The Vietnam Reader (91 page)

2. What are the two first-person narrators’ jobs? Paul Berlin’s? How might this affect their views?

3. Every narrative has a main character or “hero.” How are the heroes of these three war narratives typical or atypical? Whom are we asked to identify with, and why? What traits do these heroes share with other American heroes?

4. What implicit criticisms of the way the war is being fought or handled by the American military and political systems can you find in these pieces?

5. Compare the welcome the central characters of
Going After Cacciato
and
The Green Berets
receive and how they react to it.

6. What do these narratives imply about American innocence and nobility, especially that of the combat soldier? Compare O’Brien’s Paul Berlin to any of the others.

7. Examine the use of language in
Cacciato
and
The Green Berets,
especially profanity and military jargon. Who uses it and in what context?

8. How would the hero of
The Green Berets
view the hero of
Cacciato?

9. How would the Tim O’Brien of
If I Die in a Combat Zone
see Sven Kornie’s views?

10. Discuss the abundance or lack of irony and comedy across the three works. Why is there so much or so little?

11. How are the Vietnamese portrayed?

12. How do the soldiers in each piece fit into the military?

13. Examine the two in-country settings and what they say about the war.

14. What do the three texts say about courage and fear?

15. How do these pieces address concepts of masculinity?

2. Early Work

1. Contrast Casey’s, O’Brien’s, and Rabe’s use of irony and twisted humor.

2. Examine pieces that comment on the very act of trying to relate the experience of Vietnam. What do these pieces say about the possibility or impossibility of relating that experience?

3. How are the Vietnamese treated by American personnel in these five readings? Especially look at Halberstam’s use of Thuong as a point-of-view character and at Rabe’s very different use of Zung.

4. How are Americans who stayed home viewed?

5. Discuss how women are portrayed in the five selections.

6. How do the authors make use of pop culture?

7. How is the body (or bodies) used?

8. With whom are we supposed to identify in
Sticks and Bones?
How does Rabe achieve this effect, and why?

9. How do the authors portray previous generations?

10. How do the authors employ language and formal innovation (or conversely, traditional methods) to convey this new material?

11. How (and where) does David’s return in Sticks
and Bones
challenge American myths? How does Rabe attempt to indict the culture as a whole?

12. In what ways is this protest literature? What judgment do these works pass on the war and on America, and how?

13. Examine the relationship of the individual to the group in two or more pieces.

14. Compare the views of the war given by the minor characters in
If I Die in a Combat Zone.
Taken as a group, do they offer the FNG O’Brien a coherent or consistent picture of the war (or of their own ability to make sense of it)?

15. Where do the authors attack what they see as the gaps between the professed virtues of the American system and the realities?

16. Again, how do these authors present soldiers and soldiering? How are these versions different from the typical warrior-hero model?

17. Find examples of or allusions to American innocence and American evil. To whom (or what) are they attributed, and why?

18. In Casey’s “Learning,” the narrator says he enjoyed reading about Caesar’s fighting. Discuss the aesthetic allure of combat violence—why people like to read about it—and some of the moral challenges this poses to the writers of these five pieces.

19. Contrast Halberstam’s use of history with the other authors’.

3. First Wave of Major Work

1. Compare the end of Caputo’s prologue to O’Brien’s
If I Die in a Combat Zone
and discuss the paradox inherent in their resignation concerning the power of their separate testimonies. Examine their claims to be writing fiction or nonfiction, reportage or stories.

2. Discuss the very different literary techniques used by these five authors.

3. How do Kovic, Caputo, and the men in
Fields of Fire
and
Dispatches
fit into the stereotypical categories of American soldier?

4. How do Kovic, Caputo, and Herr explain the attraction or thrill of war? “You know how it is, you want to look and you don’t want to look.”

5. Examine Philip Caputo’s musings on the morality or culpability of the American combat soldier in Vietnam. Now Paul Berlin’s. How might Michael Herr criticize Caputo’s or Berlin’s explanations? How might Webb’s Goodrich agree with them?

6. Though these pieces come from the first wave of major literary works about the American war, all five postdate their authors’ tours of duty by at least five years. Examine Caputo’s prologue (especially his claim that
A Rumor of War
is not a political document) and Paul Berlin’s imagining with this quotation from
Dispatches
in mind: “… afterward you can make up any kind of bullshit you want to about it …” How does this serve as an analogy for any vet writing about the war (and how we as American readers must approach their work)?

7. In all five pieces, find instances where the authors question the nature of truth, reality, facts, lies, etc.

8. Discuss Caputo’s view of Vietnam and the Vietnamese. How might this influence a civilian jury’s evaluation of his guilt or innocence as the defendant in a murder trial (the victims being Vietnamese)? Examine his statement about the killings being substantially and fundamentally different from killings in Los Angeles. Now look at Paul Berlin’s view of civilians. How about Goodrich’s musings on the one hundred NVA dead and the old lady?

9. Discuss Herr’s portrayal of Americans in Vietnam.

10. Herr cites Hemingway’s tide “A Way You’ll Never Be.” Discuss how Kovic, Webb, Caputo, and Herr show the difficulty (impossibility?) of bridging the gap between combatant and noncombatant, soldier and American civilian. How is this an analogy for the writer and America?

11. Locate instances of participants feeling a nostalgia for the war or unable to reconnect with society. How does this play into contemporary (1976-78) clichés about the Vietnam vet?

6. The Oral History Boom

1. In contrast to “the gap,” or the impossibility of relating the experience of the war to the American public found in earlier texts, these oral histories purposely attack that very problem. How do they try to bridge the gap? What do they do that previous texts could not? Do they run into the same problems or adopt the same tactics as earlier work?

2. Discuss the problems of authority in these oral histories. How do the editors establish the speakers’ right (even duty) to relate their stories?

3. Fiction versus nonfiction: Look at Nam’s uncredited epigraph. Examine the contradictions of the oral history and the oral tradition of storytelling. (It wouldn’t hurt to keep Michael Herr’s
Dispatches
in mind here, and his penchant for telling emblematic yet way-over-the-top stories, then attributing them to someone else, or even no one in particular.)

4. What do the people in the one section of
Nam
say about America? How do they fit into the culture?

5. What do they say about going to Vietnam? How do they fit or explode the easy categories of reluctant draftee, professional warrior, psycho killer?

6. What is their grasp of American foreign policy? How does America fit into the world?

7. Discuss the radicalization of Malik Edwards, his views of the war, the American military, and America itself. Find other participants, fictional and otherwise, who share his views—especially Robert Santos’s comments about the Detroit riots, and his quote: “I just thought I was white like everyone else.” Address the issue of the soldier-protester, a quintessential Vietnam figure.

8. Examine how the speakers apprehend the roles of men and women in American society.

9. Critics have said there seems to be an implicit view of the speakers in these oral histories as guiltless victims of the war (which in many cultural circles is now the prevailing truth). Do you find this to be true, and if so, why? What previous stereotypes do the editors and speakers hope to overthrow or replace? In whose works have we previously seen this new version of the American soldier in Vietnam?

10. Pop versions: Several men in
Nam
cite John Wayne. Search for instances where vets discuss film or other media versions of the war. How do they see them? Examine Robert Santos’s saying: “… it was like a goddamn movie.”

11. Contrast the group of letter writers in
Dear America
with the speakers in
Nam.
On the whole, do their views of the war differ? Their politics (or lack of)? What might this have to do with the time when the letters were written and the pieces taped? How do the editors’ choices affect our view of Americans in Vietnam?

12. Compare Anne Simon Auger’s life after the war with those of other vets—Ron Kovic; Michael, Nick, and Steven from
The Deer Hunter;
David in
Sticks and Bones,
etc.

13. Discuss instances of the individual caught in the system.

14. How do these testimonies fit the
Bildungroman
trajectory from innocence to experience? What have the speakers learned?

7. Second Wave of Major Work

1. Examine Del Vecchio’s use of dialect spellings and his portrayal of Doc Johnson. Compare this use of language and cultural history with that of Wallace Terry in Malik Edwards’s section of
Bloods.
Use this comparison as the kernel of a larger discussion on the representation of minority servicemen (and -women, if you can find the evidence).

2. Rufus Brooks’s R&R: How does Del Vecchio’s portrayal of Lila fit with other female characters we’ve seen? Examine the assumptions the male characters (and, perhaps, the male authors) make about women in general and, more specifically, women in U.S. society. Keep in mind that the Women’s Lib movement was contemporary with the end of the war.

3. The usual question we ask of an American text: How do these three books portray the U.S. involvement in Vietnam? Sympathetically or not? Who do these books praise or blame?

4. How is Wright’s veteran at home different from others we’ve seen? In what ways is he the same?

5. Examine how Wright and Heinemann push their language compared to Del Vecchio. Look at the form of the novels as well. Compare the techniques used with those of Kovic or O’Brien, Herr or Baker. What similarities do you find?

6. Discuss Wright’s and Heinemann’s use of pop culture.

7. Discuss Wright’s view of American technology and society.

8. Dissect Heinemann’s first paragraph and the next few ensuing pages in light of other disclaimers (Caputo’s, O’Brien’s, Moore’s) or questionable claims of authenticity (Herr’s, Terry’s, Baker’s).

9. What about Heinemann’s narrator’s claim that most folks will shell out to see artful carnage? Discuss whether you find this true or not and why, using evidence gleaned from the other texts and films, as well as from American culture at large.

10. How and where does Heinemann indulge in—even celebrate in an over-the-top way—the stereotypes of Americans in Vietnam?
Examine his use of caricatures and other elements of the tall tale rather than the relatively straight-ahead realism of Del Vecchio.

11. Going back to Question 1, how is Heinemann’s portrait of Jonesy different from Del Vecchio’s Jackson or Johnson?

12. Who is this James that Heinemann’s narrator addresses? What is the significance of this story being told to a particular audience?

13. Compare Heinemann’s narrator’s discussion of war correspondents with other authors’ views of the media, especially Herr’s, who seems to be at least partly the target of these jibes. Tie in the line about the impossibility of a movie getting the truth about the war across that ends that section.

9. Memoirs

1. Usually memoirs are first-person accounts of lived experience. Examine Glasser’s use of fictional techniques, as well as his choice of a third-person narrator.

2. Once again, the usual question: How do these personal narratives portray the U.S. involvement in Vietnam—sympathetically or not? Compare Glasser’s view of war with Lanning’s and Downs’s.

3. What, ostensibly, is the purpose of each text—that is, what does it appear the author wants from his audience? Who is that audience?