Cleary Wilder

English 112B

Annotated Bibliography

The Vietnam War:

Oral Histories and Narratives

Although the troops were ordered home nearly thirty years ago, the Vietnam War persists as a kind of ghost in the national consciousness. There is dead silence in most public discussion regarding the true cost of the war to those who were sent to fight it. In the 1980’s, veterans of this conflict wrote and spoke about their service and their thoughts and feelings about it, and one of the results was a wealth of quality literature. Regardless, these voices--so strong in their determination to create meaning and bring back something valuable from their experiences to share with others--have remained haunting rather than heeded voices.

The young, in particular, need to hear the wisdom and the warnings spoken by these voices. N. Bradley Christie, in response to the question “Why teach these materials?” maintains that these texts “demand that students consider what it really means to live and fight in this war” (36); this is apt, as it appears increasingly likely that the millennial generation will face a similar situation. Christie believes, as well, that this literature provides an indispensable counterweight to the romanticized Hollywood version of the Vietnam War (or any other war) and to “the potent perils of measuring public experience by mythic standards” (36). Perry Oldham is aware of this peril as well, as he considers who, inevitably, his students are: “young men, and young women too, eager for a whiff of the war--in the case of members of our class, vicariously, by reading stories about it--young men and women who longed to be projected into desperate situation that would somehow give them answers to questions they had about their own bravery and selfhood” (65). In fact, Oldham expresses deep reservations about “autobiographical, conventionally written combat narratives” because he believes that their effect may be to “intentionally or otherwise, glamorize war or the warrior or the idea of war as a rite of passage” (66); he chooses, instead, to employ texts that permit the reader to achieve distance from the experiences described; “that way when we talk about the book, we can talk about art, instead of experience,” and the net effect is that “the students are pushed to confront issues addressed in the narrative, rather than just imaginatively playing soldier” (66). Larry R. Johannessen has had different classroom experiences with the same combat narratives, and expresses a contrasting perspective on this matter; he apparently creates this “successful distancing device” (Oldham 66) by making skillfully facilitated discussion, with its powerful ability to stimulate critical thinking processes, an integral part of the study of the books (Illumination Rounds 17-23).

In deference to the experience of all three of these experts, I have included in my annotated bibliography a range of materials which are intended to support students and teachers to make the best use of the centerpiece oral histories and narratives. Al Santoli’s Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War By Thirty-Three American Soldiers Who Fought It, published in 1981, was the first Vietnam War oral history collection. It was followed by Terry, Wallace’s Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, in 1984, and then by Santoli’s second history, To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians and Keith Walker’s Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-Six American Women Who Served in Vietnam, in 1985. Lynda Van Devanter’s autobiographical narrative Home Before Morning is a wonderful supplement to Piece of My Heart. In addition, Bill Addler’s Letters from Vietnam speak from a slightly different viewpoint, as they were written to family and friends for the purpose of maintaining those saving personal connections that kept many a soldier or volunteer going when the going became extremely tough. The rest of the entries in the bibliography surround these six works with various supporting offerings. The poems in the two anthologies of Vietnam veterans’ poetry, W.D. Ehrhart’s Carrying the Darkness and Rottman, Barry, and Paquet’s Winning Hearts and Minds, beautifully structured and intense in feeling, seem far more closely related to the histories does anything else in this bibliography; they are beautifully structured, condensed continuations of the narratives in the heads of the poets. I have included a few history references for both students and teachers wishing to sort out the complex events to which the oral histories refer: Larry Addington’s America’s War in Vietnam: a Short Narrative History, and Frances Fitzgerald’s sensitive treatment of the Vietnamese people’s history and culture, Fire in the Lake. Mary Cross and Frances Fitzgerald have produced a collection of photographs and essays that belong with the histories: Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth. I have included only two suggested novels, although teachers will normally consider fiction from the much wider selection available, and of course, no Vietnam unit would be complete without the classic film documentary, Hearts and Minds, directed by Peter Davis. The rest of the works are references for teachers.

Addington, Larry H. America’s War in Vietnam: a Short Narrative History.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

This book can serve as a quick, concise source of background information for both teachers and students. Who, what, where, why, how. Covers Vietnamese history until 1802, the French Indochina War, and the American involvement until 1975.

Addler, Bill. Letters from Vietnam. New York: Ballentine Books, 2003.

In this collective personal history, soldiers, medical personnel, and Red Cross Volunteers describe their everyday lives in a combat zone to their friends and families. In his introduction to the book, Al Santoli remarks that Vietnam was considered the first television war, but television has its limits. “Although stunningly hypnotic to an audience, graphic images of combat do not adequately convey the inner feelings of those whose lives are on the line moment to moment. It is candid letters, such as those contained in this book, written by warriors to their loved ones, that provide us with the most intimate reality of their experience” (1).

Brende, Joel Osler, and Erwin Randolph Parson. Vietnam Veterans:

The Road to Recovery. New York: Signet-New American Library, 1985.

Brende and Parson’s book deals with the issues of the long-term psychological effects of war on the warriors. The book is structured around the attempt to place this experience in a the historical context of this particular war, describe the actual experience of combat, explain how veterans were affected after they returned home, give an overview of the psychology profession’s past and present attempts to define and address the veterans’ problems and issues, reflect upon war’s effect on the veterans’ identity, speak of family life and the veterans’ ongoing battles with post-traumatic stress syndrome, consider the extra layer of complexity possessed by these issues when the veterans are woman or members of minority groups, and discuss the difficulties of and possibilities for recovery. This work is a must-have for teachers seeking to understand in depth the life that is lived by veterans and the war’s profound effect on those who were sent to wage it.

Christie, N. Bradley. “Teaching Our Longest War: Constructive Views from Vietnam.”

English Journal 78.4 (1989): 35-38.

Christie’s short article is an excellent resource for high school or college instructors. “Among the attractions of teaching the Vietnam War must be students’ obvious fascination with the subject and their equally obvious ignorance about it” (35); furthermore, some students recognize that the usual representation of this war in the movies and on television conflicts with documented fact, and they have a hunger for knowledge of the reality. This literature raises the theoretical question of the difference between history and fiction and “the potential perils of measuring public experience by mythic standards” (36). Other issues mentioned are gender, race, and the power of language. He models a 4-6 week unit plan for senior high school with suggestions for teaching. His resource list of books, plays, poems, films, histories, and documentaries is short but of very high quality.

Cross, Mary, and Frances Fitzgerald. Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth. Boston:

Bullfinch Press, 2001.

Frances Fitzgerald was a Vietnam War correspondent, and Mary Cross has photographed many developing countries during her career. This book is a collaborative work, a juxtaposition of essays with photographs and captions, whose common subject is traditional Vietnamese society. Fitzgerald notes that “For the past century and a half Vietnam has been through a succession of profound upheavals, the main ones being the imposition of colonial rule, revolution, and two major wars on its own territory. Nonetheless I devote much of this text to traditional, or precolonial, Vietnamese culture. The reasons are several. For one thing, to understand the new it is necessary to understand the old--the base upon which the new takes shape--and traditional Vietnamese culture is unfamiliar to most Westerners. […] Third, although colonialism, war, and revolution have altered the shape of the society and the way people think, Vietnam has not changed as much as might be imagined--or as much as the advocates of modernization, Communist and non-Communist, surely hoped” (9).

Davis, Peter, dir. Hearts and Minds. 1975. By Howard Zuker and Henry Joglom.

Rainbow Pictures. Los Angeles: Embassy Home Entertainment, 1985.

This film is a compilation of scenes from the war and of footage from interviews with military and political figures including President Johnson and General Westmoreland, but also with lower-ranking veterans, one of whom, an ex-POW, travels and speaks in favor of the war, and another of whom, an armless, paraplegic, afro-sporting African-American who lives in a medical facility, offers his compassionate opinion as to where we went wrong in our attitude toward the Southeast Asians. The film doesn’t tell, it shows the viewer.

Donelson, Kenneth L. and Alleen Pace Nilsen. Literature for Today’s Young Adults.

7^th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2005. 247-50.

This textbook gives a survey of the genre, offers useful information regarding the evaluation of Young Adult literature, provides a rich index of authors and works, and lists many references for those seeking to use this literature in the classroom. It has a short but very informative section on Vietnam literature as a subset of historical fiction and nonfiction, with literature and film selections.

Ehrhart, W.D., ed. Carrying the Darkness: American Indochina: the Poetry of the

Vietnam War. New York: Avon Books, 1985.

Creative works by veterans reflect not only the intensity of the combat experience but its many ramifications in their lives. “Free Fire Zone” by Igor Bobrowsky speaks of the people on whose land the poet fought: “Trembling and sobbing / you crawl out of your hole / brown grime encrusted on your face, / white brittle hair touched gently by the wind. / And begging you fall down on your knees / and raise your wizened hands in supplication / to what stands mute in us, and cold to all your needs-- / which kicks and prods you back upon your feet” (46). Joseph Cady describes lasting effects on his ability to feel and to connect with others, especially in intimate relationships: “You will tell him he is beautiful; / he will tell you you are beautiful; / you will sleep side by side every night for two months. / Then at Easter this lover / will knock you breathless and leave you: / he will say that he never felt any joy in the relationship: / he will tell you that he can no longer hold in his violence” (65).

Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.

1972. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1989.

“Fire in the lake” denotes one of the hexagrams of the Chinese Book of Changes, “and it is the image of revolution,” the author notes. “[F]or Vietnamese it forms the mental picture of change within the society” (vii). Although it has been more than thirty years since this book was published, it stands as a history classic, for those (teachers and students) who wish “to understand the political, economic, and social issues at stake for the Vietnamese” (ix).

Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. 1955. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Green’s classic novel of the beginning of American involvement in Vietnam depicts the character and activities of (presumably) a Central Intelligence Agency officer who plays with people’s lives as though they were negligible, for patriotism’s sake. “He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. […] A quiet American” (17) who has “pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world” (12).

Johannessen, Larry R. Illumination Rounds: Teaching the Literature of the Vietnam

War. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1992.

A part of this book was condensed to create Johannessen’s short article, “Young Adult Literature and the Vietnam War” (below), and therefore shares with it the concern with “the war that won’t go away” (“Young Adult Literature” 43) and with the education of the young, who “may not understand how the aftermath of the war continues to shape their lives and society; and they may not be prepared to make informed, intelligent decisions about their future” (Illumination Rounds18). To speak to this concern, he feels teachers should select from the cornucopia of available literature and assume a teaching stance of facilitator or coach, allowing the students to “discuss and debate with each other and arrive at their own conclusions and interpretations” (19). The bulk of the book consists of a series of practice sessions that give a clear idea as to how to stimulate and moderate this type of discussion and suggest many useful ideas for related literary analysis and critical thinking activities using photography, art, and music as well as literary works. He also includes a veritable goldmine of an annotated bibliography of Vietnam literature and film.

---. “Young Adult Literature and the Vietnam War.” English Journal 82.5 (1993):

43-49.

Johannessen feels that the Vietnam Syndrome has never gone away. Speaking of those whose parents died in Vietnam, he states that “the sorrow, grief, and loss expressed by these young people serve as a poignant reminder that despite what the former President or others might say about having buried the ghosts of Vietnam, the legacies of the war continue to haunt the nation” (43). For the purpose of teaching this war, Johannessen categorizes the existing adolescent literature on the Vietnam War: the combat narrative, the war at home, the refugee experience, and legacies of the war. He lists works that exemplify each of these categories and discusses each as to content. He strongly advocates teaching this war as an anodyne to heavily romanticized war depictions of popular culture.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1990.

O’Brien’s collection of fictionalized, related tales from his war experiences is a standard assignment for high school students studying the Vietnam War. The author effortlessly captures the reader’s imagination, curiosity, compassion, and horror all at once, with wonderful skill. One difference between this book and many other Vietnam War fictional works is that O’Brien doesn’t subscribe to the old adage of “good out of evil.” He believes that war is an unmitigated disaster, and he says so in “How to Tell a True War Story”: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (69).

Oldham, Perry. “Some Further Thoughts on Teaching Vietnam Literature.”

English Journal 82.8 (1993): 65-67.

Oldham agrees with Christie and Johannessen as to the importance of teaching the Vietnam War in high schools, but he has reservations. The eagerness of his students at the beginning of the unit has a familiar look to him (from his personal recollections of the war), that of “young men and women who longed to be projected into desperate situations that would somehow give them answers to questions they had about their own bravery and selfhood” (65). His teaching methods reflect a desire “to share with them my own visceral rejection of war and violence in general as a means of solving disputes and as a state of mind” (65). The article is a short exploration of the ways in which he chooses specific works that “compel [the students] to confront the issues basic to war,” rather than glamorizing it.

Rottman, Larry, Jan Barry, and Basil T. Paquet, eds. Winning Hearts and Minds:

War Poems by Vietnam Veterans. Brooklyn: 1^st Casualty Press, 1972.

This anthology of is the first collection of Vietnam War poems ever to be published. Rottman says of these works, “What distinguishes the voices in this volume is their progression toward an active identification of themselves as agents of pain and war--as “agent-victims” of their own atrocities. This recognition came quickly to some and haltingly to others, but it always came with pain and the conviction that there is no return to innocence” (v). This book is the poetic counterpart of much of Brende and Parson’s Road to Recovery.

Santoli, Al. Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War By Thirty-Three

American Soldiers Who Fought It. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981.

When Santoli set out to create an oral history of the Vietnam war, or rather of American troops’ experience in that country, such a project had not been attempted before. “The American people have never heard in depth from the soldiers themselves the complicated psychic and physical realities of what they went through in Vietnam” (xvi). The stories of thirty-three veterans of the American Armed Forces are presented here in chronological order from December 1962 to April 1975. These men and women speak their truths in first person, and the collective goal has been “to put into honest words the raw experience of what happened to us. We have reflected upon that experience, recalling, among other things, that we were once idealistic young people confronted by the awesomeness of fighting other human beings” (xv). Santoli argues that there can be no resolution of this part of American history until the American people understand war from the point of view of “the nameless soldier” instead of from that of the politician or the determined believer in an idealized, faceless heroism (xvi).

---. To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and its Aftermath in the Words of

Americans and Southeast Asians. New York: Ballantine Books, 1985.

Santoli continues the oral history project he began in Everything We Had, but this time he attempts to fill a critical gap, the experiences of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. “I realized that the recognition given to […] Vietnam veterans in general is only one step in our coming to terms with the Vietnam trauma. […] It seems also necessary to take a look at the revolution that preceded America’s involvement, as well as the effects of the Communist victory in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos” (xvi-xvii). “I have chosen these people [soldiers, revolutionaries, foreign aid advisors, journalists, diplomats, relief workers, and refugees] because I was deeply touched by the depth of their experience on the front lines of the Indochina conflict. Even though some were on the opposing side of the war, they share a common humanity that transcends their differences. All of them bear the scars of battle or betrayed idealism. However, they have not only survived but have become more committed to realizing those lost ideals. They have journeyed through the dark night of memory to present their stories here. With some tears and laughter, they have looked back, with courage, so that we might learn from the trials they have endured” (xvii).

Terry, Wallace. Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. New

York: Random House, 1984.

Terry began the interviews that eventually resulted in this book in 1967, when he was a Time magazine journalist. At this point in American history, “for the first time blacks were fully integrated in combat and fruitfully employed in positions of leadership” (xiv); however, this did not result in full equality. African American soldiers were subjected to discrimination in decorations, promotions, and duty assignments, and though blacks made up 11% of the American population, they accounted for 23% of the casualties. By 1969, the Civil Rights Movement and the new militancy in the urban ghettoes had had a profound effect on these young people, and they were no longer willing to accept injustice. Furthermore, “they had hoped to come home to more than they had; they came home to less” (xv)—unemployment among black veterans was an astounding double that of white vets. Black soldiers were fighting and dying in Southeast Asia ostensibly to establish for others the freedoms which this liberty-loving nation still denied to African-American people at home (xvi). Terry states that “These [twenty] stories are not to be found in the expanding body of Vietnam literature; they deservedly belong in the forefront because of the unique experience of the black Vietnam Veteran” (xv).

Van Devanter, Lynda. Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam.

New York: Warner, 1983.

After obtaining her nursing degree, Van Devanter served for a year in Vietnam as an Army combat nurse, providing standard nursing care and assisting the surgeons to save or try to save the lives of wounded American soldiers. These sometimes terribly damaged and suffering human beings arrived in masses, in floods, in deluges after any large battle, and over time, Van Devanter began to suffer not only from the same stress syndrome that afflicted the soldiers, but from one peculiar to the nurses. As women and as healers, the nurses felt an immense responsibility to the people who had no other help but the medical personnel, and it was often an impossible responsibility. No matter how much energy was (gladly and willingly) expended on these men’s behalf, there were still more of them, and more, and more, and the wounds were often unhealable, and the lives unsalvageable. Long before she left the country, Van Devanter began to feel an immense exhaustion of body and spirit that plagued her for more than a decade after her homecoming. She ultimately helped herself by helping other veterans, particularly women vets. This book is a first--in 1983, no other woman Vietnam veteran had published.

Walker, Keith. Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-Six American Women Who

Served in Vietnam. New York: Ballantine Books, 1985.

Walker collected the stories of twenty-six out of the fifteen thousand women who were in Vietnam during the war. “According to military policy, women are not supposed to be in life-threatening situations in a war zone, and therefore we have never developed an image of that in our minds. We think of men in combat, and women safely in the rear echelon in offices and hospitals” (2-3). However, this was not an accurate picture. “In these stories the women speak casually of the extremes of their experience in Vietnam: Red Cross women being fired upon in helicopters on their way to fire bases and outposts or stranded in a jungle clearing with no help in sight; nurses routinely working twelve-hour shifts six days a week and often much longer during mass casualties while rocket attacks went on outside their hospitals; a Special Services worker being flown out to a safe area during the Tet offensive, her helicopter lifting off as the mortar rounds walked across the field” (5). The experiences of these women, most of whom were members of the military (primarily combat nurses), but some of whom were workers in what are now referred to as Non-Governmental Organizations), are not so different from those of their male counterparts. Moreover, the war has profoundly affected their lives, and in similar ways.