tactics. Veterans make it clear that the war was fought among civilians who were indistinguishable from the enemy, a situation that led to death and injury for countless innocent bystanders, including women and children. Memoirs also show that a profound anti-Vietnamese racism existed among American troops; the use of racial slurs such as “gook,” “dink,” and “slope” was commonplace. Such racial hatred was obviously the driving force behind some of the most heinous atrocities chronicled by veterans, including the practice of keeping enemy body parts, chiefly ears and skulls, as souvenirs.
Most authors, also like Ketwig, portray the Vietnamese as covetous of American dollars, yet unappreciative of American sacrifices. Such depictions lead to the formation of an unlikely theme in veteran narratives: Vietnamese civilians as the victimizers of US troops. Sharing the role of victimizer with civilians in narratives are Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers, America’s chief military allies in Vietnam.12 These “ARVNs” are portrayed as lazy cowards who were inexplicably disdainful of the GIs who fought to defend South Vietnam’s freedom. All Vietnamese—friends and enemies, civilians and combatants—usually appear in narratives as racist caricatures.
If most veteran-memoirists explicitly or implicitly condemn the war, why do most also depict Vietnamese civilians in unsympathetic ways? The reason for the coexistence of these two seemingly incompatible themes is directly related to the fundamental weakness of personal narratives: limited and biased perspective. Veteran narratives provide valuable information about how American troops experienced combat in Vietnam. But since veteran memoirs represent the experiences of only one specific group of people, they are inherently limited in their outlook on the war. American soldiers generally arrived in Vietnam with little knowledge of the country’s language, culture, or history. They likewise lacked a nuanced understanding of the conflict in which they fought, knowing only the US government’s oversimplified conception of the war as a battle between Communist aggression and the forces of democracy. Most American soldiers, moreover, largely due to communications problems, had no meaningful contact with local people during their tours. No wonder few veterans knew the real reasons for Vietnamese actions that they despised.
This chapter compares memoirist representations of warfare and the Vietnamese to what other sources, chiefly historical scholarship and nonveteran narratives, say about these topics. Using this approach shows that veterans’ representations of combat often correspond to how historians and other writers depict Vietnam War combat. Outside sources also provide information, missing from veterans’ memoirs, that explains the cultural, social, economic, and historical reasons for the attitudes and behaviors of South Vietnamese living during what they called the “American War.”
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Memoirists regularly explain that their conception of combat before Vietnam was largely based on the staged battles they saw played out in war movies, especially those about World War II. Such films often inspired future soldiers to mimic the exploits of John Wayne and other celluloid warriors in the woods, backyards, and vacant lots of their hometowns. Ron Kovic, who cheered on Wayne in the The Sands of Iwo Jima,13 and W.D. Ehrhart, who killed imaginary “Krauts and Japs”14 as a boy, realized early in their tours that their boyhoods had ill prepared them for actual warfare. GIs should have learned during training that mimicking the flashy maneuvers they saw in movies usually led to death or injury, not glory. But some soldiers apparently did not get the message. A young, inexperienced marine in Lewis Puller’s platoon, for instance, was immediately hit by Vietcong gunfire when he “suddenly stood up and began firing his rifle John Wayne fashion from the hip” during a firefight.15 Larry Heinemann explains that the term “John Wayne” was a “flat-out insult” in Vietnam, used to refer to “hot-dog, hero wannabes” not smart enough to realize the foolishness of performing cinematic-style stunts in real-life combat.16
Many GIs also discovered that movies and training had not prepared them for the most gruesome and unavoidable aspects of warfare: wounds and corpses. Real battlefield deaths and injuries were far removed from movie scenes of soldiers who grimaced and fought on with bloodstained shirts after getting shot, or doomed men who let out a final yell or an inspiring slogan before they slumped to the ground and died. Philip Caputo observes that the devastating gunshot wounds suffered by a Vietcong soldier killed by US troops were nothing like “the tidy holes as in the movies.”17 Charles R. Anderson soberly relates that “what happens to human beings in mechanized warfare has absolutely no poetic or theatrical possibilities.”18
After commenting on the falseness of movie war wounds, Caputo goes on to describe the dead Vietcong’s injuries, noting that his body lay in “a crimson puddle in which floated bits of skin and white cartilage.”19 Two pages earlier he writes of another dead Vietcong with “brains spilling out of the huge hole in its head like grey pudding from a cracked bowl.”20 Such hideously realistic descriptions are one of the defining elements of Vietnam veteran memoirs. In stark contrast to the war movies veterans watched as children, their narratives are full of descriptions of battlefield gore that are graphic, disgusting, and difficult to read. The purpose of this technique is clearly not exploitative, but a symptom of memoirists’ desire to “tell like it was” in their narratives; to do so necessitates authentic descriptions of even the most horrible aspects of warfare.
Using World War II (either in its film or real-life incarnations) as a basis for understanding warfare led GIs to hold other preconceptions about combat that did not apply to the war in Vietnam. The Second World War featured, for the most part, battles waged by conventional armies for control of territory, but America’s Vietnamese adversaries, in contrast, frequently employed guerrilla tactics. The Americans tried to draw their elusive enemies into fighting traditional battles that the US military, with its vastly superior firepower, was sure to win. This approach was taken by General William Westmoreland, the commander of US forces during the opening phases of major American military operations in Vietnam.21 He devised a strategy in which US patrols conducting “search and destroy” operations in the countryside “would . . . locate the enemy and then call in artillery and airpower to eliminate him.”22 In theory, such operations would eventually drive “large enemy units . . . from populated areas,” giving US troops the opportunity to secure and “pacify” these locales by rooting out remaining “local guerillas” and Vietcong political leaders.23 These tactics were also part of a “war of attrition” strategy that entailed using the massive resources of the American military to kill as many enemy troops as possible.24
Westmoreland’s tactics, however, often failed to produce the desired results, and many memoirs feature stories that confirm this. Former infantrymen who took part in search and destroy patrols often describe these operations as bewildering, exasperating affairs. Some recall long stretches with no enemy activity, and when contact was finally made it was usually in the form of a Vietcong ambush. These accounts represent the experience of most US infantrymen. Studies show that US small-unit patrols infrequently made contact with the enemy,25 and that when they did it was usually initiated by the Vietcong.26 A common theme in the description of these actions is the idea that Americans in Vietnam, from privates to generals, did not really know what they were doing. Anderson consistently uses words like “blunder,” “idiocy,” and “chaos” in his memoir, The Grunts, to portray the infantry operations in which he participated.27 Rod Kane describes his own unit’s patrols as follows: “we wander around, bumping into things. Things bump into us.”28
Another symbol of the futility of US tactics was the fact that GIs, no matter how many enemy soldiers they killed, did not permanently take control of territory. Nathaniel Tripp says that because US forces did not “hold” the land they struggled over, it “didn’t take long to figure out that [the Vietnam conflict] was a hopeless war.”29 The ostensible irrationality of this strategy was compounded by the fact that regions deemed officially “pacified” did not always live up to that designation. This phenomenon infamously occurred following Operation Cedar Falls, a 1967 US attempt to clear
