Only W. D. Ehrhart, in Viet Nam Generation, notes the failure
of this ending. To Ehrhart, the Wall ''has [be]come [a] substitute for substance and fact." By ending her
novel at the Wall, Erhart explains, Mason is able to avoid such troubling questions as "Why did all those
people die? Who offered them up for slaughter? What was accomplished for the price of so much blood?
How was it permitted to go on for so long? Where are the names of the three million dead of Indochina?"
That seemingly progressive academic critics should ignore the ideological flaws of Mason's conclusion,
should in fact praise this ending, is evidence of the facile progressivism of academic literary culture.
Sympathetic to the conceits of identity politics, these critics read Sam's seeing her name on the Wall as a
sign of self-awareness and growth. Sam's painful struggle to learn about the war, and the knowledge she
gains about racism, nationalism, class exploitation, and historical revisionism, are consistently smoothed
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allegedly politically informed critical approaches, academics have read In Country as a novel about
individual growth, about a disaffected youth's maturation and ultimate reconciliation with family, home,
and nation. These readings reveal the essence of liberal pluralism: that the end result of dissension is
consensus, that criticism of America is in the American grain, that critical investigation inevitably leads
to individual and national reaffirmation.
Of all that has been written on In Country there is only one sophisticated materialist critiqueMarjorie
Winther's "M*A*S*H, Malls and Meaning: Popular and Corporate Culture in In Country." The novel's "
[r]eferences to corporate logos and electronic media," according to Winther, "serve to overlay Sam's
fragmented conceptions of the Vietnam War with sophisticated and cohesive political analysis." Pointing
to Sam's awareness (on the first page of In Country) of highway scenery, of "Exxon, Chevron, and Sunoco
loom[ing] up, big faces on stilts" (3), Winther notes that Mason alludes to, but does not directly enter,
political discussion. '' 'Big oil' represents the power of American capitalism more succinctly and
completely than any other image" (195). Winther explains that Mason uses allusions to popular culture
and the mass media to suggest the "distorted infosystems" that perpetuate "a state of fuzzy
incomprehension" and "the absence of honest discourse" about the war (198). In addition, Winther
suggests that "for Sam, the war and the interests of American big business are inextricably fused" (199).
Unfortunately, analyses like Winther's remain far more the exception than the rule in current critical
practice. For in its dismissal of contemporary history, its concern with individual self-affirmation, its
focus on discourse and myth, and its belief in American regeneration, the academic reception of In
Country (whether formalist, poststructuralist, or feminist) demonstrates the liberal pluralism that
predominates within academic literary culture and that has failed to confront the renewal of militarism
and the continuity of class exploitation within contemporary America.

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7
Undying Uncertainty

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Tim O'Brien is probably the best known and most acclaimed novelist of the Vietnam War. His Going
After Cacciato won the National Book Award, and The Things They Carried was a finalist for both the
Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Robert Harris in the New York Timed Book
Review places the latter not merely on "the short list of essential fiction about Vietnam" but "high up on
the list of best fiction about any war." To Peter Prescott in Newsweek, two or three stories in The Things
They Carried "seem as good as any short stories written about any war." And Michiko Kakutani in the
daily New York Times declares The Things They Carried "a vital, important booka book that matters.''
1
The Things They Carried is a hybrid text, a collection of stories that functions as a novel. Characters and
incidents are repeated from story to story and are refracted through several literary modes and through the
O'Brien narrator/persona's shifting self-interest and self-delusion. An embodiment of the processive and
indeterminate nature of consciousness, The Things They Carried replicates a veteran's struggle to make
sense of wartime experience and memory. It is at once a recounting of a soldier's experiences in Vietnam
and an interrogation of how such experiences are transformed into fiction by the imagination, as can be
seen in one of the novel's central incidentsthe death of O'Brien's comrade Kiowa.
In the story "Speaking of Courage," O'Brien tells us his platoon bivouacked beside the Song Tra Bong
River in what they discovered too late was "a shit field. The village toilet" (164). Rain transformed this
field into "deep, oozy soup. Like sewage" (164). During the night the platoon was bombarded by mortar
fire that made the ground explode and boil. When Kiowa began to drown in this shit field, another soldier,
Norman Bowker, "grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out. then suddenly he felt himself
going too. He could taste it. The shit was in his nose and eyes. and he could no longer tolerate it. He
released Kiowa's boot and watched it slide away" (168). O'Brien repeatedly forces this image before us
to convey the horror of war. It also serves as a metaphor for combat: to American soldiers in Vietnam
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to "the day-to-day combat operations endured by GIs in the field" (Clark, 463). O'Brien revivifies this
conventional metaphor by making it horribly tangible. That men's lives were wasted in Vietnam is
likewise emblematized by the shit field. Kiowa's death also evokes the notion that for the U.S. Vietnam
was a quagmire; his drowning functions almost emblematically to suggest America's deepening
entanglement in southeast Asia. "This field," O'Brien writes, "had embodied all the waste that was
Vietnam" (210).
What is striking about The Things They Carried, though, is not O'Brien's use of metaphor but his
elaborate and elusive self-consciousness. He gives us several versions of this incident and foregrounds
his role in shaping these stories. In "Speaking of Courage," he tells us that Norman Bowker failed to save
Kiowa. In "Notes," he reveals that Kiowa's death had been omitted from an earlier version of this story
and that Bowker, haunted by that night, had committed suicide. In another story, "In the Field," O'Brien
blames not Bowker but an unnamed soldier who instigated the mortar attack by carelessly turning on his
flashlight. And in "Field Trip'' O'Brien tells us about his return to the site of Kiowa's death years after the
War. "That little field," he writes, "had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My belief in
myself as a man of some small dignity and courage. Still, it was hard to find any real emotion. After that
long night in the rain, I'd seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and
hopes for myself sucked away into the mud" (210). Nowhere in The Things They Carried does O'Brien
explain more clearly the psychic devastation wrought by wartime trauma. In order to overcome this
trauma and to regain what he lost in Kiowa's death, he must confront his past, so he wades into the filthy
river. Previously, O'Brien had "felt a certain smugness about how easily [he] had made the shift from war
to peace" (179). Now he writes, "in a way I'd gone under with Kiowa, and after two decades I'd finally
worked my way out. I felt something go shut in my heart while something else swung open" (212).
O'Brien's intensity here and in his many other attempts to come to terms with his battlefield experiences
suggests how important it is for him to tell the truth about what happened in Vietnam. Indeed, in a story
entitled "How to Tell a True War Story," he repeatedly points to the accuracy of his fiction: "This is true"
(75), he writes, "It's all exactly true" (77), "It all happened" (83), "here's what actually happened" (85).
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reinforcing its essential accuracy, implies that there might be a reason to question the relationship
between reality and textual representation. Indeed, because of its complex and contradictory character, the
war for O'Brien can never be faithfully rendered: "the only certainty," he writes, "is overwhelming
ambiguity" (88). He goes on to say that "in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true'' (88). Yet it is
through stories that experience is given the heft of truth: "the remembering is turned into a kind of
rehappening" (36). And this "story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth" (203).
O'Brien is faced with a terrible paradoxa painful need to write the truth set against a realization that there
is no unmediated access to truth. If for Michael Herr experience is mediated by language and culture, for
O'Brien it is bound up with the process of memory and imagination. He can tell no truth that is not already
contaminated by its imaginative reconstruction. To resolve this paradox, O'Brien emphasizes the process
of story-making. For it is in this process that truth and falsehood, reality and representation, fact and
fiction cohere. Paradoxically, it is by emphasizing artifice, by demonstrating the extent to which
experience is an imaginative construct, that O'Brien attempts to identify the important truths buried within
his memories of Vietnam. To O'Brien self-referentiality is a necessary feature of truthful writing, for only
by emphasizing artifice can he write the truth, or as he suggests, "you tell lies to get at the truth" (quoted in
Schroeder, 141).
To commercial critics, O'Brien's paradoxical mix of fact and fiction was an essential means of conveying
the truth about Vietnam. Only one reviewer, Geoff Dyer in New Statesman & Society, seemed troubled by
O'Brien's self-absorption. Dyer complains that through O'Brien's literary aesthetic, "what happened in
Vietnam gets enlarged and generalised into a concern with the nature and purpose of war stories." For
Dyer, The Things They Carried can be boiled down to one central, trivial "there is something remarkable
about making the transition from soldier to author." For other reviewers, The Things They Carried is
remarkable in its ability to capture the essence of the war. Peter Prescott (in Newsweek) argues that the
literary aesthetics used to describe previous wars are inappropriate for describing Vietnam.
"Straightforward wars are built like novels," he writes, "they begin here, go to there, swell and subside
along the way." But "Messy wars, like the one we fought in Vietnam, lend themselves more readily to
fragmented narratives." According to Robert Harris (in the New York Book Review), O'Brien "strives to

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get beyond literal descriptions" (since these are incapable of capturing the essence of the war) and to
make "sense of the unreality of the war" by "distort[ing] that unreality even further in his fiction."
Similarly, Michiko Kakutani (in the daily New York Times) praises O'Brien's ability "to capture that war's
hallucinatory mood, the oddly surreal atmosphere produced by jungle warfare, heavy drug use and the
moral and political ambiguity of American involvement.'' To R. Z. Sheppard in Time, O'Brien succeeds
"in conveying the free-fall sensation of fear and the surrealism of combat." And Julian Loose in the Times
Literary Supplement explains that "By creating a work which so adroitly resists finality, O'Brien has
been faithful to Vietnam and the stories told about it." For these reviewers, the war is a messy, unreal
conflict that resists finality.
To describe the mass bombardment, defoliation, systematic assassinations, and planned destruction of the
rural society of South Vietnam as "messy," however, to domesticate it, to make it seem the result of bad
management. It also views the war from an American perspective and profoundly trivializes the suffering
of the Vietnamese. Nonetheless, this perception is an accurate assessment from the point of view of
imperialists, for whom Vietnam was a "messy" war (as opposed to the "splendid, little war" the United
States fought against Spain at the turn of the century or the alleged surgical precision of the Persian Gulf
War) because it did not go as planned and, for a brief time, became something of an obstacle for
American policy makers, a mess they have been trying to wash their hands of ever since.
To speak of the surreality and unreality of Vietnam is to mystify the war by confusing its perceptual
experience with its material fact. True, from a soldier's viewpoint the chaos of battle was surreal, and
some of the elements of this waran unknown enemy; an alien landscape, culture, and climate; the vast
difference between American military strength and the often under-equipped Viet Cong; the jarring
juxtapositon of American commercial culture and Vietnamese povertymay have seemed "unreal." The
problem with this perception is that it has dominated literary portrayals of the Vietnam War. To see
Vietnam as resisting finality, as many critics have, is to see the war as inexplicable, therefore with no
lesson to be learned. This denial of finality means denying any certain and explicit understanding of the
war, as Kakutani makes clear when she speaks of "the moral and political ambiguities of American
involvement"a sentiment that mirrors exactly the liberal rewriting of the war, in which war crimes
become moral and political ambiguities and an

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invasion becomes "involvement." (Likewise, Gary Krist in Hudson Review finds the soldiers in The
Things They Carried "on their way to a morally ambiguous goal" [692].) One need only transfer this
interpretation to a context involving an enemy of the United Statesthe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for
instanceto recognize the disguised politics embedded in Kakutani's seemingly apolitical evaluation. It is
difficult to imagine a critic, in her evaluation of a novel about the Afghan war, asserting the moral and
political ambiguities of Soviet involvement. (This comparison is somewhat misleading, since the
justification for Soviet involvement in Afghanistan is more compelling than the justification for U.S.
involvement in Vietnam.) In literary criticism, moral ambiguities are rarely politically ambiguous. That is,
morality is seen as ambiguous, complex, and uncertain when it involves the United States, but when an
official enemy's actions are scrutinized, no such nuanced, sensitive, and charitable interpretation is given.
The harmful actions of enemies are always clearly immoral; the harmful actions of the United States are
frequently clouded by ambiguities and complexities. (Kakutani herself faced no such moral ambiguity
when writing about Rosalie Maggio's The Bias-Free Word Finder, condemning "the rigid orthodoxy" of
"the self-appoiinted language police" and concocting predictably fanciful PC-speak, such as retitling The
Iceman Cometh "The Ice Route Driver Cometh'').
Reviews of The Things They Carried reveal a continuity running through the reception of Vietnam War
literature, stretching back to The Quiet American. Walter Allen praised Greene for depicting "Human
nature not [as] black and white but black and grey" (344), Irving Howe praised Kolpacoff for conceiving
The Prisoners of Quai Dong "without any blatant propagandistic intent" (29), Roger Sales praised Herr
for including in Dispatches "no politics, no certain morality, no clear outline of history" (35), and
Kakutani praises O'Brien for his moral and political ambiguities. In each case, reviewers repudiate or
transform whatever seems ideological, and they shower praise upon writers for creating narratives that
are paradoxical, complex, ambiguous. However much the critical practice of reviewers may have
changed since the 1950s, the ideology within commercial literary culture has remained much the same.
Academic critics have viewed The Things They Carried through a postmodern framework. This stress on
the epistemological problematic of history has tended to occlude historical knowledge and to place
emphasis upon literature for its own sake. For despite its pretensions to radical politics, postmodern
literary criticismat least as exemplified by the

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academic reception of The Things They Carriedseems little more than a new aestheticism, a belief in the
power of storytelling and the literary imagination.
Continuing where reviewers left off, Steven Kaplan (first in an essay in Critique, later in a chapter of his
Understanding Tim O'Brien) praises O'Brien for demonstrating the impossibility of understanding the
war. "The only certain thing during the Vietnam War," Kaplan writes, "was that nothing was certain" (43).
Similarly, he denies the possibility of finality, declaring that "events have no fixed or final meaning" (51).
Consequently, no moral can be derived from the war, no lesson learned, since, in O'Brien's words, "a true
war story is never moral" (76). To Kaplan, ''The only thing that can be determined at the end of the story
is its own indeterminacy" (47). Rather than question the appropriateness of O'Brien's textual playfulness
and self-reference, Kaplan praises O'Brien for making readers "fully aware of being made a participant in
a game, in a 'performative act' " (48), and he suggests that we can never fully know anything since all
knowledge is language-dependent. It is not merely the war that is unknowableeverything is, since there
can be no access to knowledge that is not mediated by language. For Kaplan, as for O'Brien, "events deny
the possibility of arriving at something called the 'full,' meaning certain and fixed 'truth' " (46). Full,
certain, and fixed truth of course can never be achieved. No reputable philosopher or literary critic would
assert such. More importantly, this denial of the full truth often seems to lead to a denial of any truth
whatsoever. Thus all O'Brien can do, according to Kaplan, is "force the reader to experience the
impossibility of ever knowing what actually happened." Consequently,
O'Brien liberates himself from the lonesome responsibility of remembering and trying to understand events. He also creates a
community of individuals immersed in the act of experiencing the uncertainty of all events. O'Brien saves himself by demonstrating in
this book that the most important thing is to be able to recognize and accept that events have no fixed or final meaning and that the
only meaning that events can have is one that emerges momentarily and then shifts and changes each time that the events come alive
as they are remembered or portrayed. (Kaplan, 51)
Kaplan's argument points to the worst aspects of postmodern theory. At a time of American triumphalism,
liberating oneself from the responsibility of remembering and understanding events is hardly
emancipatory, since it is precisely this remembering and understanding that has been under assault. We do
not need O'Brien to create a community immersed

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in the uncertainty of eventsthe mystifications and mythologies of American culture more than adequately
reproduce this uncertainty. Kaplan's essay was published only two years after the Gulf War; yet he does
not consider how effectively the Gulf War was sanitized and constructed as a noble mission. Against a
background of overt propaganda, censorship, and jingoistic fervor, Kaplan argues for the vital importance
of postmodern uncertainty. Such an argument, in its skepticism and acceptance of the status quo, is
complicit in the erasure of historical memory and the reconstruction of the ideological system. What is
needed is not a community immersed in the uncertainty of events but one that is educated in the details of
capitalist exploitation and imperial enterprise.
Maria Bonn sympathizes with many of Kaplan's arguments. She argues that The Things They Carried
"do[es] not teach" and suggests that if "O'Brien's readers have truly accepted his wily postmodern
perceptions of the reader's relationship to the text then they know that they must reject any lessons" (14).
Just as Kaplan finds O'Brien denying the possibility of finality, so Bonn declares that in The Things They
Carried "any sense of conclusion or epiphany must be its own undoing'' (1415). Unlike Kaplan, however,
she finds that O'Brien's "dizzying interplay of truth and fiction is not solely aesthetic postmodern
gamesmanship but a form that is a thematic continuation of the concern throughout his career with the
power and capability of story" (13).
More political than either Kaplan or Bonn, Philip Beidler in Re-Writing America sets out to demonstrate
that Vietnam authors, continuing the spirit of the 1960s, are involved in a radical revision of American
life and culture, an attempt "to reconstitute [American cultural] mythology as a medium both of historical
self-reconsideration and, in the same moment, of historical self-renewal and even self-reinvention" (5).
For Beidler, though, this struggle for historical self-renewal and reconsideration has little to do with
history and much to do with these writers' formal strategies, since it is "through the bold embrace of new
strategies of imaginative invention" that Vietnam authors "become in the fullest sense the creators of
cultural myth for new times" (2).
Beidler does not consider the numerous and substantial obstacles that face any attempt to reconstitute
cultural mythology. And he fails to recognize that his own argument relies on American cultural myth.
Belief in the possibility of cultural and self-renewal and reinvention depends upon the myth of America as
a land opportunity, a nation in which anyone can reinvent him or herself and an entire culture can be
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acts of the imagination. Beidler's reference to coming "new times" likewise repeats a familiar belief in
the unrestrained promise of America. For Beidler, The Things They Carried helps reconstitute American
cultural memory, a crucial task, he asserts, "in a country whose resolute belief in its historical
exceptionalism, even after its involvement in a geopolitical tragedy like Vietnam, continues to be
predicated on its easy capacity for historical amnesia" (28). The importance of The Things They Carried
is to be found in its postmodern shattering of traditional categories of knowledge. Beidler explicitly
connects such transgressions with cultural reinvention: The Things They Carried is a "rewriting of the
old dialectic of facts and fictions and a literally exponential prediction of new contexts of vision and
insight, of new worlds to remember, imagine, believe" (3233); it is ''the work of literature as personal
sense making and cultural revision in the largest sense" (36). Despite his denunciation of American
exceptionalism, Beidler premises his argument upon a similar beliefas is demonstrated by his reference to
the new times, new contexts, and new worlds that may open up through The Things They Carried. In
making this argument, Beidler ignores the immense institutional obstacles arrayed against real
reinvention. He fails to define renewal and reinvention in any but the most general, abstract terms. He has
no apparent political strategy or economic policy or ideology in mind, and his repeated mention of "self"
suggests the individualist ethos that grounds his postmodern rhetoric.
Beidler also overlooks the considerable effort that has already gone into reconstructing the ideological
system. Ignoring this background, he views Vietnam War literature as a significant force for cultural
reinvention, for rewriting America. He does not consider the possibility that this literatureand the culture
that shapes, produces, distributes, and receives itmay, because of institutional constraints, be involved in
a conservative rather than a progressive reinvention. As this book argues, literature and literary culture
have indeed been rewriting America, but it has been a rewriting that obscures a radical, materialist
critique and places in its stead an individualist, ethnocentric, and ahistorical appreciation of ambiguity
and fragmentation.
The blurring of distinctions between fact and fiction is not, as Beidler and others suggest, an inherently
radical gesture. This misperception stems from a postmodern reading of hierarchies and categories as by
definition authoritarian. By transgressing borders and bringing into question the whole notion of
categorization, or so the argument goes, O'Brien

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is involved in a radical project. Yet American culture hardly needs O'Brien, or academic postmodernists
for that matter, to deconstruct fact and fiction. With its quasi-historical popular entertainments, its
fictionalizations and historical reenactments and sensationalist news, American popular culture is deeply
involved in problematizing the fact/fiction distinction.
Beidler's argument that O'Brien's achievement is "cultural revision in the largest sense" is reminiscent of
Frances Kunkel's assertion that we "enlarge our perspectives by abandoning Greene's views of American
foreign policy" (150, emphasis added). Beidler's ''largest sense" really amounts to a narrowing of
perspective, since in his discussion of The Things They Carried there is virtually no mention of actual
history. The reinvention of our categories of fact and fiction is in effect an erasure of fact and a
preoccupation with fiction, with aesthetics, with the literary imagination. Beidler never refers to the
countryside devastated by American weapons or the society shattered by American military policy or the
people who fought against and suffered because of the Americans. Instead, he writes that "Vietnam must
remain out there somewhere between memory and imagining" (35), out there in the realm of pure artifice.
Like Beidler, Donald Ringnalda in Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War singles out O'Brien's blurring
of the fact and fiction distinction. He argues that in his work O'Brien has increasingly demonstrated the
arbitrariness of this distinction, moving from "a solid line to a dotted line to one that sometimes
disappears altogether" (103), finally "spurn[ing] the Western paradigm of Manichaean dualism, which
convinces most of the people most of the time that they can tell the difference between reality and fiction"
(104). As his allusion to P. T. Barnum ("you can fool most of the people most of the time") implies,
Ringnalda believes the distinction between fact and fiction to be little more than a carry trick. For
Ringnalda, seeing through this con and deconstructing the fact/fiction split is an act of vital political
importance because it is precisely the inability to do so that initiated U.S. involvement in Vietnam: "This
genre sureness got us into Vietnam in the first place." Ringnalda's argument goes something like this:
unable to acknowledge "the powerful influence of our positivist paradigm," America did not recognize
that its belief systemwhat it perceived as fact, in particular "its righteous anti-Communist paradigm"
(101)was fiction. If the United States had had a more postmodern sensibility, it would not have been
presumptuous enough to believe it could organize the world into good and evil, communist and

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capitalist, and would not have attempted to impose its "epistemologically crude and nave" (102) view of
reality upon Vietnam.
There are several problems with this analysis. For one thing, if we truly are unable to distinguish between
fact and fiction, on what grounds is Ringnalda's postmodernism to be privileged over realism? Underlying
his argument, after all, is the notion that postmodernism is in some sense a more accurate (because less
reductive and more complex) way to view the world. The Things They Carried is said to be a better
book than John Del Vecchio's realist novel The 13th Valley because O'Brien's uncertainty about the
distinction between fact and fiction is truer to the facts of Vietnam than Del Vecchio's positivism. "To
offer up a hallucinatory experience as straight history, as an accumulation of facts and information" the
way Del Vecchio does, is, according to Ringnalda, "to mediate that experience out of existence"; it is to
use "a language disconnected from the reality it purports to express" (16). But the question persists: how
can Ringnalda posit a knowable, quantifiable reality if it is impossible to tell the difference between fact
and fiction? On what basis can Del Vecchio's facts and information and language be disconnected from
reality and O'Brien's uncertainty essential to it? Ringnalda would argue that the reality of Vietnam was
chaotic and that a positivist epistemology, with its notion that experience is clear and verifiable, cannot
possibly hope to convey this chaosonly a postmodern epistemology captures something of this experience.
Ringnalda sees the choice as between postmodernism and positivism; thus he establishes his position as
the only alternative to an admittedly crude and nave epistemology. He sets up a straw epistemology that
is easily knocked down. The problem with this opposition between postmodernism and positivism can be
seen in Ringnalda's choice of metaphors. He argues that "Sense-making narratives of realism continue to
display the will to superimpose the clarity of [Norman] Rockwell over the ambiguity of Dali in our
Vietnam experience" (6). For Ringnalda, realism equals Rockwell, postmodernism Dali. Of course,
realism does not have to be reduced to the nostalgic fantasies of Rockwell. But Ringnalda's argument
would be far less convincing if he were comparing the surrealism of Dali to the realism of a Breughel or
a Goya. In seeing the choice as between postmodernism and positivism, Ringnalda seems unaware of
recent work in the philosophy of science by the likes of Richard Boyd, Roy Bhaskar, and Hilary Putnam
that offers a much more sophisticated realist epistemology. As Gregory Meyerson explains:

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Recent theories of sophisticated realism have seriously undermined the assumptions enabling deconstructive criticism. First, realism
need not be an epistemological absolutism. As a result, reasons and evidence need not be ultimate, need not be "an absolute
guarantee." In recent realist discussions of theory confirmation, evidence forms part of a larger chain-of-reasoning argument.
Evidence itself is in a broad sense theory dependent; theoretical considerations can, in turn, be evidential. Both points undermine the
theory/observation distinction and a foundationalist reading of the distinction between direct and indirect evidence that follows in its
wake. (58)
Ringnalda goes on to suggest that America was unable to perceive how positivism/realism distorted its
beliefs because of its "fear of disorder and complexity, and addiction to the righteous power over that
disorder and complexity." To Ringnalda, this "cultural imperative against disorder" (25) explains the
American war in Vietnam. Realism is an inappropriate literary strategy, therefore, not merely because it
is unfaithful to the complexity of the war but because it attempts to impose order on chaos. For Ringnalda,
the connection between Del Vecchio's realism and "simplifying a disorderly landscape with agent orange
is more than metaphorical: it stems from the same culturally induced urge: to render chaos into simplified
order" (26). Realism, on Ringnalda's account, is imperialism.
The corollary to this argument is true for Ringnalda as well. If U.S. policy is based on positivist premises
and a need to impose order, then Viet Cong policy must be based on postmodernist premises and an
acceptance of chaos. Ringnalda sees Vietnam quite explicitly as a war between American realism and
Viet Cong postmodernism: "the paradigm we carried with us to Vietnam was that of the 'omnisciently
narrated' corporation, which functions with hierarchical, vertical management. By contrast, the Vietcong
were organized more in terms of Postmodern literature. In other words, the Vietcong cadres were not
dependent parts of the whole, they were inextricable, interdependent manifestations of the whole. The
organizational principle, more lateral than vertical, was based more on patterns of surprise and
unpredictability than on structures of power and domination" (11). Ringnalda goes on to argue that the
vast majority of Vietnam War novels mistakenly adopt a realistic aesthetic that "emulate[s] the narrow
conventional preoccupations and presumptions of America's military leaders in Vietnam. They refuse to
relinquish the traditional 'firepower' of authorial, 'managerial' control" (12). Specifically, Ringnalda
identifies four ways that "most Vietnam

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novels mirror the military operations": "They are enamored of the sense-making 'power' of maps (literal
and figurative); they limit themselves to linear time; they overestimate the capabilities of technology; and
finally, they are mired in cultural narcissism that results in racism and a shocking ignorance of Vietnam
and its people" (13). For someone honestly concerned with cultural narcissism and racism, Ringnalda
seems unaware of the extent to which his own argument depends upon cultural essentialism in its
suggestion that the Viet Cong "used the strength of our technology the way Eastern martial arts absorb and
redirect an opponent's aggression, strength, and momentum" (9) and that "the East has always had a much
different understanding of chaos'' (29). Even if we ignore this essentialism (and the inappropriateness of
reading a revolutionary war against U.S. imperialism through first world literary/cultural conceits), it is
worth noting that Ringnalda's argument works just as well the other way around: American policy can be
associated with postmodernism and Vietcong policy with realism. The advanced weaponry used by
American troops produced, it could be argued, a Baudrillardian hyperreality for pilots and anyone else
witnessing this destruction from afar. For the victims of these weapons, however, the war was all too
real. It is hard to read the following remembrance, by The Ngoc Phan, as in any way postmodern:
The houses had been bombed many times before, but that time we were hit by napalm. We called it the Battle of Pouring Fire. We
had been living in tunnels with only the clothes on our back. And when they told us we had to go to an evacuation center we came out,
and that's when they dropped the napalm. We were all burned. At first we couldn't find Kim Phuc [The Ngoc Phan's nine-year-old
daughter]. We buried the two children and went to look for her. Three days later we found her at the hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.
They had put her with the dead bodies, and later saw she was still breathing. She looked like she was dead, with all her flesh burned
off. She cried all the time, it was so painful. From 1972 until 1984 her skin continued to burn, twelve years. (quoted in Hess, 109)
Likewise, American soldiers' cultural confusion and perpetual awareness of difference and their ability to
move rapidly from one place to another can be read as postmodern, whereas the Viet Cong's respect for
Vietnamese tradition, its attempts to preserve village solidarity, its closeness to nature, and its relative
lack of technology can be read in terms of realism.
In defining postmodernism many critics distinguish between an earlier era of monopoly capitalism and a
contemporary world of late capitalism,

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whose features consist of, in Fredric Jameson's words, "a new international division of labor, a
vertiginous new dynamic in international banking the flight of production to advanced Third World areas,
along with all the more familiar social consequences" (xix). To these critics postmodernism is associated
withis, according to Jameson, the cultural logic oflate capitalism. Since the United States fought to keep
Vietnam from withdrawing from the global capitalist system (and from thereby serving as a model for
other states intent on doing soin other words, to maintain Vietnam as a site to be exploited by
transnational corporations within the era of late capitalism), it is odd, to say the least, to associate the
Viet Cong with postmodernism, to view their third-world nationalism and anticapitalism as the
embodiment of a first world, capitalist conceit. But as Philip Melling explains, "What the American
experience reveals, says the postmodernist, is a level of sophistication and enterprise that is far more
intriguing and relevant to the world in which we live than the primitive ideology of an aspiring third
world country" (119).
For others, postmodernism is also frequently defined by its opposition to what Jean-Franois Lyotard
labels "master narratives"any central, ordering, legitimizing narrative, such as Marxism. The Viet Cong,
of course, was a revolutionary people's army. Its politics were explicitly Marxist. By associating it with a
literary/cultural theory that denies the validity of Marxism (and that grew out of Lyotard's and others'
post-1968 anticommunism), Ringnalda in effect erases the defining ideology of the Viet Cong for the sake
of superficial similarities between VC organization and postmodern theory.
Predictably, Ringnalda associates realism with a "cultural narcissism that results in racism and a shocking
ignorance of Vietnam and its people" (13). In so doing, he repeats the familiar idea that postmodernism
provides space for individuals, groups, and beliefs that have been marginalized by the various
metanarratives that make up the Western tradition. Yet it is precisely the postmodern elements of The
Things They Carried that contribute to its solipsism and ethnocentrism. In attempting to challenge the
concept of an autonomous subject, O'Brien writes a text that is obsessed with self; he details the uncertain
effects of an unreal war upon an unknowable self but fails to examine its all too real effects upon the
Vietnamese. This oversight echoes American culture's repeated excision of Vietnamese suffering from the
historical record. Even on "the rare occasions when the devastating consequences of the war are noted,"
write Herman and Chomsky, "care is taken to sanitize the reports so as

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to eliminate the U.S. role" (83). Part of this role, between 1965 and 1967, was to unleash 4.5 million tons
of aerial bombardment upon Indochinaabout nine times the tonnage dropped in the Pacific during World
War II (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki). By the end of the war the United States had dropped seven
million tons of bombs on Vietnammore than twice the tonnage dropped on Europe and Asia during the
second world war, or almost one 500 pound bomb for every Vietnamese (Zinn 469). While many
Americans can give a rough estimate of U.S. casualties, they consistently underestimate Vietnamese
casualties. According to public opinion polls circa 1990, Americans on average estimated 100,000
Vietnamese deaths, missing the true figure by only two million (Chomsky, World Orders, 96). Such
ignorance of the lethal consequences of U.S. militarism is due to a process of historical revision that has
been ongoing since the end of the war.
The logic behind the repeated association of postmodernism with the Vietnam War is explained by Kate
Beaird Meyers. "Because Vietnam is so different from other wars in modern memory," Meyers writes,
"no good model exists for translating it into a traditional chronological historical narrative" (547). She
argues that the war presents many problems for historians: there was no specific starting date, official
facts conflict with observable phenomena, and the Vietnam war was something newa war of images. And
most significant of all"the American public was never told why Americans were dying in Vietnam."
Because it has "blast[ed] into fragments any ideas we might have had about the way wars are supposed to
be," Meyers asserts, "the Vietnam War may be the perfect subject for postmodern history'' (549). Just as
critics agree with O'Brien's deconstruction of the fact/fiction split, seeing it as a necessary dismantling of
an unjustifiable distinction, so Meyers argues that "'factual history,' which is based on the 'fiction' of
language, cannot exist" (550). If Meyers can find no specific starting date for the war, Milton Bates can
find no specific end date: "Was it over in 1973," he asks, "when the last American troops were
withdrawn from Vietnam? In 1975, when South Vietnam fell to the North? In 1991 when President Bush
declared the United States had 'kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all' with its victory in the
Persian Gulf? In 1995, when President Clinton extended full diplomatic recognition to the government in
Hanoi? Or will the war last as long as there are people whose lives have been affected by it?" (253).
Postmodern consensus about the inability to distinguish between fact

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and fiction and the inherent falsehood of any organizing metanarrative has already had the effect of
excluding radical critiqueor for that matter any coherent explanation of the warfrom most discussions of
Vietnam War literature. And it has led to a championing of literary texts that similarly avoid explanation.
Thus in Dispatches Herr writes:
You couldn't find two people who agreed about when [the war] began. Mission intellectuals like 1954 as the reference date; if you
saw as far back as World War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. 'Realists' said that it began
for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission flack insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution, as though all the killing that had gone
before wasn't really war. Anyway, you couldn't use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where
the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter;
might just as well lay it on the proto-Gringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up
with their own imported devils. (51)
Similarly, in Goinq After Caciatto O'Brien speaks of an ideological uncertainty:
He didn't know who was right, or what was right; he didn't know if it was a war of self-determination or self-destruction, outright
aggression or national liberation; he didn't know which speeches to believe, which books, which politicians; he didn't know if nations
would topple like dominoes or stand separate like trees; he didn't know who really started the war, or why, or when, or with what
motives; he didn't know if it mattered; he saw sense in both sides of the debate, but he did not know where truth lay; he didn't know if
Communist tyranny would prove worse in the long run than the tyrannies of Ky or Thieu or Khanhhe simply didn't know. And who
did? Who really did? (313)
Thirteen years later in The Things They Carried O'Brien has come no closer to understanding the war. He
repeats this earlier uncertainty with a series of rhetorical questions: "Was it a civil war? A war of
national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the
USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a
nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold
War? What about dominoes?" (44).
As a consequence of the postmodern epistemology and aesthetic that have come to dominate literary
representations of the war, Herr cannot tell whether 1954, the year in which the French were defeated at
Dien Bien Phu and in which President Eisenhower pledged U.S. support for

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Diem, or the forced migration of the Cherokee in 1838 is a more likely date for the beginning of the
Vietnam War. From a Marxist perspective, there is a continuity between these events, since both resulted
from colonialist expansion, from the need to acquire and control territory and increase national power.
But Herr's and O'Brien's cataloguing of interpretations and questions is meant to suggest the unfathomable
complexity and moral ambiguity that define Vietnam, not to detail the historical continuities of American
imperialism. Such complexity mirrors postmodernists' contention that no explanation has a privileged
connection to the truth. And it is reminiscent of literary culture's traditional sense that the world is far too
rich and ambiguous to be reduced to a simple political lesson. To O'Brien's set of questions and to the
general feeling that Vietnam is unreal and inexplicable, we could append another set posed by Michael
Parenti: "Why has the U.S. government never supported social revolutionary forces against right-wing
governments? Could it possibly do so? If not, why not? Why in the post-war era has the U.S. overthrown a
dozen or more popularly elected left-reformist democracies? Why has it fostered close relations with just
about all the right-wing autocracies on earth?" (Sword and the Dollar, 191). The most logical and
coherent explanation for this history is that in its foreign policy the United States has placed the interests
of capital above almost all other concerns. While some of the questions O'Brien and others ask may be
difficult to answer with absolute certitude, any general understanding of the Vietnam War should start
with recognition of America's consistent support for right-wing regimes and its opposition to left-
reformist democracies in order to, in Parenti's words, "mak[e] the world safe for plutocracy" (Sword and
the Dollar, 191). Yet in these catalogues of questions and indeterminacies no one points to the kind of
argument offered by Parenti, not even as one out of many possible interpretations. While literary critics
may agree that all explanations have potentially the same connection to truth, they almost invariably
exclude from consideration Marxist theories of imperialism. In seeking to understand why Kiowa died,
O'Brien writes, "when a man died, there had to be blame. You could blame the war. You could blame the
idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the enemy. You could
blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were
bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole
nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or
an old man

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in Omaha who forgot to vote" (198199). The only certain cause of Kiowa's death, according to O'Brien,
is its direct cause: "In the field the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or
plain stupidity" (199). Yet some causes are more proximate and explanatory than others. Robert
McNamara is more responsible for deaths in Vietnam than an old man in Omaha who forgets to vote. The
board of directors of Dow Chemical are more blameworthy than people who switched channels at the
mention of politics. The people who made the war and the munitions makers (both of whom, unlike Karl
Marx and, earlier, Ho Chi Minh, O'Brien refuses to name) deserve the blame.
Besides ignoring the ideological complicity of the postmodern refusal to distinguish between fact and
fiction, between true and false histories, contemporary literary critics, in their repeated endorsement of a
postmodern rendering of the war, have failed to recognize that postmodernism itself arose during and has
taken part in the reactionary rewriting of the war and repudiation of left radicalism. As Alex Callinicos
explains:
The political odyssey of the 1968 generation is crucial to the widespread acceptance of the idea of a postmodern epoch in the 1980s.
This was the decade when those radicalized in the 1960s and early 1970s began to enter middle age. Usually they did so with all hope
of socialist revolution goneindeed, often having ceased to believe in the desirability of any such revolution. Most of them had by then
come to occupy some sort of professional, managerial or administrative position, to have become members of the new middle class, at
a time when the overconsumptionist dynamic of Western capitalism offered this class rising living standards. This conjuncturethe
prosperity of the Western new middle class combined with the political disillusionment of many of its most articulate membersprovides
the context to the proliferating talk of postmodernism. (168)
As upwardly mobile professionals entering managerial positions (or as those who seek to do so), many
contemporary academic literary critics are sympathetic to postmodernism because it gives their
scholarship a radical edge at no cost, and sometimes even at benefit, to their careers. For those who write
of O'Brien's deconstruction of fact and fiction, who associate the Viet Cong with chaos and the Americans
with a rage for order, who refuse to impose any form of coherent narrative on the Vietnam War, little they
write is significantly at odds with dominant belief. Their critique might be more complex and even more
progressive than that of establishment policy makers, but it rarely confronts the issue of class,
exploitation/imperialism and its connection to the war.

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The reception of The Things They Carried, therefore, suggests that even into the 1990s, dominant modes
of literary analysis are frequently used to avoid serious ideological and materialist critique, while
seeming to do the opposite. Criticism that has countered such prevailing views in order to read Vietnam
War literature for what it reveals about U.S. imperialism and capitalist hegemony is atypical of both
traditional and contemporary critical practice, within and without the academy; it appeared only after the
tumult of the 1960s and the horrors of the war; and it is now under steady assault, rhetorically and
financially, from the forces of capital.

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Conclusion
True War Stories

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Of the many novels and memoirs about the Vietnam War, whether juvenile potboilers, realistic
autobiographies, or highly wrought experimental fictions, almost all have been concerned with historical
accuracy. From depictions of U.S.-sponsored terrorism during the French-Indochina War to
considerations of how the war is misremembered by contemporary generations, these texts have been
preoccupied with telling the truth. Graham Greene opens The Quiet American with an apology for taking
the name Phuong from an acquaintance in Saigon and for using her apartment as Fowler's apartment. He
also declares The Quiet American "not a piece of history" but "a story about a few imaginary characters."
Ironically, Greene's apology and his disclaimer that he is merely writing a story had the effect of
foregrounding his novel's roots in contemporary history, as was evidenced by reviewers' passionate
denunciations of his anti-Americanism. Writing 25 years later in his autobiographical Ways of Escape,
Greene was far less apologetic about his reliance upon contemporary history, declaring "there is more
direct reportage in The Quiet American [than] any other [novel] I have written" (203). Covering a press
conference in Hanoi, accompanying a French dive-bomber pilot on a mission, patrolling alongside
Foreign Legion troops, seeing a dead child in a ditch, Greene reported on events he witnessed firsthand.
Similarly, in their "factual epilogue" William Lederer and Eugene Burdick declare the many incidents in
The Ugly American to be barely fictionalized accounts of real episodes involving American foreign
service officials. They claim to "have taken part in the events which have inspired this book, and in both
the records and in the fields [to] have studied the Communist way to power" (271). Robin Moore too
claims that he took part in or witnessed the actions he recounts. He opens his novel by declaring The
Green Berets "a book of truth" (9). These claims to factual accuracy led to the Pentagon's forcing Moore
to concede that The Green Berets was fiction. Likewise, John Clark Pratt's The Laotian Fragments upset
the Air Force, which delayed the novel's publication. But whereas Moore's problem was asserting fiction
to be fact, Pratt's was including too much fact in his fiction. His very aesthetic, with its repeated use of

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official documents and news reports, is an attempt to ground his text in the reality of war in Indochina. To
the Air Force, The Laotian Fragments suffered from too much verisimilitude.
Dispatches, Michael Herr's nonfiction account of his year in Vietnam, uses a self-conscious style and
fragmented narrative to render the war more truthfully. Herr intends to document the true stories of grunts
in their own idiom, thereby conveying a reality that could not be conveyed through documentary realism
or conventional journalism. Sam Hughes in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country searches as well for the truth
about Vietnam. In her passionate desire to know what Vietnam was really like, Sam struggles against a
commercial culture that has obscured, distorted, and erased the war. And in The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien incessantly remembers and revises his experiences in Vietnam, approaching these from
various angles and foregrounding his imaginative reconstruction in an attempt to record as faithfully as
possible the truth about Vietnam; he even titles one of his stories "How to Tell a True War Story." Given
Vietnam War authors' preoccupation with telling the truth about the war, one might expect that reviewers
and critics would have looked closely at these texts' historical backgrounds. But this background seems to
have been strenuously avoided by American literary culture.
Initially, critical appraisals of Vietnam War literature concentrated on traditional "literary" elements and
read these texts as examinations of a general, transhistorical human condition. In writing about The Quiet
American, for instance, critics transformed Thomas Fowler's neutralism in the face of anticolonial and
anticommunist violence into an existential dilemma. Saigon became a microcosm of twentieth-century
politics, Fowler a twentieth-century Everyman. And French Indochina circa 1952 became a metaphorical
landscape on which were played out the complexities and moral uncertainties of human existence. From
its publication in 1956 until the mid-1970s, critics ignored the specific history Greene documented. The
historical figures and incidents Greene wrote aboutGeneral The, the Cao Dai sect, French use of Foreign
Legionnaires and American-supplied napalm, U.S. involvement in terrorism, the sexual exploitation of
Vietnamese womenwere almost completely ignored by literary critics for the sake of discussions of
Greene's Christian suffering and existential despair.
Published eleven years later, Victor Kolpacoff's The Prisoners of Quai Dong received a comparable
critical treatment. Praised for what it revealed about men in a moral crisis and about the horror of all
wars, The

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Prisoners of Quai Dong was not examined for what it revealed about the behavior of U.S. troops and the
nature of U.S. policy in Vietnam in 1967. No one asked whether Kolpacoff's depiction of the torture of a
Vietnamese prisoner who may or may not have been Viet Cong accurately documented the treatment of
prisoners by the U. S. military and its allies. There was no discussion as to whether this torture was a
common practice or whether such practices were sanctioned by the U.S. military. And no critic read
Kreuger's imprisonment for refusal to follow orders as a moral response to an immoral war or as
evidence of a growing dissension within the military. At the height of the war, no one seemed to consider
it appropriate to read The Prisoners of Quai Dong against the very war it sought to documenton the
contrary, it was praised for transcending such ephemera.
This ahistoricism did not last, however. As literary culture became politicized (partly in response to the
war), critics began to consider how these texts functioned ideologically, as well as how they critiqued
dominant ideological belief. This criticism has tended toward one of two focusescultural myth or
postmodernism. The former approach is premised on a belief that societies are organized around a set of
governing myths or defining narratives. According to this view, Americans have perceived their society
as different from others, as a city on the hill, a working out of providence. Unlike other nations, whose
territorial expansion and violent conquest have been motivated by the quest for riches and power,
America has perceived its expansion as nobly motivatedan errand into the wilderness that tests character,
a beacon of democracy that shines into benighted lands. Although challenged by historical events, this
narrative persists within much popular entertainment, political rhetoric, and mass media discourse.
Recent controversies over national history standards, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the
New World, and the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit derive in part from an unwillingness to question this
founding national narrative. For most academics, however, this myth is perceived as having a direct
ideological function. Much of their work, therefore, has been aimed at explaining the continuity and the
revising of this mythand revealing the history it has distorted, a history of economic exploitation, racial
intolerance, and racist violence.
Critics have placed The Ugly American within this tradition of racist justifications for American
expansion. The belief that the Vietnamese are easily manipulated by superior Americans, that Americans
know (and

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do) what is right for them, and that Vietnamese desires should be subjugated to American foreign policy
goals is seen as a continuation of the objectification of Indians that has been an integral part of the
American character since Puritans viewed Indians as animals, objects, agents of the devilas obstacles to
their righteous taming of a new land. Critics have repeatedly read the Vietnam War as a continuation of
this racism and violence and as a demonstration of the persistent disorder within the American psyche.
The Green Berets has been read as a variant of this same cultural myth. American guerrilla forces have
been perceived as versions of the frontier heroNatty Bumppo, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett. Possessing
the wilderness skills of Indians, the Green Berets, in Moore's account, have superior intellects, more
refined moral sensibilities, and access to the latest Western technologies. Thus they can defeat the natives
on their own terms and in their own land and can do so while maintaining the moral high ground that
Americans automatically inhabit. To most critics, however, this mythic evocation serves merely as a
crude justification for America's violent expansion.
If critics see Lederer & Burdick and Moore as crudely and uncritically reformulating traditional cultural
myth to fit the American mission against communism in southeast Asia, later Vietnam War authors are
seen to foreground these myths in order to critique them. Most of these authors are said to demonstrate the
pernicious effects of traditional nationalist myth, especially as it has been conventionalized by American
popular culture in war movies and westerns. In Vietnam War literature, the young men sent to fight are
shown again and again to have had their impressions of war, bravery, masculinity, nationality, and self-
identity shaped by the fantasies of the culture industry, by the celluloid heroism of John Wayne, Errol
Flynn, Audie Murphy, and so on.
This assault upon the kinds of nationalist myths conveyed in The Ugly American and The Green Berets is
necessary, according to Vietnam War veterans, because their own eagerness to fight in Vietnam was
shaped by popular culture. That this myth was influential in shaping the attitudes of many young
Americans who went to war seems undeniable. That government and military officials and business
executives who determined American policy in Indochina also had their attitudes shaped by the myth of a
noble, providential America, however, seems less certain. I believe it is unlikely that those making,
financing, and implementing American militarism in Indochina and elsewhere were so deluded by cultural

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myth that they perceived their efforts to be a continuation of the phenomenon of U.S. good will. And even
if they were so deluded, their actions were motivated not by myth but by the need to perpetuate capitalist
hegemony.
Yet for many critics cultural myth has just this sort of determining power. America's war in Vietnam is
seen as motivated and justified by, and conducted according to, such mythic national beliefs. This focus
on the shaping power of American cultural myth has obscured recognition of the cold-hearted calculation
behind U.S. policy. Much has been written to show how Vietnam War literature either continues a
traditional myth that stretches back to the Puritans or critiques this myth. However well-intentioned, this
focus on the continuity of the frontier myth has served as a mystification, a means of shifting blame and
obscuring the real causes of the war. I do not mean to imply that material conditions alone influence
people's actions and shape their consciousness. As a form of ideology, cultural myths are undoubtedly
influential. The problem as I see it is that cultural and literary critics too often merely identify the
continuity of these myths, focusing excessively on their literary and historical roots, rather than on their
connection to contemporary material conditions. They do not adequately examine how these mythic
narratives are created and distributed nor how information that counters these narratives is institutionally
marginalized. And in seeing myths as semi-autonomous transhistorical narratives, literary and cultural
critics tend to overemphasize the collective national psyche and to overlook the force of capitalist
institutions. To put it another way, critics preoccupy themselves with culture as superstructural expression
and ignore the economic base that influences these expressions.
The other main thread in critical discussions of Vietnam War literature is postmodernism. Both
Dispatches and The Things They Carried have been championed as brilliant evocations of
postmodernity. A critical consensus has developed that the war was postmodern, particularly because it
eroded belief in an essential connection between language and experience, between representations of
reality and reality itself. This skepticism developed out of a recognition that official discourseswhether
military press briefings, conventional reporting, political speeches, fact-finding missions, position
papers, even documentary footagewere woefully inadequate, were nothing short of fabrication. Such
epistemological skepticism was influenced as well by the sense-shattering nature of combat. Its chaos and
confusion, its unpredictability, its sheer exhilaration and terror

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seemed to overwhelm conventional forms of literary representation. The surreality of this war in
particular, with its high-tech weaponry arrayed against a nearly medieval culture, its seemingly invisible
enemy, its frequently entangling landscape and its absurd and labyrinthine military and political logic was
seen as defying realist and positivist conventions, resulting in a belief that standard literary
representations falsify the war and that, consequently, only postmodern literary aesthetics approximate a
truthful rendering of the war.
To cultural myth and postmodernism can be added a third critical approach: gender critique. In many
essays and one bookSusan Jeffords's Remasculinization of Americacritics have begun to examine
Vietnam War literature through the framework of gender. Whereas earlier approaches tended to praise
this literature, gender-centered critiques have been far more critical. Formalists praised Vietnam War
narratives' complexity and ambiguity; cultural critics, while attacking unsophisticated, propagandistic
novels like The Ugly American and The Green Berets, praised the self-conscious critique of American
cultural myth made in later Vietnam War narratives; and postmodernists praised these texts' emphasis on
the surrealism, linguistic indeterminacy, and fundamental unknowability of the war. But gender critics
have read against these texts, identifying their frequent misogyny, their insensitive depictions of
prostitution and rape, their uncritical endorsement of ''male" and repudiation of "female" virtues, and their
complicity in remasculinizing American culture.
Critics have also begun to read the depictions of Vietnamese in these texts against common Western
stereotypes of Asians. This approach, too, tends to critique rather than praise, to see that Vietnamese are
depicted stereotypically as cruel, inscrutable, mysterious, exotic, natural, and sensualwhen, that is, they
are individualized at all. Often Vietnamese exist merely as a threatening background noise and local
color, barely separable from village dogs and water buffalo. These Western perceptions of Asians are
read in the context of a colonial discourse that seeks to justify its enterprise by asserting Western
superiority. Both gender and postcolonial critiques offer important insights into how dominant discourses
have shaped perceptions and furthered male and Western hegemony.
However, despite their differences, these approaches, with their varying degrees of critique, are united by
a lack of historicizing. Traditional literary critics see these texts in terms of literary historyforms, types,
themes, and so forthrather than in terms of a larger world history, and

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they fail to consider the specific relation of these literary topoi to a material history. Cultural critics, on
the other hand, allude to historybut it is an amorphous, discursive, nonmaterialist history. By tracing the
continuity of the rhetorical conventions and mythic narratives that have accompanied and been used to
justify American westward expansion, these critics frequently displace a focus on the construction and
implementation of military strategies and official policies with a focus on transhistorical discourse. In this
analysis, anticommunism becomes an extension of Puritan Manicheanism, the strategy of attrition becomes
a variant of Indian-hating. Although feminists and postcolonialists have been more willing to refer to
contemporary history, their focuses on gender and race have similarly caused them to overlook the
political economy of the Vietnam War, the connections between America's (and the West's) economic
interests and an anticommunist war in Indochina.
Every literary textand the reception of literary textstakes place within a society in which a dominant
ideology (and its proponents) fights to maintain legitimacy against other ideologies (and their
proponents). It is a struggle for the right to be perceived as common sense, as a society's defining belief
system. All literary texts (and all cultural products) are marked by ideological struggle. A novel's
ideology can be ascertained by examining its character system, its aesthetic, and its choice of detailsthe
very world it constructsand by seeing how this fictional world works, what it defines as normative and
deviant. I believe it important, therefore, that this fictional world be contrasted with the history and
culture and social relations it represents. The point of doing so is not merely to show inaccuracies, since
literary texts inevitably collapse and distort. The point is to ask, why these specific inaccuracies and
distortions? Why in The Quiet American is Pyle so ludicrously inexperienced and unintuitive? What
understanding can be derived from the psychedelic mosaic of Dispatches? Why does Mason have Sam,
Emmett, and Mamaw come together at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial?
Whether a polemical work of social realism or an experimental fiction, literary texts are implicated in a
war over the meaning of events. The ideology of a given text may be unfocused, contradictory, and
difficult to state definitively, but it is there nonetheless. Yet despite the politicization of the humanities,
materialist critique, which situates a literary text in its historical context and examines how the text itself
functions as ideology, how it disguises or reveals the operations of power and the systematic
reproduction

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of inequality and exploitation, is made infrequently and incompletely by critics, commercial and
academic.
This has been especially true for critical analyses of Vietnam War literature. In examining this literature,
critics have focused on literary devices and American cultural discourses but have ignored these texts'
bases in historical reality. Critics look at the representations of this historical background and connect
these representations to earlier American culture, but they rarely consider the reality that undergirds both
these representations and the process of literary reception. No incident in recent American history has
created a more contentious ideological struggle than the Vietnam War. Literary texts about the war,
regardless of their assertions of neutrality or uncertainty, are inevitably implicated in this struggle. Yet, by
and large, critics have ignored the demystifying potential of materialist analysis. The lack of this critique,
I believe, is evidence of a literary culture facing significant institutional pressures to adhere to an
unacknowledged but unavoidable ideological consensus. These pressures have promoted a critical
practice that has consistently aestheticized and thus depoliticized literary texts, particularly those
concerned with still divisive social issues such as the Vietnam War. Thus while examining a centuries-
old British imperialism in innumerable articles, books, and conferences, literary culture has ignored
American imperialism of the last few decades. Indeed, for American literary culture it is as if there were
no such thing as U.S. imperialism.
In overlooking a materialist critique, literary scholars have had little to say about the systematic terror the
United States inflicted upon Vietnam, about how Vietnam War authors' concerns for the individual
experiences of G.I.s have obscured this terror, or about how this mystification coheres with the dominant
culture's rewriting of the war. Reading Vietnam War literature and critical appraisals of it, one would
scarcely be aware that the United States dropped eight million tons of bombs and 400,000 tons of napalm;
used death squads to assassinate more than 20,000 alleged members of the NLF; sprayed 18 million
gallons of chemical defoliants, with an ongoing legacy of cancer, miscarriages, birth defects, and
poisoned agricultural lands; relied upon a staggering arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, including AC-47
gunships (which fired 18,000 rounds per minute), B-52 bombers (which carried 150 tons of bombs),
portable heaters (which raised the temperature inside Viet Cong tunnels to 1,000 degrees), and cluster
bombs (which released 180,000 metal

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"fleshettes"and which were redesigned in fiberglass so as to be undetectable to X-rays)all of which
resulted in the killing of two million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, the wounding of another
three million, and the displacement of more than 14 million people in southeast Asia (Parenti, Sword and
the Dollar, 4345; Young, 191).
Nor would one learn that an important motivation for fighting this cruel war was to demonstrate to other
nations the cost of attempted abdication from the capitalist sphere. Having removed itself from the
capitalist sphere after a 20-year war, Vietnam faced a worldwide economic boycott (not lifted until
1989). With massive debts as a consequence of the war, Vietnam was forced to accede to the
International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) draconian structural reforms, which entailed (in the IMF's words)
"lowering real labor costs, cutting back or eliminating subsidies to consumers and state enterprises, and
reducing capital outlays" (quoted in Kolko, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace, 34). The results of these
market reforms have been sadly predictable: increased foreign investment, growing disparity between
rich and poor, restrictions on labor organizing, sharp deterioration in education and health services, and
increases in prostitution, drug addiction, and unemployment (Kolko, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace,
102111).
As I write this, U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright has concluded a trip to Vietnamthe first by a
senior U.S. official in more than two decadesin preparation for normalizing relations between the two
countries. At the same time, American corporations are exploiting Vietnam's vast pool of cheap labor.
Nike, for example, with factories in several locations, including Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon),
pays its laborers an average of 20 cents per hour, which amounts to a daily wage of $1.60. Vietnam Labor
Watch reports this sum to be less than the cost of three simple meals, and it describes workers as saying
"they literally have to make a daily choice between eating a balanced meal and paying rent for [their]
single room." While Nike's laborers are earning less than two dollars per day, its CEO, Philip Knight, is
receiving more than $2,000 per day in salary, and nearly that much in bonus pay. Pitchman and sometime
basketball player Michael Jordan is paid $40 million annually by Nikeabout double the combined income
of Nike's entire workforce in southeast Asia. Given this background, it is more than a little ironic that
Albright scolded the Vietnamese for human rights violations while saying nothing about working
conditions and salaries in U.S.-owned factories. She made certain that Vietnam agreed to abide by

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international copyright law, while ignoring its violations of international labor standards. For Albright
and for capitalist elites, intellectual property rights far outweigh human rights concerns. Indeed, the
exploitation of cheap labor to maximize the profits of CEOs, boards of directors, and large shareholders
is precisely why the war was fought in the first placeto further global capitalist hegemony. Yet this
understanding has seemed beyond the pale of respectable consideration for American literary culture
when examining novels and memoirs of the Vietnam War.

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Notes
Chapter 3
1. In his 1973 introduction Greene explained some of the historical background that shaped The Quiet
American. According to Greene, "The Life photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well
placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a
puss-puss driver still upright after his legs had been blown off. This photograph was reproduced in an
American propaganda magazine published in Manila over a title 'the work of Ho Chi Minh,' although
General The had promptly and proudly claimed the bomb as his own. There was certainly evidence of
contacts between the American services and 'General' The. A jeep with the bodies of two American
women was found by a French rubber planter presumably they had been killed by the Viet Minh, but what
were they doing on the plantation? The bodies were promptly collected by the American embassy, and
nothing more was heard of the incident. Not a word appeared in the Press. An American Consul was
arrested late at night on the bridge to Dakow carrying plastic bombs in his car. Again the incident was
hushed up for diplomatic reasons" ("Introduction," xviii xix).
2. In a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, Theodore Draper recounts his experiences in
Guatemala in 1950. "When I wanted to travel by train," Draper writes, "I found that the International
Railways of Central America, valued at $80 million, were owned by United Fruit. When I wanted to send
a telegraph message, I was told that the telegraph was controlled by United Fruit. So was the local
newspaper. When I went to the American embassy for information, I was told that the most complete files
were possessed by the United Fruit office in Guatemala City. When I wanted to see the vast United Fruit
banana plantation, I was taken there in a United Fruit plane, which was the only way to get there. The only
decent hospital was run by United Fruit at its plantation. Except for a few minor coffee plantations and
some handicrafts, United Fruit's bananas were the only important industry in the country" (18).
3. Chinua Achebe makes a similar argument about another English novelist who traveled in and wrote
about the Third World: Joseph Conrad. Achebe writes that "It might be argued that the attitude to the
African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad's but that of his fictional character, Marlow, and that

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far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly, Conrad
appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral
universe of his story. But if Conrad's intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the
moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems to be totally wasted because he
neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the
actions and opinion of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad's power to make that
provision if he had thought it necessary. Conrad seems to approve of Marlow, with only minor
reservationsa fact reinforced by the similarities between their two careers" (910).
Chapter 4
1. Fitzgerald also quotes from General Maxwell Taylor's description of the pacification program before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "We have always been able to move in the areas where the
security was good enough. But I have often said it is very hard to plant the corn outside the stockade when
the Indians are still around. We have to get the Indians farther away in many of the provinces to make
good progress" (quoted in Fitzgerald, 491). Similarly, Slotkin cites one American veteran who spoke of
"The Indian idea the only gook is a dead gook" and another who explained that cutting the ears off of dead
Viet Cong was "like scalps, you know like from Indians. Some people were on an Indian trip over there"
(quoted in Fatal Environment, 17).
2. Chomsky's essay also brings into question the notion that the antiwar movement consistently denounced
American soldiers. Chomsky writes, "Soldiers are unwitting instruments of terror; one does not blame or
attack the club that is used to bludgeon someone to death. The soldiers, after all, are in much the same
position as the draft resistors. If they obey orders, the become brutalized by what they do; if they do not,
the personal consequences are severe. It is a situation that deserves compassion, not abuse" ("On
Resistance," 68).
3. Ironically, in this very issue of the NYRB Philip Rahv reviews Howe's The Radical Imagination and
derides his "used-up formulas of the Old Left" (10). In a response several weeks later Howe gives
evidence of his alienation from the New Left, declaring that "the 'radicalism' now arising in the
intellectual world is in quality and content crude, fashion-driven, smugly moralistic, and supremely
verbal" (Howe and Rahv, 36). In his response to Howe's response, Rahv suggests that Howe "cannot face
any challenge to his comprehensive claims of being a leader of the Left. How else explain his obsessive
raging against the young people of the New Left? Can it be that he is infuriated with them because they
refuse to accept him as the minence grise of American radicalism?" (Howe and Rahv, 39).

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Chapter 5
1. The consequences of applying postmodern epistemology to the experience of war were apparent in
January 1991 when Baudrillard wrote an essay declaring that the Persian Gulf War would never happen
because it was a mass-media simulation. In his subsequent essay, "The Gulf War Has Not Taken Place,"
published in March of the same year, Baudrillard writes, "The true belligerents are those who thrive on
the ideology of the truth of this war, despite the fact that the war itself exerts its ravages on another level,
through faking, through hyperreality, the simulacrum, through all those strategies of psychological
deterrence that make play with facts and images, with the precession of the virtual over the real. If we
have no practical knowledge of this warand such knowledge is out of the questionthen let us at least have
the skeptical intelligence to reject the probability of all information, of all images whatever their source.
To be more 'virtual' than the events themselves, not to reestablish some criterion of truthfor this we lack
the means. But at least we can avoid being dupes" (quoted in Norris, 194).When writing of the Vietnam
War as "postmodern" no critic has gone so far as to argue that the war did not take place. However, to
those sensitive to the importance of an accurate historical rendering of the war, the frequent arguments
asserting its unknowability and unrepresentability come uncomfortably close.
Chapter 6
1. While most reviewers generally adhere to dominant ideological views, Yardley, editor of the
Washington Post's Book World, is strikingly sympathetic to dominant beliefs. In an article on the politics
of academic literary studies, written during the 1996 MLA convention in Washington, he attacked courses
on the literature of American business because these were, shockingly, often critical of business. And in
another article he saw Harper-Collins's dismantling of Basic Books as a justifiable response to the
beneficial corrective pressures of the market, an "inefficient and archaic" book publishing industry
receiving a needed "kick in the derriere" from Rupert Murdoch (F6).
2. Examples of working-class ignorance of its own history are plentiful. Herbert Gutman tells the moving
story of Camella Teoli, "the thirteen-year-old daughter of Italian immigrants, scalped by a machine for
twisting cotton into thread" (396) at the Washington Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. As the 1912 textile
strike in Lawrence began, she was called to testify at a congressional hearing. This testimony, according
to Paul Cowan, "became front-page news all over America" (quoted in Gutman, 396). When talking to
Camella Teoli's daughter Mathilda, Cowan discovered she "knew nothing at all about [her mother's]
political pastnothing about her trip to Washington nothing about the sensational impact her mother had
made

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on America's conscience," even though "the accident had left Camella Teoli with a permanent scara
bald spot toward the back of her head that was six inches in diameter. Practically every day of her life,
Mathilda had combed her mother's hair into a bun that disguised the spot" (quoted in Gutman, 396).
A similar, though less dramatic historical ignorance existed in my own family, where legend has it that
my grandfather, with coal-blackened nose and brows, appeared in the foreground of a famous
photograph of child laborers in a Pennsylvania mine. No one in my family knew of the background of
this photograph, that it was taken by Lewis Hine while he was working for the National Child Labor
Committee, that Hine often had to hide his camera or pose as fire inspector or insurance agent to take
these pictures, or that he documented conditions not just in mines but in factories, canneries, textile
mills, and various agricultural industries.
3. Perhaps the most striking example of cinematic revisionism was the Soviet takeover filmmovies which,
harkening back to the anticommunist films of the 1950s, described American life under Soviet occupation.
In the same year that In Country was published Invasion U.S.A., starring Chuck Norris, and Red Dawn
were released. Two years later ABC television aired a similarly themed miniseries, Amerika, the
fascistic misspelling used by leftists to denounce a capitalist and imperialist America used now to suggest
totalitarianism in a Soviet-occupied America. No wonder, then, that Mason tells us that Sam's classmates
"voted in favor of the invasion of Grenada. They were afraid of the Russians" (88). The country seemed
about to be attacked. (And if Red Dawn was any indication, it would be high school students who would
lead the guerrilla war against the occupying Soviet army.) These movies can be understood as rather
explicit attempts to revise the history of the Vietnam War: America rather than Vietnam is invaded;
Americans rather than the Vietnamese fight as guerrillas against an imperial power. Martin notes that
these films are "predicated on the notion that the Vietnam syndrome has sapped the American people's
will to resist." He goes on to argue that "such films were attempting to give cinematic expression to the
rhetoric of the New Right [as] evidenced [by] the presence of Nicaraguan Sandinista troops in the various
invasion scenariosa representational fall-out from the new domino theory that had come to fashion Latin
American foreign policy along lines that resembled the discredited Vietnam policy" (123).
4. Mason shows the persistence of racism in the New South several times in the novel. At one point a
character jokes, "How do you reckon they know if a nigger's born a blue baby?" (96). At another point
Sam stays up listening to a radio talk show in which "college students called in their opinions on world
issues. Several of them called up in favor of the Ku Klux Klan, denying it was violent. 'They have a right
to their opinion,' most of the callers insisted" (151).

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Chapter 7
1. The blurbs cited on the Penguin paperback give a good idea of the kind of hyperbole that greeted The
Things They Carried. "As good as any piece of literature can get" (Chicago Sun-Times), "one of the most
persuasive works of any kind to arise out of any war" (Hartford Courant), "a matchless literary book"
(Kansas City Star), "writing so powerful that it steals your breath'' (Milwaukee Journal),The Thinqs
They Carried "joins the work of Crane and Hemingway and Mailer as great war literature" (Tampa
Tribune & Timed), and Tim O'Brien is "the best American writer of his generation" (San Francisco
Examiner).

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Index
A
Achebe, Chinua, 223n. 3
Afghanistan, 79, 196
Ahmad, Aijaz, 46, 53
Albright, Madeline, 220
Algeria, 116, 120
Allen, Walter, 63-64, 66, 196
Allott Miriam, 71, 73
Althusser, Louis, 40
American Studies, 83, 100, 102
Amerika, 226n. 3
Angola, 10
anti-Americanism, 27, 56, 60, 64, 65, 67-69, 76, 77, 79, 80, 85
anticommunism, 10, 20, 25, 45, 46, 50, 56-60, 64, 65, 66, 76, 79, 108, 141, 176, 200, 204
antiwar movement, 4, 8, 9, 54, 108, 119, 121, 122, 140, 145, 166
Apocalypse Now, 150
Appy, Christian, 172
Arbenz Guzman, Jacobo, 56, 61-62
Architectural Digest, 23
Argentina, 10
Art of Japanese Management, The, 156
Atkins, John, 69
Atlantic, 9, 19, 44
Aubrey, James, 128-30
B
Bagdikian, Ben, 21, 27, 29
Baggules, John, 118
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 148
Bangkok, 2, 34
Bao Dai, 62
Barnes and Noble, 23
Barnett, Richard, 35
Barnum, P. T., 200
Barthelme, Donald, 148
Bartolovich, Crystal, 99
Bates, Milton, 130-31, 205
Baudrillard, Jean, 152, 164, 225n. 1
Bawer, Bruce, 34, 36
Baym, Nina, 50
Beatles, The, 137
Beidler, Philip, 7, 110-12, 125, 198-200
Belgium, 129
Bennett, William, 44
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 102
Berman, Russell, 28
Brub, Michael, 12, 46-47, 52
Bhaskar, Roy, 201
Bhopal, India, 178
Bien Hoa, 65
Bigart, Homer, 3
Black, George, 109
Blais, Ellen, 186-88
Bloom, Alan, 44
Bloom, Harold (Bloomian view), 138
Boardman, Gwenn, 72, 74
Bolivians, 109
Bombeck, Erma, 178
Bonn, Maria, 147, 153, 159
Book-of-the-Month Club, 29, 97
Booth, David, 174
Borders, 23
Borges, Jorge Luis, 152
Bosch, Juan, 109
Boston, Anne, 168
Boston Globe, 9
Boy George, 186
Boyd, Richard, 201
Boyers, Robert, 78, 81

Page 246
Bradbury, Malcolm, 83
Brazil, 10
Breughel, 201
Brinkmeyer, Robert, 178-80, 187
Brint, Stephen, 15, 19, 30, 32, 43, 53
British Petroleum, 28
Browne, Malcolm, The New Faces of War, 105
Broyles, William, 186
Bryan, C. D. B., 137
Buchanan, John (Jack), M.I.A. Hunter, 110
Buckley, Tom, 154
Buell, Edgar "Pop," 131
Burdick, Eugene. See Lederer, William
Burma, 91
Bush, George, 44, 159, 205
business:
Americanization program, 25
anti-democratic activism, 5
concessions to labor, 4
crisis of democracy, 4-5, 26, 139-42
foreign policy, influence on, 176-77
multiculturalism, 99
opposition to the Vietnam War, 119
propaganda, 25-26, 140-41
structural domination of, 10, 185
Business Week, 99
Buttinger, Joseph, 95-97
C
California at Santa Cruz, University of, 45
Callinicos, Alex, 208
capitalism:
literary culture, 15
popular culture, 176
poststructuralism, 152, 203-04
threats to, 4-5, 25-26
Vietnam War, 5, 7, 54, 87-88, 99-100, 120, 220
Capouya, Emile, 109
Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War, 125, 130, 136, 145, 146
Carey, Alex, 25-26
Carmichael, Stokely, 32
Carter, Jimmy, Carter Administration, 139, 144
Carver, Raymond, 173
Case, Senator Clifford, 119
Castillo Armas, Carlos, 61-62
Cavanaugh, John, 35
Central Intelligence Agency, 58, 62, 67, 74, 95, 129, 131, 145
Cheney, Lynne, 44
Chevron, 190
Chicago Sun-Times, 227n. 1
Chicago, University of, 45
China, 93
Chinese, depiction of, 113
Chomsky, Noam:
At War with Asia, 9
Counter-Revolutionary Violence, 27
Manufacturing Consent, 20, 36
mass media, 10, 20
New York Review of Books, 31, 121, 138, 139
"On Resistance," 121-22, 224n. 2
The Pentagon Papers, 62, 63, 65, 111, 128
publishing, history of, 9
"The Responsibility of Intellectuals," 9
similarity between journalists and academics, 43
torture by North Vietnamese, 143
Turning the Tide, 35
U.S. geopolitical aims in Vietnam, 79
U.S. immorality in Vietnam, 204-05
Christian Science Monitor, 94, 172
Christopher, Renny, 102-03, 112-14
Chrysler Corporation, 41
class:
gender, 187
literary culture, 31, 52-53
race, 51
Vietnam War, 150, 160-61, 167, 177, 181, 183, 185, 190, 194
Cleveland Plain Dealer, 23
Clinton, Bill, 205
Cohen, Robert, 45
Colombia, 10
Commentary, 19, 50, 57, 59, 66, 79
Committee for Cultural Freedom, 57
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, 59, 62, 132
Commonweal, 109, 167
communism:
duplicity, 90-91
evils of, 9
face of the devil, 92
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global threat, 9, 25, 57, 58, 65, 92-94, 104
timetable for world conquest, 61, 91
Vietnamese, 58, 59
Communist Party, 57
Con Son prison, 144
Congo, 129
Connaroe, Joel, 170, 182
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 128-30, 223n. 3
conspiracy theory, 13-14
Cowan, Paul, 225n. 2
Cowley, Malcolm, 73
Critique, 197
Cuba, 104
D
Daedelus, 19
Daily-Intelligencer, The, 166
Dali, Salvador, 201
Daly, William, 29
Davis, Angela, 45
Davis, Robert Gorham, 56-59
Davis, Thulani, 168, 170
Deer Hunter, The, 166
Del Vecchio, John, The 13th Valley, 136, 201
Derrida, Jacques, 53
Details, 23
DeVitis, A. A., 68, 73-74
Diamond, Sarah, 141
Dien Bien Phu, 206
Disney Corporation, 28
Dissent, 95
Dixon, Marlene, 45
Dominican Republic, 109
Donahue, Phil, 178
Dostoevski, Feodor, 61
Dow Chemical, 171, 174
Dowd, Maureen, 44
Dowie, Mark, 27
Draper, Theodore, 223n. 2
Drinnon, Richard, 98-99, 100, 102
D'Souza, Dinesh, 32, 44
Ddintsev, Vladimir, Not by Bread Alone, 94
Dulles, Allen, 101
Dulles, John Foster, 93
Durbrow, Ambassador Elbridge, 92
Du Pont, 29, 174
Dux, John, 177
Dwyer, June, 183-89
Dyer, Geoff, 194
E
Eagleton, Terry, 42, 47, 155
East Timor, 10
Ebert, Teresa, 7, 51, 161, 187
Eden, Anthony, 61, 91
Edwards, David, 9
Egypt, 10
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 4
Ehrhart, W. D., 166, 173-74, 189
Eisenhower, Dwight, 58-59, 206
El Salvador, 10
Eliot, T. S., The Wasteland, 175
Elliot, Mark, 28
Emerson, Gloria, 77, 146, 159
Epstein, Jason, 25
Epstein, William, 47-48
Esquire, 32, 136
Ethiopia, 10
Evans, Robert, 68, 70
Exxon, 174, 190
F
Faatz, Chris, 25
Falklands, 79
Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom, 180
Ferguson, Thomas, 141
Ferraro, Geraldine, 186
First of Michigan Corporation, 41
Fitzgerald, Frances, 63, 72, 97, 100, 146
Flynn, Errol, 215
Foley, Barbara, 45, 48
Forbes, 20
Ford, Daniel, 123
Foreign Policy, 35
Fortune, 29
foundations, conservative, 26, 141
France:
Algeria, 116, 120
anti-communism, 54
British sympathy for, 86
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Foreign Legion, 212
military strategy, 94, 96
napalm, 71
opium, 85
return to Indochina, 59
torture, 85
U.S. support of, 59, 96
Vietnamese Catholics, 72
Franklin, H. Bruce, 45, 145
Fromkin, David, 80
Full Metal Jacket, 150
Fullbright, Senator William J., 131
G
Galbraith, John Kenneth, The Affluent Society, 100
Gallagher, Carole, 24
Gandhi, Indira, 187
Gardner, Marilyn, 172
Gaston, George M. A., 68, 72, 74
Gates, Henry Louis, 52
Geiger, Jack, 4
Geneva Accords, 62, 66, 206
Geneva Convention, 144
Genghis Kahn, 114
Georgetown University, 44
Germany, 93
Gilman, Owen, 180-82
Glamour, 23
Goodman, Paul, 122
Goodman, Walter, 32
Gordon, Haim, 87-88
Goya, 201
GQ, 23
Graff, Gerald, 49, 50, 52
Grant, Zalin, 138, 139, 143, 145, 158
Gray, Paul, 137, 138, 143, 145, 146, 168, 170
Great Society, 5
Greece, 10
Greene, Graham
class background, 86
colonialist sympathies, 85
opium, 65
Shirley Temple, 68, 85
visa problems 68
The Quiet American: ambiguity, 75, 90, 92, 95, 97, 118
American innocence, 78, 86
anti-Americanism, 56, 64, 67-69, 77
Asians, depiction, 83
Christian elements, 64, 70-73, 83, 87-88
critical reception, 56-88
Dispatches, compared to, 150
existentialism, 70, 185
gender, 83-88
historical accuracy of, 212
homosexuality, 86-88
the human condition, 64, 66, 67-68, 73-76, 83-88, 196, 200
ideology, 56-57, 92, 218
prescience, 77, 87
Soviet praise, 66
stereo-typical characters, 66
Ways of Escape, 212
Grenada, 166, 169, 226n. 3
Guatemala, 10
censorship, 61
disenfranchisement, 61
labor movement, destruction of, 62
land reform, 61
United Fruit Company, 61, 223n. 2
U.S. support for Carlos Castillo Armas, 61
Guevera, Che, 109
Guillory, John, 7, 48, 51
Gulf and Western, 174
Gutman, Herbert, 225n. 2
Guyana, 10
H
Hackman, Gene, 110
Haiti, 10
Halberstam, David, 80
Hall, Stuart, 50-51
Hanoi, 62, 65, 143
Harper's, 9, 35
Harris, Robert, 192, 194-95
Harrison, Gordon, 105
Hartford Courant, 227n. 1
Hatch, Robert, 95
Hearst Corporation, 150
hegemony: academic study of, 18
American, 81, 98, 106
business propaganda, 25-26
capitalist, 26, 89, 175
communist, 91
counter-hegemony, 39, 84
formalist, 48
and literary canon, 52
and literature, 52-53
male, 217
and the
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publishing industry, 28
Vietnam War literature, role of, 6-8
Western, 12, 217
Heinemann, Larry, Close Quarters, 136
Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 127-28
Hellman, John, 97, 100-02, 110, 147-50
Henry, William A., III, 44
Herald Tribune (New York), 31
Herman, Edward, Counter-Revolutionary Violence, 27
Manufacturing Consent, 36
mass media, 10, 20
public service programming, 22
U.S. immorality in Vietnam, 204-05
Herr, Michael, 125, 194
Dispatches, 125, 136-64, 206, 207
Going After Cacciatto, compared to, 157-59
gender, 159-61
historical accuracy, 213
ideology, 146, 218
literary aesthetic, 136-38, 147-50
madness, 138, 139, 142
media, 147-48, 155, 162-63
New Journalism, 137, 148-50, 157
popular culture, 148
as postmodern, 150-56, 162, 216
praise for, 137, 146, 148-50
The Quiet American, compared to, 150
rock-n-roll, 142, 161-63
Vietnamese, depiction of, 143, 156
Herrnstein, Richard, 12
Hine, Lewis, 226n. 2
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 177, 205
Hitchens, Christopher, 27
Hmong, 127, 131-32
Ho Chi Minh, 58, 65, 101, 114, 206, 208, 223n. 1
Hogan, Patrick, 41
homosexuality, 13, 86
Honduras, 10
Hook, Sidney, 57
Hoover, Julie, 30
House Un-American Activities Committee, 57
Howe, Irving, 121-22, 224n. 3
Hudson Review, 196
Hughes, R. E., 68
Hughes, Robert, 44
Hugo, Victor, Les Miserables, 61
humanism, 12
Huntington, Samuel, 4
I
IBM, 174
imperialism, 5-7, 8, 10, 14, 34, 36, 73, 85, 94, 97, 152, 175, 207
India, 10
Indonesia, 10
Ingram Book Company, 23
International Monetary Fund, 220
International War Crimes Tribunal, 117
Invasion USA, 226n. 3
Iran, 166
Iraq, 175
infant mortality, 4
typhoid epidemic, 3-4
Israel, 79
IWW, 25
J
Jackson, Michael, 166
James, David, 161-63
James, Henry, 83
Jameson, Fredric, 151-52, 204
Japanese, depiction of, 113
Jeffords, Susan, 159-61
Johns Hopkins University, 53
Johnson, Dianne, 168
Johnson, Lyndon, 54, 133, 150, 184
Jones, Dale, 147, 157-59
Jordan, Michael, 220
Jungle, The, 97
K
Kadushin, Charles, 30
Kahn, Herman, 80
Kakutani, Michiko, 168, 171, 192, 195, 196
Kansas City Star, 227n. 1
Kaplan, Steven, 197
Karanikas, Alexander, 48
Karnow, Stanley, 80
Kauffmann, Stanley, 120-21

Page 250
Kaye, Harvey, 4
Kehde, Suzanne, 85-86
Kelly, Richard, 77
Kennan, George, 19, 80
Kennedy, John F., 97
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 166
Khrushchev, Nikita, 60
Kinney, Katherine, 186-87
Kirkus, 33
Kirsch, Robert, 116
Kissinger, Henry, 19, 93
Kister, Kenneth, 127
Knight, Philip, 220
Kochetov, Vsevold, The Yershov Brothers, 93
Kolko, Gabriel, 35, 36, 58, 80, 104, 106-09
Kolpacoff, Victor, The Prisoners of Quai Dong, 90, 115-26, 196, 214
allegory in, 115-16, 124
characterization, 116-17
existentialism, 117-18
the human condition, 120-22
literary aesthetic, 121
Korea, 10, 175
Kors, Alan, 45
Kosinski, Jerzy, 148
Kovic, Ron, Born on the Fourth of July, 136
Krasteva, Yonka, 182-83, 185, 187, 188
Krauthammer, Charles, 45
Kriegel, Leonard, 116, 123-24
Krist, Gary, 196
Kristol, Irving, 19
Kunkel, Francis, 69-71, 73
Kuwait, 3, 80
L
Lake, Anthony, 80
Lansdale, Colonel Edward Geary, 62, 65-66
Laos, 126, 128-33
Larsen, Eric, 77-78
Lauter, Paul, 42
Lawrence, Massachusetts, 225n. 2
Learman, Jo Ann, 137, 146
Lebanon, 10, 169
Lederer, William J. and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American, 90-103, 105, 215, 217
commercial success, 90
foreign aid, 90
historical accuracy, 85-98, 212
similarity to The Green Berets, 104
Lehmann, John, 64, 66
Leibling, A. J., 60
Lemann, Nicholas, 36
Leroy, Gaylord, 45
Lescaze, Lee, 34
Levin, Martin, 128
Lewallen, John, 132
liberalism: cold war, 47, 67, 76, 80, 90, 133
''gone berserk," 140
sixtiesera, 105, 108-09, 133
Library Journal, 126-27
Libya, 10
Life, 223n. 1
Lind, Michael, 5, 168-69
literary canon, 44, 46-48, 50-52, 90, 118
literary culture: academic, 40-54
aestheticism, 12, 28, 31, 33-36, 48, 76, 90, 118, 119, 121, 146, 169, 170, 171, 174, 213
class/materialist critique, absence of, 7, 11-12, 23, 52-53, 87, 199, 213-14, 217-19
commercial, 18-37
complexity, 6, 32, 36, 47, 158
critical approaches, 11, 103, 115
gatekeeper intellectual journals, 18-19
ideological state apparatus, 40
ideology, 8, 11, 13, 47, 75, 80, 156
liberal pluralism, 8, 11-14, 20, 26, 28-29, 31, 36, 40, 49, 51, 52, 54, 67, 75, 118, 187, 190
"literary liberalism," 15, 32, 49
myth, 82-83, 98-102, 133-34, 182-84, 214-16, 218
nationalism, 102, 183-84, 189-90
objectivity, 94, 146
professional-managerial class, 30, 40, 52-53, 81-82, 208
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Vietnam War literature, marginalization of, 13
Lockheed, 174
Lomperis, Timothy, 131
London Magazine, 77
London Review of Books, 168
Loose, Julian, 195
Luce, Henry, 108
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 162, 204
M
McCaleb, Claude, 27
McCarran Act, 68
McCarthy, Mary, Vietnam, 118
McCarthyism, 26, 31, 45, 49, 57
McCoy, Alfred, 131
McDermott, John, 63
McElroy, Neil H., 93
McNamara, Robert, 119, 133, 150, 208
civilian casualties, 54
fuel air explosives, 3
McNaughton, John, 113, 119
"MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour," 44
Mademoiselle, 23
Maggio, Rosalie, 196
Mailer, Norman, 121
Maloff, Saul, 119-20
Mansfield, Senator Mike, 121
Mao Zedung, 90, 94, 96, 104
Martin, Andrew, 54, 174, 226n. 3
Marx, Karl, 207, 208
Marxism: academic, 22, 46, 51
base/superstructure of, 6, 50
criticism of, 45-46
hegemony, 6
media analysis, 10
and universities, 11-12, 45-46
Marxist Literary Group, 46
Marxists: universities, treatment by, 45-46
Maryles, Daisy, 21
"M*A*S*H," 186
Mason, Bobbie Ann: In Country, 166-90, 218
agent orange, 167, 171, 181
as bildungsroman, 170
class, 167, 169-70, 172, 174, 177-78, 180, 181, 183, 187
conclusion, 188-90
gender, 172, 182-88
grail legend, 174-76
historical accuracy, 213
human condition, 170, 182
minimalism, 167, 169, 172, 173
popular culture, 173-76, 178, 181, 190
racism, 171, 179, 181, 226n. 4
as Southern novel, 168-70, 178-84
U.S. militarism, 166-67, 169
Vietnamese, depiction of, 188
media: advertising, 29, 140-41
commercialism, 23
conspiracy theory, 14, 27
ideology, 14, 31, 130
liberal bias, 9
liberal-conservative consensus, 11, 20
news filters, 20
political correctness, 12
propaganda model, 20
public relations, 140-41
Vietnam, 35, 148, 155, 162, 175
Water-gate, 35
Melling, Philip, 82, 204
Menshaw, Michael, 77
Mexico, 10, 99
Meyers, Kate Beaird, 205
Meyerson, Gregory, 201-02
Michigan State University, 41, 95
Miller, William, A New History of the United Stated, 93
Milwaukee Journal, 227n. 1
Mirsky, Jonathan, 119
Missing in Action, 110, 175
Modern Language Association, 13, 67
Modern Language Studies, 183
modernism, 32, 48-49, 174, 175, 185
Molarsky, Mona, 172-73
Moore, Robin, The Green Berets:
commercial success, 109-10
communistmenace, 104
cruelty, 105-07
historical accuracy, 114, 212
ideology, 112
literary aesthetic, 111
Pentagon dispute over, 107, 212
Viet Cong terrorism, 104, 105
Vietnamese, depiction of, 112-13
Morgenthau, Hans, 80

Page 252
Morton, Donald, 51
Morton, Senator Thurston B., 119
Mossadegh, Mohammed, 28, 56
Mozambique, 10
multiculturalism, 11-13, 44, 52
Murdoch, Rupert, 225n. 1
Murphy, Audie, 215
Murray, Charles, 12
My Lai, 80, 144
Myers, Thomas, 6, 77, 82, 154
Mystery Train, 156
N
Nation, 19, 63, 95, 116, 123, 137, 172-73
National Book Award, 34, 147, 192
National Book Critics' Circle Award, 33
National Child Labor Committee, 226n. 2
National Review, 142
Nelson, Cary, 49
neoconservative(s), 19, 54, 139-40
New Criticism, New Critics, 48-50, 57, 73, 75
New Deal, 5, 25-26
New Leader, 57
New Masses, 57
New Orleans Times Picayune, 23
New Republic, 9, 19, 36, 44, 49-50, 64, 66, 77, 120
New Statesman, 142, 194
New York, 44, 45
New York Review of Books, 9, 19, 25, 31-32, 85, 121-22, 138-39, 168, 224n. 3
New York Times, 3, 9, 29, 30-31, 33, 63, 80, 93, 94, 119, 133, 141, 144, 154, 168, 192, 195
New York Times Book Review, 9, 18-19, 29-31, 35-36, 56-59, 92, 105, 116, 118, 126, 128, 137, 138,
170, 182, 194, 223n. 2
Newark Star-Ledger, 23
Newsweek, 31, 44, 66, 68, 116, 119, 126, 128, 137, 139-40, 192, 194
Ngo Dinh Diem, 62-63, 65, 71, 72, 95, 97, 101, 104, 107, 114, 207
Nguyen Khanh, 206
Nicaragua, 10, 81, 169
Nike, 220
Niva, Steve, 3
Nixon, Richard, 145
Norden, Eric, 171
Norris, Chuck, 110
North, Oliver, 3
Northwestern University, 45
nuclear testing, 24
Nyden, Paul, 45
O
O'Brien, Tim, 125
Going After Cacciatto, 136, 157-59, 192, 199
The Things They Carried, 136, 192-209
critical praise, 192
fact/fiction, 195-200, 205-06
historical accuracy, 213
literary aesthetic, 192-93
postmodernism, 196, 201-05, 208
truth, 193-94
unreality, 195
Vietnamese, depiction of, 197, 204
Ohmann, Richard, 18, 20, 29, 40-46, 50
Orwell, George (Orwellian), 36, 155
Osborne, K. Barton, 124
Osborne, Peter, 52
Oshinsky, David, 36
opium: CIA connection, 131-32
French monopoly, 85
Graham Greene and, 65
Orientalism, 84-85, 112
OSS, 114
P
Paglia, Camille, 45
Pakistan, 10
Palestine, 79, 120
Panama, 10
Parade, 23
Parenti, Michael, 35, 45-46, 67, 87, 140, 207
Parrinder, Patrick, 168, 170

Page 253
Partisan Review, 19
Pathak, Zakia, 83-85
Pathet Lao, 127, 131, 132
Peace Corps, 109
Peking, University of, 45
Pennar, Karen, 35
Pennsylvania, University of, 45
Pentagon Papers, The, 62, 63, 65, 111, 128
Peretz, Martin, 9
Perot, H. Ross, 145
Persian Gulf War, 3-4, 9, 80, 142, 159, 195, 205, 225n. 1
Peru, 10
Philippines, 10
Physicians for Human Rights, 4
Pietro, Thomas de, 167, 170
Pilger, John, 142-43, 178
Pittsburgh, University of, 45
Plummer, William, 147
Pochoda, Elizabeth, 137, 146
Pochoda, Phil, 22
political correctness, 12, 32, 34, 43-45, 141, 196
Pollan, Michael, 35
Pollock, J. C., Mission M.I.A., 110
Portugal, 10
postcolonialism, 7, 34, 83
POW/MIA myth, 123, 143-45
Powell, Jody, 166
Powers, Richard, 33-35
Pratt, John Clark, 73, 74
and Catch-22, 127-28
documentary sources, 127-28
and Heart of Darkness, 128-30
historical accuracy, 212
The Laotian Fragments, 126-33, 146-47, 213-14
Vietnam War, fragmentary nature of, 128, 130-31
Pravda, 93
Prescott, Peter, 128, 131
proletarian literature, 48-49
propaganda model, 20
prostitution, 34
Public Interest, 19
publishers: Advance Publications, 20
Allyn & Bacon, 23
Ballantine, 23
Basic Books, 225n. 1
Birch Lane Press/Carol Publishing, 28
Common Courage, 31
Crown, 20
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 20
Free Press, 23
Funk & Wagnalls, 29
Guilford, 51
Harper, 26, 225n. 1
Holtzbrinck, 20
Houghton Mifflin, 20
International Thomson Publishing, 22
Knopf, 23
McFarland, 115
McGraw-Hill, 28
MacMillan Publishing, 23
Monthly Review, 31
National Amusements, 23
Northwestern University Press, 22
Norton, 20
Pantheon, 23, 26
Pocket Books, 23
Prentice-Hall, 29
Random House, 9, 18, 23, 25, 26
Routledge, 22
Simon & Schuster, 26-27
South End, 31
University of Michigan Press, 51
Viking, 18
Vintage, 23
Publishers Weekly, 21, 126-27
publishing industry:
censorship, 28
corporatization, 20
dominance by conglomerates, 21-23
layoffs, 29
multiculturalism, 52
and the 1960s, 18-37
profits, 22
university presses, 22
Pulitzer Prize, 192
Purkayastha, Sharmila, 83-85
Pustay, John S., Counterinsurgency Warfare, 105
Putnam, Hilary, 201
Q
Quemoy and Matsu, 93
R
Radical Caucus (of the Modern Language Association), 46
Rahv, Philip, 67
response to Diana Trilling, 79
response to Irving Howe, 224n. 3
review of The Quiet American, 59-60
review of The Radical Imagination, 224n. 3
Rai, Gangeshwar, 70, 74, 75
Rambo, 175

Page 254
Rampton, Sheldon. See Stauber, John
Ray, Dennis, 176-77
Rea, Richard H., 29
Reagan, Ronald, 26, 78, 82, 159, 166, 167, 181, 183, 186
Red Dawn, 226n. 3
Redstone, Sumner, 23
Rehyansky, Joseph, 142
Reising, Russell, 83
Reisman, David, The Lonely Crowd, 100
Ringnalda, Donald, 200-04
Robbins, Bruce, 50
Rockwell, Norman, 201
Rodden, John, 18
Rogers, Joel. See Ferguson, Thomas
Roosevelt, Kermit, 28
Rostow, Walt, 19, 125
Rudich, Norman, 45
Rusk, Dean, 125
Russell, Bertrand, 117
Ryan, Barbara, 185-86, 189
S
Sack, John, 123
Sadler, Barry, "The Ballad of the Green Berets," 110
Said, Edward, 40
Saigon, 3, 62, 68, 74, 84, 155, 212
Sales, Roger, 146
Salvatore, Anne, 75
San Francisco Examiner, 227n. 1
Sarnoff, William, 27
Sartre, Jean Paul (Sartrean), 70, 118
Saturday Evening Post, 65-67
Saturday Review, 19
Schiffrin, Andre, 26
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 19, 75, 80
Scott, James, 84
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 86
Sengupta, Saswati, 83-85
Shakespeare, William, 44
Shapiro, James, 23
Sharrock, Roger, 68, 74
Sheehan, Neil, 138
Sheppard, R. Z., 195
Siegel, Fred, 44
Simon, William, 4
Slotkin, Richard, 98, 99, 149
Smith, Adam, 141
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 50
Snyder, Richard, 26-27
Sokolov, Raymond, 137, 146
Soley, Lawrence, 41
Somalia, 10
Soviet Union, 10, 60-61, 66, 196
Spielman, Robert, 80
Springsteen, Bruce, 166, 173
Spurling, John, 75
Stallone, Sylvester, 110
Stanford University, 45
Stauber, John, 140
Stead, Ronald, 94
Steinfels, Peter, 31
Stewart, Matthew, 147-50, 189
Stratford, Philip, 68, 71, 75
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 108
Sunday Telegraph (London), 62
Sunoco, 190
T
Talese, Nan, 27
Tampa Tribune & Times, 227n. 1
Tate, Allen, 73, 178;
I'll Take My Stand, 180
Taylor, General Maxwell, 119, 224n. 1
Taylor, Gordon, 77, 150-51
Taylor, Thomas, 123
Temperley, Howard, 83
Temple, Shirley, 68, 85
Teoli, Camella, 225n. 2
Thatcher, Margaret, 186, 187
The Ngoc Phan, 203
Thomas, Brian, 69, 72, 74
Thompson, Hunter, 137, 147
Time, 29, 31, 44, 60-61, 63, 81, 91, 94-95, 107-08, 130
Time, Inc., 29
Times Literary Supplement, 116, 168, 195
Ton That Tung, Dr., 177
Tonelson, Alan, 35

Page 255
Toyota, 41
Transamerica, 174
Trilateral Commission, 4
Trilling, Diana, 66-67, 79
Trilling, Lionel, 49
Trinh Minh Th (General), 223n. 1
Turkey, 10
Trumbull, Robert, 92-94
Tyler, Patrick, 4
U
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 97, 98
Uncommon Valor, 175
Union Carbide, 178
United Fruit Company, 61, 223n. 2
United States: American exceptionalism, 11, 34, 49, 78, 80, 109, 199
benevolence, 56, 60, 78, 85-86
benevolence of foreign service officers, 94
of Green Berets, 107, 110
toward Guatemala, 61
imperialism, 8, 10, 70, 97-98, 157, 163, 177
innocence, 78-79
national character, 3, 60, 79, 83
national psyche, 98, 133, 172, 215
nuclear testing by, 61
postmodern America, 157
racism, 98
toward South Korea, 35
toward Taiwan, 35
toward Vietnam, 65, 80
universities, 40-54
adjunct employment, 42
applied sciences, 41
corporate funding, 41
disciplinarity, 40-42
hegemony, 40, 140
ideology, 18
job crisis in, 11
Marxists, 11-12
meritocracy, myth of, 43
professional-managerial class, 43
Unsworth, 18
USAF Academy Association of Graduates Magazine, 127
V
Vang Pao, 132
Vanity Fair, 23, 80
Vermont, University of, 45
Viet Nam Generation, 189
Vietnam:
ARVN, 106, 108, 124, 155
destruction of, 142-43, 154
disease, 142
dispossession, 119, 144, 153-54
land reform, 58, 62, 106
NLF (Viet Cong), 103, 105-07, 112, 115, 117-18, 202, 204, 219
NVA, 127, 131, 132
prostitution, 142, 213, 220
Viet Minh, 58-59, 62, 73-76, 94
Vietnam Labor Watch, 220
Vietnam syndrome, 175, 178, 179, 205
Vietnam War:
agent orange, 144, 161, 171, 175, 176-78
antiwar movement, 4, 8, 54
assassination, 10
British sympathy for French, 86
capitalism, 54
casualties, 76, 219
chemical weapons, 10
civilians, killing of, 34, 71, 117, 118, 122, 133, 144, 150, 171, 180, 205
class, 150, 160
Communists, popular support for, 58
dispossession, 10, 76, 114, 122
domino theory, 58, 226n. 3
elections (1956), 56, 58, 62
environmental destruction, 10, 76, 219
as error, 8, 10
free-fire zones, 78, 106
French rule, 58, 71, 85
genocide, 70, 117, 122
Gulf of Tonkin, 71, 105
human rights violations, 63
immolation by monks, 71, 143, 188
land reform, 58, 62
My Lai, 80
napalm, 71, 145, 171, 175, 219
Phat Diem massacre, 69-70
Phoenix Program, 144, 145, 219
refugees from North Vietnam, 65
on Sartre (Jean-Paul), 70
torture, 10, 95, 96, 117, 124, 125, 143-45
as tragedy, 9, 10, 35, 85
U.S. geopolitical aims, 7, 70
U.S. sanctioned terrorism, 62, 99, 223n. 1
U.S. support of French, 59, 65, 71, 97
Vietnam War literature: Americancentrism, 7, 54, 82-83, 102, 103, 112-13, 150, 175, 195
American innocence, 78-79, 86
Asian stereotypes, 112-14
canon, 90, 113, 147
class, 87-88, 99, 160, 172, 176