Vietnam War Lit.(1): In Country

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Vietnam War Lit.(1) In Country

• Surviving the War in the Popular Culture

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Outline

• Backgrounds
• 1) Vietnam War
• 2) Vietnam War Discourse
• 3) the South
• In Country
• The Author and the Director Characters
• Starting Questions
• Vietnam Experience and Responses
• Emmetts and Sams Identity Crises in and
  through popular culture
• Different Kinds of Solution

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Vietnam War

• History in Brief the country divided into North
  and South in 1954 the U.S.s involvement (the
  last frontier) since around 1955 support forces
  arriving since 1961, intense bombing since 1965,
  withdrawal since 1969, and the total withdrawal
  in 1973, a few months after a ceasefire was
  signed in Jan. The fall of Saigon in May 1975.
• Whose war? Variously seen as an imperialist war
  (US vs. Vietnam), revolution (Communist), a civil
  war for reunification, a guerrilla war, a media
  war, and an American civil war

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Vietnam War (2)

• reasons
• 1. World savior, Manifest Destiny, the myth of
  the (last) frontier e.g. Why Are We in Vietnam?
  (Norman Mailer Texas? Alaska?Vietnam) (Star Wars
  (another frontier)
• domino theory (????)
• conservatism in the 60s optimism and
  nationalism inspired by JFK in the babyboomer
  generation
• Strategies used helicopter bombing, attrition
  (???the repeated taking and abandoning of the
  same territory in pursuit of a high enemy body
  count), pacification (involving intrusion into
  villages for enemy caches of documents and
  supplies)

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Vietnam War (3) Immediate Consequences

• Atrocities
• A. American side
• 58,148 dead, 270,000 injured
• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Agent Orange
• consequences in the U.S. another civil warthe
  anti-war movement

• Vietnamese side
• dead (from both sides) more than 4,000,000
  civilians and soldiers10 of the entire
  population
• displaced 9,000 out of 15,000 villages
• destroyed farmland, forest, farm animals all
  six of the industrial cities in the North
• affected 200,000 prostitutes, 879,000 orphans,
  181,000 disabled people, 1 million widows

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Vietnam War (4) Long-Term consequences

• 1. Displacement the displaced Vietnamese
  Amerasians, Vietnamese refugees
• 2. cultural representations of Vietnam war --
  national denial at first, then burst of interest
  in Vietnam in late 70se.g. memoirs, fiction and
  films on Vietnam war
• the vets as misfitssuicidal, criminal, (e.g.
  Stuntman 1980, Taxi Driver 1976, Deer Hunter
  1978, In Country 1989)
• Superhero (re-masculinization of U.S. culture)
  First Blood, Rambo musical Ms Saigon
• killing and other forms of brutalityPlatoon
  Born on the Fourth of July
• memoir Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic
  (dir. Oliver Stone ? Platoon, JFK, Heaven and
  Earth,

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Vietnam War (5) Gender and War

• Awright, ladies!There are eighty of you,
  eighty young warm bodies, eighty sweet little
  ladies, eighty sweetpeas. . .Grab your
  trousers! shouted the sergeant. These are
  trousersnot pants! Pants are for little girls!
  Trousers are for marines! Put your trousers on!
  
• --THIS IS YOUR RIFLE LADIES I WANT YOU TO KNOW
  IT ALL EVERY PART OF IT! (76, 82) (from Born on
  the Fourth of July )

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Vietnam War Films --FYI

• War experience
• The Deer Hunter (1978)American POW Russian
  roulette --controversial
• Apocalypse Now (1979) -- Based on Joseph
  Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
• First Blood (1982) Rambo II, Rambo III
• Missing in Action (1984)
• Platoon (???? 1986 Oliver Stone 1st)
• Good Morning, Vietnam (1995) radio DJ a
  comic version
• Forrest Gump (1994)

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Vietnam War Films --FYI

• Post-War experience
• Born on the Fourth of July (1989) (Oliver Stone
  2nd)
• Also from Vietnamese perspective
• Heaven and Earth (Oliver Stone 3rd)
• Surname Viet Last Name Nam
• Famous Vietnam Literature

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Background The South Related works

• The South
• W. Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery
  OConnor, Bobbie Ann Mason, etc.,etc.
• Stereotypes of backwardness, country-style,
  etc.--????? Sweet Home Alabama.

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The Author and the Director

• Bobbie Ann Mason (1940-)
• Born and now lives in Kentucky
• A contemporary Southern writer

• Norman Jewison
• Moonstruck
• Jesus Christ Superstar
• Other Peoples Money

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The Characters

• Sam Samantha
• Emmett her uncle, for whom she serves as
  caretaker
• Ireneher mother
• Lonnie her boyfriend
• Dawn's her friend who gets pregnant

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Starting Questions

• How do the veterans and the other characters in
  this film describe the Vietnam war?
• And how do the vets adjust to the life after it?
• How does Sam try to understand it?

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Culture of the South with clear sexual and
racial divisions

• Hopewell -- One of the veterans says of HBO, "I
  wouldn't let my wife watch it.'
• Lonnie for the stag party, gets panties from
  Sam.
• At the grandpas ham, fried chicken, mashed
  potato, etc.
• The Blacks one glimpse
• Dawn pregnant and married young.

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Vietnam Experience

• A bunch of kids out in the country
• Souvenirs (Ears, tattoo)
• We could have won. (5233)? Earl lives in the
  future
• Its all a mistake.

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Vietnam Experience --selective

• Egret -- That beautiful bird just going about
  its business with all that crazy stuff going on.
  Whole flocks of them would fly over. ... Once a
  grenade hit close to some trees and there were
  these birds taking off like quail, ever' which
  way. We thought it was snowing up instead of
  down.

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Survivors Different Responses -- MauMau

• 1. MawMaw says, "They wrote and told what a help
  he was to his country. I take comfort in that."
• Sam replies, "What good did he do for the
  country? Everybody knows it was a stupid war, but
  fifty-eight thousand guys died. Emmett says they
  all died for nothing."
• MawMaw "Well, Emmett can talk. He didn't die.
  Dwayne was fighting for a cause...."

• Got only an closed casket or a body bagwithout
  having a chance to prepare the body and go
  through the mourning ritual.

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Different Responses --Irene

• Leaves the past behind and gets on with her life.
  
• New life

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Post-Vietnam Experience -- Emmette

• Social misfitrefuses to work watches TV
  (MASH reruns ), plays video games, feed
  rabbits and does birdwatching.
• Haunted by the past physical symptoms (rashes,
  insomnia), emotional outburst (2900)
• Re-enact the past Dug trenches to find a leak,
  set flea bombs. (3140)
• Emasculated-- dressed in a "long, thin
  Indian-print skirt with elephants and peacocks on
  it." cooks dinner for Sam

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Post-Vietnam Experience Emmette (2)

• By the swamp (135) Theyre still alive.
  There's something wrong with me. I'm damaged.
  It's like something in the center of my heart is
  gone and I can't get it back."
• Sam replies, "But you cared enough about me to
  come out here." . . . Sam says, "I wish that bird
  would come."
• Emmett explains, "If you can think about
  something like birds, you can get outside of
  yourself, and it doesn't hurt as much. That's the
  whole idea. That's the whole challenge for the
  human race."

guilt feelings of the survivors
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Sam Her Life at a Turning Point

• Lost her father before she was born
• Her life
• graduated from high school choice between
  working and going to college
• Style -- Ear-piercing, jogging with a walkerman
  
• Consumer culture car, work in Disneyworld
• Mass media the mall, movies (E.T., Ghost Buster,
  Body-Snatchers, etc.).

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Sam and Popular Culture (2)

• Her life marked by big events and names in
  popular culture 1. Springsteen -- It was the
  summer of the Michael Jackson Victory tour and
  Bruce Springsteen Born in the U.S.A. tour (novel
  23).

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Sam and Popular Culture (3)

• In Toms room, (filmic techniques in her mind)
• She dried her face . . . And pushed her hair
  back behind her ears, exposing her earrings. She
  was aware that something was about to happen,
  like a familiar scene in a movie, the slow-motion
  sequence with the couple rolling in the sheets
  and time passing. She hoped there wouldnt be
  jump cuts. . . . (126).

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Sam and Popular Culture

• Sam would drive her VW to Disney World and get a
  job there . . . And somewhere, out there on the
  road, in some big city, she would find a Bruce
  Springsteen concert. And he would pull her out
  of the front row and dance with her in the dark
  (190).

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Sam Her mediated experience of the Vietnam War ?
part of her identity

• Tries to ask questions about the war but never
  get direct answers.
• Emmett "women weren't over there. ... So they
  can't really understand" (107)
• Gap between her and her father 3837
• Read the letters look at the photos (2028
  2420)
• Read the diary
• Find vicarious experience in
• making love to Tom
• Leaving the veterans' dance with Tom

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Reading the Diary

• She has to go to Paducah mall (the film, by the
  pond) to read the diary.
• As she reads it (burn hootches, teeth as
  sourvenir, shooting a soldier at the skull from
  the back), she feels sick, humiliated and
  disgusted.
• After reading it, she wonders
• What would make people want to kill? If the
  U.S.A. sent her to a foreign country, with a
  rifle and a heavy backpack, could she root around
  in the jungle, sleep in the mud, and shoot at
  strangers? How did the army get boys to do that?
  Why was there war? (208)

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Humping the boonies (serving as the point man ??
for his platoon ) --experienced as a film

• ? the war scene 210 248, sandwiched by two
  nationalists speeches
• ? 124

• Thought of the war as horror films
• now at the swamp -- rice paddies werent real
  to her . . . She tried to remember the
  descriptions she had read. It was like
  fireworks. And the soundtrack was different from
  bugs and frogs the whoosh-beat of choppers, the
  scream of jets, the thunder-boom . . .

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Solutions (1)

• get outside of yourself

• "'If you can think about something like birds,
  you can get outside of yourself, and it doesn't
  hurt as much'" (226).

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Solutions (2, 3)

• watching lives Mawmaw
• The memorial is black like death
• Up close, she sees carnations growing
• trying to understand death, (p. 245)
• Sam "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 this wall."
• Emmett his face bursts into a smile like
  flames.

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What the film does not show

• Sam first sees the Washington Monument, rising
  "up out of the earth, proud and tall. She
  remembers Tom's bitter comment about it--a big
  white prick. She once heard someone say the
  U.S.A. goes around fucking the world."

In Country (Vietnam//US)
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Literature on War--FYI

• WWIHemingways Farewell to Arms, The Sun also
  Rises?Time Passes in To the Lighthouse
• WWIIKurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-V, Joseph
  Hellers Catch-22, Norman Mailers The Naked and
  the Dead
• Vietnam WarNorman Mailers Why Are We in
  Vietnam?, The Armies of the Night, Michael Herrs
  Dispatches, Tim OBriens Going After Cacciato,
  Robert Stones Dog Soldiers, Bobbie Ann Masons
  In Country, Joan Didions Democracy