The Viet Nam War, the American War: Images and Representation in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives
By Renny Christopher
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. 341 pp., $38 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
The Vietnam War may have ended over 20 years ago, but the US political and cultural establishment continues to fight it in print and film (deploying the big guns of anticommunism and racism) in an attempt to justify the war it lost politically at home and militarily in Vietnam.
Renny Christopher's book examines representations of the war in literature by US and Vietnamese exile writers. Most US writers, despite their occasional insights, she finds, are constricted by the ideological needs and cultural prejudices of the US imperialist venture.
A major approach to depoliticising the war and excluding the Vietnamese experience is to focus on "the grunt's eye view", the soldier's private experience of battle. This excludes the political frameworks of US imperialism and the Vietnamese resistance as an "honest fight against a dictatorship imposed by the US".
When not erased from Vietnam War literature, Vietnamese figures are subjected to racist stereotypes — primitive, subhuman Asian brutes and therefore available for extinction. At best, in the hands of liberal writers, the Vietnamese are presented as poor victims, a view which is unable to cope with the fact that the Vietnamese were, in the end, victors.
Opposition to imperialism is missing from both the pro-war writers and the liberal "opponents". Robin Moore's The Green Berets, the biggest selling novel ever about the war and the basis for the John Wayne movie in 1968, is a "love song to the Special Forces, John F Kennedy's favourite fighting force in the war against communism". The more ambiguous Graham Greene, in The Quiet American, whilst able to write in opposition to the war that "one has to take sides if one is to remain human", qualifies this moral principle by only opposing wanton slaughter and not imperialism per se and by directing his ire against US foreign policy but not the more "benign" English or French variety.
Christopher also explores the predominant representation by the mostly male writers of Vietnamese women as prostitutes or rape victims. She notes that this is a double dehumanisation (as oppressed Vietnamese and abused women) which also fails to politically locate the cause in the US military presence which created the market for prostitution through inflation and rural depopulation.
As well as critically examining the books by US authors that have made it into the canon of acceptable Vietnam War literature, Christopher devotes much attention to exile works, noting that racism works its own way here, too, in the politics of publishing: only 12 of around 7000 Vietnam books published to 1990 were written by the large US Vietnamese exile population.
Christopher argues that there is no single "Vietnamese refugee" position, the writers coming from different political, religious, class and gender perspectives. Her analysis brings out these differences well, although it is also apparent that all exile authors share a similar paradigm involving some degree of opposition to the Vietnamese resistance or postwar regime and/or acceptance of the US role in the war.
This is clear in the case of those exile writers who willingly display "doctrinaire anti-communism and cloying pro-Americanism", such as the businesswoman who employed 500 workers and who "wanted independence but not the redistribution of wealth" that the independence struggle also proclaimed, or the middle class Catholic intellectuals who were fed on anticommunist lies about bloodbaths and Gulag-type re-education camps. Those who fought for the NLF more fairly present the positive side of the communist-led resistance but are generally disillusioned (not always on socialist grounds) with the political aftermath in Vietnam.
The compulsion to "write to the market" also affects the work of sensitive and intellectually open authors such as Le Ly Hayslip. The stories that Hayslip recounts debunk the myth that the US was fighting for freedom for Vietnam — rather the US joined in the exploitation by rich Vietnamese of poor Vietnamese. Hayslip nevertheless downplays her sympathy for the NLF, and in seeking to promote the worthy goal of reconciliation, tilts towards absolving the US politically for its war crime.
Hayslip argues that both sides were guilty of oppression of the peasants (which Christopher agrees is an "unassailable" view) and her technique of anecdotal storytelling also gives a misleading impression of an equivalence between the "good and bad on both sides". However, even allowing for NLF mistakes and lack of discipline over those who took retribution into their own hands, the alleged "balance" of right and wrong is spurious. It is by now clear that the NLF/NVA enjoyed a level of popular support which was the main political reason for their military success.
Christopher argues that Hayslip throws into disarray both the pro-war mainstream and the antiwar left. Yet the reason Hayslip has been admitted to the establishment canon (Oliver Stone made the film When Heaven and Earth Changed Places from her novel) is because she can be read as confirming sufficient evil of the Vietnamese resistance, and sufficient good intentions of the US, to partially justify the war, and because her argument that "we all did what we had to do" absolves the US of responsibility.
This is a position less common to "return narratives" of Vietnam vets, whose spirit of forgiveness and understanding does not necessarily require any political concessions to the wrongness of the US invasion. W. Eckhardt returned in 1987, writing: "I had been told that the people of Vietnam wanted and needed our help, but I found that most people in Vietnam hated us because we destroyed their forest with chemical defoliants, and burned their fields with napalm, and called the people of Vietnam gooks, chinks, slopes, and zipperheads, turning their sons into shoeshine boys and their daughters into whores".
He returned to see what they did with their victory, and although he is no rap for the "socialist-drab architecture of Hanoi" nor the "socialist speechifying", he does not disagree with the communists' basic view of the war.
Christopher's book has a few flaws, including an excessively close textual analysis of some books, a tendency to downgrade their political content in favour of their ethnic representations and a limited view of the domestic political forces involved in the struggle around the Vietnam War. She argues that racist portrayals of the Vietnamese are shared "across the political spectrum" and that "both Left and Right" exclude the Vietnamese experience. Her view of the antiwar left does not extend beyond the liberal left who opposed the war for, at worst, pragmatic reasons (it was not winnable at acceptable cost) or solely for humanitarian reasons. The revolutionary left, however, based its opposition on genuine internationalism, a political expression of a shared humanity with the oppressed Vietnamese.
Nevertheless, in the ongoing struggle against the literary B52s which are still being directed against Vietnam for daring to defeat US imperialism, Christopher's book is a useful contribution.