DEVIATIONS FROM REALISM IN THE
VIETNAM WAR NOVEL
DESVIOS DO REALISMO NO ROMANCE DE GUERRA DO VIETNÃ
Tom Burns*
Resumo
Ao contrário dos romances de guerra com forma similar às narrativas de combate do realismo da Segunda
Guerra Mundial, alguns dos romancistas inovadores da Guerra do Vietnã utilizaram estratégias narrativas
de estilo pós-modernista – fantasia, metaficção, paródia etc. – para escrever sobre uma guerra que parece
desafiar uma análise racional. Dois exemplos, The bamboo bed, de William Eastlake, e Going after
Cacciato, de Tim O'Brien, são aqui analisados.
Palavras-chave: Realismo, Guerra do Vietnã, Literatura de Guerra, Pós-modernismo.
Abstract
In opposition to the war novels modeled on the combat narratives of realism of the Second World War,
some of the innovative novelists writing of the Vietnam War employed narrative strategies of the type called
postmodernist –fantasy, metafiction, parody, etc. – to write about a war that seemed to defy rational
analysis. Two examples are analyzed here: William Eastlake's The Bamboo Bed and Tim O'Brien's Going
After Cacciato.
Key words: Realism,Vietnam War, Literature of War, Postmodernism.
1 Realism as Inadequate to the Experience
Most fictional narratives inspired by the Vietnam War have carried on in a number of ways –
thematic, stylistic, and structural – the literary inheritance of previous wars in theme and structure
by representing the experience of that war in traditional modes of realism, especially in the popular
works and pulp fiction of the war. A number of serious novelists of the Vietnam War, however, have
denied the efficacy of that kind of representation. Authors such as William Wilson, Gustave
Hasford, William Eastlake, Ward Just, Lloyd Little, James Park Sloan, Nicola Rinaldi, and especially
Tim O'Brien seemed to sense in their work that the old war narrative of realism "entails notions
of objective truth and depends on Western historical metanarrative for its justification" (Carpenter,
2003, p. 30). New forms of doing fiction were required that eschewed the traditional mimetic
modes of realism and naturalism found in older writers about war like Norman Mailer and James
Jones, as well as in newer ones like Winston Groom, James Webb, and John Del Veccio. In Robert M.
Slabely's formulation, "The depiction of America's longest, strangest war required new devices,
structures, styles, even a new language to tell it 'like it is'" (Slabely, 1988, p. 88). One might add that
Slabely's final phrase is redundant: there is a need for such devices precisely because the war is too
ambiguous to be told "like it is."
Don Ringnalda has also argued that the narrative of realism was an inadequate instrument for
representing the war: "Implying a sense of controlled continuity and rational ordering, realism is a
particularly inappropriate mirage in the context of America's Vietnam War" (Ringnalda, 1994, p. 5).
Nevertheless, realism is the dominant mode of choice, not so much because, as Ringnalda claims,
that it "reflects a belief that one can make the private nightmare public and bring it under control
with that fictive rein, that one can linearize and cause-and-effect it into some kind of submission"
(Ringnalda, 1994, p. 5), but because it had long before become the dominant mode of representing
the experience of war. These soldier-novelists of Vietnam were imitating their fathers, uncles, and
grandfathers.
In response to the perceived inadequacy of realism to represent the experience of Vietnam, the
authors of these "deviant" novels evidently thought that a more indirect, allusive, parodist
representation would be more appropriate to a war whose origins, causes, and objectives were not
clearly understood or well-defined. In fact, it was during the war – and partly in response to it –
that American literary postmodernism was developed, with its distrust of transcendent, all –
encompassing narratives and the authoritative certainty associated with realism. In the
postmodernist manner, these novels employ a number of procedures and devices, such as a
mixture of high and low discourses; diverse styles and genres (parody, pastiche, allusion, black
comedy); and the deliberate confusion of fact and fiction. They mix fantasy and realism, graft
fantastic elements onto a straightforward narrative structure or offer fantasy as an alternative
narrative, insert metafictional comment, and even problematize the truthfulness of war narratives.
Politically, these works tend to be critical of the whole enterprise of the war.
2 Rewriting the Classic War Novel
I would like to examine here two examples in some detail to show how these procedures have
been assimilated into the Vietnam War novel. It seems clear by now that this type of novel has
become more common with the passing of time and the fading from the memory of the war itself.
William Eastlake's The bamboo bed (1969) would seem to deny what I have written above about
deviations in the Vietnam novels from the old models, as it pays explicit homage to Joseph Heller's
World War II novel, Catch-22 (1961) and borrows extensively from it. As can be seen from the
publication dates of both novels, moreover, the time gap between the two books is short. Heller's
novel, one of the most important American literary productions to come out of World War II, was
published fifteen years after the end of the war and was really more about the post war world of
international corporations and civilian anomie than the war itself. For its part, Eastlake's novel was
published in the middle of the Vietnam War when these phenomena were being assimilated. Indeed,
John Clark Pratt has argued that Heller's novel "should properly be seen as a paradigm for the
Vietnam War itself" (Pratt, 1991, p. 89). With respect to the fiction to come out of the Vietnam War,
he claims that at least "nine major novels would probably not have been written without Catch-22
as a model" (Pratt, 1991, p. 95). Some of the more fanciful works that he discusses seem, like
Heller's novel, to serve more as warnings about the future than narratives about the war itself,
because they express "the author's despair in our ability to perceive what we are doing to
ourselves, especially with our dependence on technology and media" (Pratt, 1991, p. 87, p. 109).
Eastlake's strategy is to write an updated version of Catch-22, reproducing that novel's apocalyptic
whimsy in the dialogue, the episodic plot weaving back and forth chronologically, the generally
expressed feeling of absurdity, the mixture of comic and grotesque etc. Some episodes, like that of
the back-and-forth business of the bridge changing hands are directly inspired by Heller's novel.
The war is constantly regarded as itself a fiction. When one character (Colonel Yvor) tells another:
"Jesus Christ and Clancy got killed for us, Billy", he receives the reply: "That's just in books"
(Eastlake, 1969, p. 234). A series of improbabilities makes it clear that this novel never tries to
establish itself as naturalistic: "Aberrant means truth," as the protagonist, Captain Clancy, says
(Eastlake, 1969, p. 286). The various characters, all of whom have a philosophical bent, tend to speak
in this mannered, portentous way, as if they are making utterances for a written record. Here is
Mike: "This is not a lost generation. This is the ignored generation, the generation that is used by
old people to kill young people" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 139). Or Batcheck, a chopper pilot, speaking to
two soldiers who returned to Vietnam without knowing why:
It's because nobody in the States gives a damn about the Vietnam war. They want to forget it.
Anyway, you're supposed to win a war.You remind them that it's still going on.You're
supposed to win a war or get killed.You guys didn't do either (Eastlake, 1969, p. 155).
The dialogue itself often recalls Heller's repetitive, convoluted, absurd turns. Here are Batchek and
Ozz discussing the massacre at Ridge Red Boy:
What about Alpha Company?
What about it?
It's the biggest single loss our side has had in the war. How did they get it?
They were bait.
What does that mean?
They bring the Chinamen out of the hills. Bait.
But they were not supposed to be annihilated.
No, that was a mistake. Something went wrong.
What went wrong?
We made a mistake.
What was the mistake?
Leaving home (Eastlake, 1969, p. 241).
Heller's concept of "Catch-22" is explicitly evoked in a passage where Appelfinger, the
"evolutionist," is trying to explain to Wientraub, a former peace-marcher who now finds he enjoys
killing people, that he is not going mad:
I know enough about evolution to know that man adapts.
You mean if he adapts to insanity he's not going crazy?
Yes, Appelfinger said.
But he's crazy if he doesn't become crazy? If everyone else is crazy?
Yes.
Why is that?
Because we have to set a norm, Appelfinger said. Even if that norm is crazy. It's called a
mean (Eastlake, 1969, p. 296).
Often in the novel, as Colonel Ivor says, "Talk is a defense against communication" (Eastlake, 1969,
p. 343).
The CO of Alpha Company, Captain Clancy is a leader with panache: he wears a plumed helmet
with a roman crest and a sword, employs a Vietnam orphan as a drummer-boy to assemble his
troops, and quotes Coleridge and Blake. He shares the danger confronted by his men, who will
consequently follow him anywhere. Clancy descends with paratroopers to defend against an
advancing NVA unit. He lands on the huge rubber plantation of Madame Dieudonné, Viet-French
woman who takes him into her bed in her under-ground mansion located under the swimming
pool. Mike, an apparent journalist, arrives after Alpha Co. has been destroyed at Ridge Red Boy.
Appelfinger, the Radio-Telephone Operator, carries off Clancey's body, so there is some initial
question as to whether or not he is really dead, although interspersed chapters feature Clancy's
rambling thoughts about war, life, death, Madame Dieudonné, and so on, as he slowly bleeds to
death after having lost his entire company during the battle of Ridge Red Boy. This battle, the
central military event of the novel, is not even described but only referred to obliquely by all of the
characters.
In a suggestive comparison that is recurrent throughout the novel, Ridge Red Boy is seen as the
equivalent of the (historical) Battle of the Little Big Horn, where General George Custer, another
flamboyant commanding officer, lost an entire cavalry unit to a Native-American ambush. In the
novel, Clancy is often explicitly compared with Gen. George Custer: "How did Clancy get into this?
The same way Custer did (...) The fantasy life becomes real" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 79). In both battles,
there was mutilation, which implicitly equates the Indians with the Vietnamese as victims of white
American soldiers in a colonialist war: the scalping of Indians is seen as analogous to the soldiers'
taking of ears as trophies. In both battles, the (white) Americans forsook cover for the open, where
they were massacred: a military blunder by commanders who ought to have known better. At
Ridge Red Boy, the Americans had sealed the ravine. They were to serve as a decoy, luring the
North Vietnamese Army (NVA) out of the hills onto the ridge. The bait worked, but too well: the
NVA forces ate it up before the main force could get there. The story given to the press is that
Alpha Company all died in the trap, but the battle was nevertheless a success: "enemy in full flight,
one thousand Unfriendlies already dead" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 170). Even while the war was in
progress, the fictional nature of the Vietnam news reports was raised, and the novel has one or
two passages ridiculing the false optimism of the Commander-in-Chief William Westmoreland, as in
his light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel speech of November 21, 1967.
Mike, who turns out to be from Army Intelligence, needs to find out what happened and why, for
which he must locate Clancy himself, the search being not only in the physical sense: When Mike is
asked what he expects to find out from Clancy, he replies "The secret of the war." The novel might
have been called "the quest for Clancy," since he in some undefined way is thought to have not
only the key to what happened at Ridge Red Boy, but the answer to the enigma of the American
intervention in Vietnam itself, and yet, as Clancy's own chapters show, he is as confused as
everyone else; this seems to be only Eastlake's way of saying that no one really understood why the
Americans went there in the first place and why they stayed on with such disastrous results.
Two civilians appear on the scene, Bethany Quinn and Peter Scott, hippie "types who wander Asia
looking for the message" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 72), Knightbridge thinks, but the hardness in Scott's
eyes indicate he is an Army deserter. Bethany wears a button that says "I have a dream," and hopes
to stop the war, though that is a problem she has not been able to solve. They seem to be the
youthful, ineffectual "flower power" of the late Sixties. Clancy's being alive would cause problems:
"Clancy is giving the war a bad reputation" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 85). He would be better as a hero,
safely dead, and it is suggested that the top brass thought Clancy dangerous and wanted him
removed, even that the bombing of his position was ordered by Colonel Ivor. Although the
bombing was not intended for that precise purpose, it would serve the purpose: "There was
nothing like a good bombing to solve everything. Save something by eliminating everything"
(Eastlake, 1969, p. 85), a parody of US military strategy.
Mike remembers Clancy as a boy in New Jersey, playing war games against a troop of Boy Scouts,
and catching them in an ambush. The dialogue here recalls Tom Sawyer's "ambush" of the Sunday
school picnic in Twain's Huckleberry Finn, in which Clancy both demonstrates he is a leader and
deceives the adults into giving him a medal. This is evidently a clue to what is wrong with Clancy,
"trying too hard in a no-war. That is, growing up in Prettyfields [a boarding school for boys with no
families, where he was Mike's classmate], he never quite understood the language on the outside
and so he thought they meant fight when they said fight" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 108).
Colonel Ivor, who may or may not have any "arms," searches for the two civilians in a chopper; he
fires into the jungle at Appelfinger, Peter and Bethany, pulling the trigger of the M-60 machine gun
with a string he pulls with his teeth. Appelfinger fires back with a found AK-47 and hits the chopper.
When the couple ask why he is shooting at the men from same side, he says: "because Colonel Ivor
is the war" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 177) and confirms that Ivor sent Clancy out as bait. The incident
points to the notorious confusion of targets in Vietnam, where one never knew at whom one was
firing, a situation taken to absurd lengths in the novel, where everyone on both sides fires at
Knightbridge's helicopter, the "Bamboo Bed."
Another motif in the novel is the familiar one of the Vietnamese enemy as invisible. The natives are
often identified with their jungle setting, which implies they belong there, while the Americans do
not. As Appelfinger says: "The jungle is on their side and all the junk we got is no match for the
jungle. Our tanks get lost in it. Our brains get malaria in it, and from up above you can't see nothing
in it" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 191), which Knightbridge elsewhere confirms: "The jungle is the friend of
the Unfriendlies. The jungle is the enemy of those that make it the enemy" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 249),
which was historically precisely the problem.
Neither good intentions nor professional competence are sufficient the disadvantages. In the final
chapters, the novel returns to the battle preceding Ridge Red Boy, in which Clancy had been
successful, but, it is suggested, this success only led to the disaster that followed. Clancy took Hill
904, an objective with which the Americans became obsessed and to which they lost many men.
They are here ironically compared to the British imperial soldiers getting knocked off Bunker Hill
by the American revolutionary army (i.e. the British are the Americans and the Americans the
Vietnamese). Clancy takes the hill by crawling up through the jungle cover and not calling in a
(useless) air strike, that is, by using guerrilla, not the usual American tactics of overwhelming
firepower.
Lacking a straightforward narrative, the novel's most insistent theme is that the waging of war is
simply absurd. "What mistake did the French army make? Arriving" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 201), a quip
later repeated in relation to the US army, even though. Knightbridge, like so many American
leaders, insists that the war must make some sense: "The war must have some meaning even if it is
an obscenity" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 202), a hopeful fantasy that becomes ridiculous in the face of the
facts: "Like I told you fifty soldiers yesterday, I tell you ten soldiers left today, we are winning the
war" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 239), Ivors insists.
A common metaphor in the novel is that war as a substitute for sex, and (more healthily) viceversa: for example, Captain Knightbridge and the nubile Nurse Lt. Janine Bliss, who are called
"Tarzan and Jane" by men in their unit, have sex in the Bamboo Bed flying over combat in the
jungle. When the civilian Peter opines: "Thinking is not a male thing. When a man thinks he comes
up with a war" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 77), Mike echoes him: "Women are tougher than men. That's why
they don't have to go to war to prove anything" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 79). From the other side of the
argument, Appelfinger claims that "just screwing is a poor substitute for the ecstasy of war"
(Eastlake, 1969, p. 225). For the women in the novel, evidently, sex or even business (Madame
Dieudonné) suffice.
The title introduces the constantly reiterated motif of the Bamboo Bed, an image suggesting Asia,
sex, dreams, both comfort and discomfort. The Bamboo Bed is the bed in Madame Dieudonné's
underground villa, where she lies with Clancy; it is the jungle floor, where soldiers, including Clancy,
die; and it is the name of Knightbridge's Huey helicopter, which is compared to a butterfly in its
flight above the jungle, a vehicle that never rescues anyone but is the nest where he and Janine have
sex. The bamboo bed is therefore both the reality of war and the potential escape from it. At the
same time, as is reiterated several times in the novel, the only real escape is through death: "Our
captain's bride," (Eastlake, 1969, p. 350). Fittingly, Mike finally catches up with Clancy, has his body
removed in the Bamboo Bed at the end.
3 Fantasy as Narrative Escape
My second example, Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato (1978) is a contemporary version of an old
literary genre, the quest narrative. Thematically, it is about war and the desire to escape it, but it
does not focus on action or even suggest what is wrong with this particular war, but rather on the
individual soldier's consciousness. It is therefore a story of remembering and forgetting, a pervasive
theme in all of O'Brien's work. While in the circumstances forgetting becomes impossible, fantasy
becomes a substitute, although not a completely satisfactory one. While the novel seems to defend
the soldier's need for illusion, it also reminds political conservatives and their false versions of
history that the reality of the Vietnam War, the reality of American history, cannot be wholly
escaped by alter-native versions of the truth.
On another level, the metaphysical, Going after Cacciato suggests that the individual's perceptions
and the narratives he weaves from them do not point to a transcendent, all-explanatory
metanarrative for the war. For a soldiers, direct witnesses of war, this means that their war stories
can only be partial versions, that there is no overriding truth about war: "after a battle each soldier
will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and…when a war has ended it is as if there
have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 236-237).
A mixture of fantasy and realism, there are three levels or tracks of narrative, more or less
corresponding to past, present, and future. The past is Private Paul Berlin's terrible memories of his
recent experiences in combat; the present is his six-hour guard duty on an Observation Post (OP);
the "future" a fantasy journey overland from Asia to Europe, in which he imagines escaping from
the war. The imagined is therefore interspersed with flashbacks from the war he is fighting, which
recount the deaths of eight other members of the squad. The clue to the connection between the
reality of his experiences and his fantasies is the epigraph to the novel, "Soldiers are dreamers,"
which is the first half of the first line of Siegfried Sassoon's World War I sonnet, "Dreamers," the
second half of which is "from death's grey land." The poem evokes the intense yearning of soldiers
for the ordinary settings and routines of peace, their dream of escape from the hell of the
trenches.
Berlin is spending the night on an Observation Post (OP), weaving this fantasy about getting away
from the war because he can never entirely escape his immediate situation – his constant fear incountry and his memories of the deaths of his companions in combat: "This was the dangerous
time. He'd heard stories of how OPs were attacked: always during the darkest hours…He tried to
forget it. The trick was to concentrate on better things. He therefore negotiates the various levels
of narrative: "He saw the river darken, the sky turning pink, the city beginning to light itself. And he
believed what he saw" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 143). “Paris. All the things seen and felt, all the happy things.
Average things" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 152), such as Sassoon's evocations of "bank holidays and wives."
The Third Squad has just lost a number of men: "It was a bad time," the novel begins, but almost
immediately, the disappearance of a soldier named Cacciato is announced and the solution
proposed to bring the deserter back to the war. The surviving squad members set out west from
Vietnam, working their way across Laos, Burma, India, Iran, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Germany, over
eight-thousand miles, to reach their final destination in Paris (where the peace talks that offered
hopes for the end of the war were held). They travel on foot, but also by boat, train, bus, and car, in
pursuit of the wayward, plump, moon-faced Cacciato (who can be seen as either Dostoevsky's
Holy Fool, or Alice's White Rabbit, since time is running out on the OP. Cacciato is "the ordering
enigma of the novel, the aporia at its core" (Carpenter, 2003, p. 24). A man who one day simply
goes AWOL and decides to walk to Paris, leaving his squad clues at intervals along the war and
making surprise appearances so they cannot get lost. Cacciato is not quite real to the other men:
there is "something curiously unfinished about Cacciato…The result was blurred and uncolored
and bland" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 21). He is spotted in odd situations – as a Cao Dai monk, at a train
station in Delhi, springing them from an Iranian jail – but he always eludes capture.
This declared objective becomes less and less plausible the further away they get, but their leader,
the war-weary Lieutenant Corson, will insist on the difference between their desire for the
enterprise and its "reality," which turns out also to be the impossibility of real escape, which in
military terms can only mean desertion: "The war's not over. We left the bloody war-walked away,
ran. Under-stand that?" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 211: italics given). Some of the squad members in pursuit
are lost along the way. One gives up and turns back. Another man jumps ship to avoid being
arrested and disappears. The lieutenant tries to drop out when he falls in love with an Indian
woman, but he is kidnapped by his own men and returned to the quest. Another female member is
added to the group in the form of a young Chinese woman from the Cholon district of Saigon
whom Berlin takes up as his girlfriend. She is the soldier's romantic fantasy of female
companionship: "Paul Berlin took Sarkin Aung Wan's hand and led her to the floor. Unreal, he
thought. Just a creature of his own making – blink and she was gone – but even so he liked the way
she closed her eyes to the music" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 243). Consistently with the terms of the
fantasy, she wants him to remain in Paris and make a life there, but he insists that he has to "return"
to the war, that is, wake up.
Other episodes have an Alice-in-Wonderland quality, as when the squad is searching a train for
Cacciato and it transforms into a search of a Vietnam village. Or when the men are checking out a
Viet Cong tunnel and fall into an ultramodern underground headquarters, a Hollywood maze to
which they cannot find the exit: "The way in is the way out…We have fallen into a hole. Now we
must fall out" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 122).
As the journey progresses in his mind, he even sees it as already over, as having turned into a
narrative, a tale to be told at a later tie, and he even anticipates the objections of the listeners: "He
smiled. It would make a fine war story. Oh, there would be some skeptics. He could already hear
them: What about money? Money for hotels and food and train tickets? What about passports?…
What about the law? Illegal entry, no documents, no military orders, no permits for all the
weaponry? What about police and customs agents?" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 153). As if in compensation
for such objections, the squad is indeed arrested at one point for illegal entry and possession of
firearms, but these are secondary charges to the main one, espionage, which is clearly absurd. In
any case, the Third Squad live well on apparently nothing, cross frontiers and wander about foreign
cities in uniform, humping their weapons and ammo.
O'Brien does not completely leave behind some of the recurrent concerns of the war, as seen in
two passages where Paul Berlin (in the war, not on the journey) is seen plodding up a hill. He is
first observed by his platoon leader, Lieutenant Sidney Martin:
He admired the oxen persistence with which the last soldier in the column of thirty-nine
marched, thinking that the boy represented so much good-fortitude, discipline, loyalty, selfcontrol, courage, toughness… Sidney Martin, not a man of emotion, raised a hand to hail the
boy (O'Brien, 1978, p. 203).
This is another kind of fantasy, the one of how a gung-ho junior officer, a John Wayne type, with
"blue eyes and fine blond hair and strong teeth," might see his laboring platoon, one who believes
in the war and his own place in it: "He believed that the mission to the mountains, important in
itself, was even more important as a reflection of a man's personal duty to exercise his full
capacities of courage and endurance and willpower" (201). These reflections are immediately
followed by those of the last soldier in the column:
Paul Berlin had no sense of the lieutenant's sentiment. His eyes were down and he climbed
the road dumbly. His steps matched his thoughts. He did not notice the heat, or the beauty
of the country, or the lieutenant's raised hand. If he had noticed, he would not have
understood. He was dull of mind, blunt of spirit, numb of history, and struck with wonder
that he could not stop climbing the red road toward the mountains (O'Brien, 1978, p. 203204).
This difference sums up the gap between officers and men, between those who believed in the war
and wanted to be in it and those who were there because they could not escape it. When
Lieutenant Sidney Martin orders them to search a tunnel and they refuse, he goes down himself
and is fragged (i.e. killed by a fragmentation grenade) by his own platoon. Every man touches the
grenade they drop in – a collective act of retributive murder, reflecting real incidents of rebellion by
troops fed up with the war.
The characters in the fantastic journey, as if reversing the direction of Paul Berlin's own thoughts,
can never fully expel the war's reality. They even discuss this point: "Opinions varied. According to
Doc Peret, no fool, the war was over; according to the lieutenant, the war was still a war" (O'Brien,
1978, p. 78). The confusion of fantasy and reality can also be seen in the content of the events, as in
the episode showing "how on his very first day he [Berlin] had witnessed the ultimate war story"
(O'Brien, 1978, p. 249): Billy Boy Watkins, after having his foot blown off, died of fright on the field
of battle" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 260). Berlin has an attack of the giggles at this event and it is Cacciato
who offers him a stick of gum to calm his down: "You'll do fine," he says…"You got a terrific sense
of humor" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 262).
In an Iranian prison, a colonel of Savak, the feared security organization in the era of the Shah,
makes them all confess: "Now tell me that this…this mission, this so-called mission…tell me it is a
fiction. Tell me it is a made-up story. Tell me it is an alibi to cover cowardice" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 276:
italics given). The men confess, loudly, for it is a fiction after all, and perhaps one through which
Berlin, who has earlier confessed to being a coward, confesses the whole ruse. If one important
difference between a dream and a fantasy is that in a fantasy one has some measure of control in
how the story will turn out, this kind of closure is denied. In Vietnam, Cacciato does desert, but the
squad surrounds him on a hill and in the morning goes after him: "That was the end of it, the last
known fact" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 380). In "Paris," they corner him in a shabby apartment in a dead-end
alley. With the lieutenant gone ("East," with the woman), it is Berlin who has to go in after him.
When he begins firing, the room transforms and the two settings suddenly merge: the squad is
back in Vietnam. Cacciato is gone, reported Missing In Action.
At first, Berlin also seems to be merely hoping that someone, even if it is not himself, has got away
from the war: "'I hope he keeps moving,' Paul Berlin whispered to Doc Peret. "'That's all I hope. I
just hope he's moving. He does that, we'll never catch him'" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 27). As they set out
on the journey, however, his thoughts more and more tend to wishful thinking: "He liked this.
Walking away, it was something fine to think about…Was it really so impossible? Or was there a
chance, one in a million, that it might truly be done?" (O'Brien, 1978, p. 31). On the other hand, the
fantasy narrative serves not only as an "escape" but as a way of controlling the present "reality."
Tobey C. Herzog, for example, reads the novel as a text on the difficulties of writing a war novel –
a theme that O'Brien takes even further in his interwoven collection of stories The things they
carried (1990). Paul Berlin's attempts to control his constant fear by transforming the chaos into
logical, ordered, and understandable events" (Herzog, 1992, p. 162); in other words, by forming the
confused events of a soldier's life into a coherent narrative. The result is the fantasy journey in
which even the wildest events have a certain logic that remains under the control of the daydreaming soldier-writer.
4 Conclusion
It has been shown how two novelists, Eastlake and O'Brien, have avoided the pitfalls of tell-it-like-is
realism by resorting to narrative strategies in which the received realities of the Vietnam War are
called into account: Eastlake by rewriting and updating Heller's absurdist novel of World War II,
O'Brien by inventing alternative narratives suggesting an alternative "reality." Other fictional
strategies have been resorted to by other authors writing of the war who felt the need to express
its political and military ambiguities.
For example, John Clark Pratt, in The Laotian fragments (1974) constructs a narrative about
American pilots in the secret war in Laos in the early Sixties that is constructed entirely out of
documents – military dispatches, letters, magazine articles, telegrams, diary entries, tape-recordings,
etc. – to suggest that the "reality" of the war, for most of us, will remain the fragments that are
inscribed on paper, tape or film. James Park Sloane, in War games (1971) parodies the usual
paradigms of the Vietnam novel. In Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers (1979), black humour is
pervasive and narrative cause-and-effect are absent. Finally, one might mention Nicola Rinaldi,
Bridge Fall Down (1985, 1986), where Vietnam is not even mentioned and the war is dislocated in
time and space, with an entire military operation turning out to be an excuse for a filmmaker to
make a movie about the war that will make his artistic reputation. All these works eschew an
overreaching narrative to explain the experience of the war. Its complexities, absurdities, and
contra-dictions – political and military – can only be suggested, for a war that seemed to have no
"closure" and continues to be debated even while new military adventures were being launched on
the other side of the world.
References
CARPENTER, Lucas. It don't mean nothing: Vietnam war fiction and postmodernism. College Literature, v. 30,
n. 2, p. 28-37, Spring 2003.
EASTLAKE, William. The bamboo bed. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1969.
HASFORD, Gustav. The short-timers. New York: Bantam Books, 1983. (First edition: 1979).
HELLER, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Dell, 1974. (First edition: 1961).
HERZOG, Tobey C. Vietnam war stories: innocence lost. London: Routledge, 1992.
JASON, Philip K. Fourteen landing zones: approaches to Vietnam war literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1991.
O'BRIEN, Tim. Going after Cacciato. New York: Dell, 1978. (First edition: 1975).
PRATT, John Clark. Yossarian's legacy: Catch-22 and the Vietnam war. In: JASON, Philip K. Fourteen landing
zones: approaches to Vietnam war literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. p. 89-110.
______. The Laotian fragments. New York: Avon, 1985. (First edition: 1974).
RINALDI, Nicola. Bridge fall down. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. (First edition: 1985).
RINGNALDA, Don. Fighting and writing the Vietnam war. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994.
SEARLE, William J. Search and clear; critical responses to selected literature and films of the Vietnam war.
Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988.
SLABELY, Robert M. Fact, fiction, and metafiction in James Park Sloan's War games. In: SEARLE, William J.
Search and clear; critical responses to selected literature and films of the Vietnam war. Bowling Green:
Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. p. 87-95.
SLOANE, James Park. War games. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1971.
Dados do autor:
*Tom Burns
Doutor em Letras – UFSC – e Professor – Faculdade de Letras/UFMG
Endereço para contato:
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Faculdade de Letras, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras
Av. Antônio Carlos, 6627
31.270-901 Belo Horizonte/MG – Brasil
Endereço eletrônico:
[email protected]
Data de recebimento: 30 maio 2009
Data de aprovação: 26 ago. 2009