the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

In a book review for the New York Times this year, Philip Caputo wrote the following:

The more powerful a country is, the more disposed its people will be to see it as the lead actor in the sometimes farcical, often tragic pageant of history. So it is that we, citizens of a superpower, have viewed the Vietnam War as a solely American drama in which the febrile land of tigers and elephants was mere backdrop and the Vietnamese mere extras.

That outlook is reflected in the literature—and Vietnam was a very literary war, producing an immense library of fiction and nonfiction....

My colleague and friend Bill Newmiller brought this book review to my attention when I told him I was teaching Caputo's classic A Rumor of War in my senior class. The opening to Caputo's book review sums up much of our problem regarding Vietnam: if we know anything about it, we probably “know” only what Hollywood and hooah literature have taught us. We don't know the truth.

Last semester, when I was teaching a couple of classes of seniors, I learned that they couldn't even reliably tell me when we were in Vietnam. They could toss out “domino theory” and “containment of Communism” buzzwords, but that was the extent of their knowledge.

I was horrified.

These are seniors about to graduate from the Air Force Academy, get a commission in my Air Force, go forth, and be leaders of men at war. And they don't even have a basic understanding of America's Great Embarrassment—the war we stand to learn the most from at this point, considering the myriad mistakes involved and our distance from it.

So I included three Vietnam books in my syllabus for this semester's seniors: Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army, Michael Herr's Dispatches, and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War. One needn't understand much of anything about Vietnam to grasp Wolff's book; it's quite accessible. However, when they began struggling through Dispatches,* I realized that they didn't even understand the terms.

* Herr's book is a mix of memoir and journalism. Wolff was an American advisor (first lieutenant) in Vietnam during 1967 and 1968, and Caputo was there from 1966 and 1967 as a Marine infantry platoon commander and staff officer (first lieutenant).

After the first day with Dispatches, I offered my laddies and lasses the opportunity to earn some extra credit. I would assign topics regarding Vietnam (from the French colonization in the 19^th century through the fall of Saigon), and they would produce briefings on their topics (as teams). Thus, they figured out the difference between, say, VC and ARNV and Ruff Puffs and ARVN. They brought in maps and pictures and got faces to put to the names. Each briefing lasted about 15 minutes, then we'd take a quiz over that day's reading and discuss the difficult books we were reading.

When I call them “difficult,” I don't mean they're hard to read. Well, Dispatches is a bit dense (but the prose and insight is breathtaking the second time through). The real difficulty of these books is that they force us to face ideas and behaviors and decisions of Americans that shame us, even now.

It may be important to understand that I teach almost all literature as a vehicle of ideas. That is, all great literature has within it implicit truth claims that don't only apply to the time and place being discussed, but to human nature across time. To get inside the heads of men who spent months in Vietnam, to see through their eyes, is to form ideas of what we might do—or should do—in the same situations. It is one of the best ways, short of going to war and learning on the fly (should we survive long enough to do so), to brace ourselves for the moral quandaries and threats war poses.

Possibly the most difficult book we read was not the awful “core requirement” (Sparta, by Roxana Robinson), but Caputo's A Rumor of War (the title is drawn from Matthew 24, incidentally—an ironic allusion, to say the least). It's hard to read because we genuinely like Caputo. He's an all-American boy. A Baby Boomer, he was filled with the idealism and self-assurance that followed our victory in the second World War. He enlisted in the Marines because he found “in a commonplace world a chance to live heroically.” He became an officer and was sent to Vietnam as a platoon commander in 1965.

He explains in the prologue what circumstances contributed to the atrocities we all heard so much about. He doesn't do this to excuse himself (which is apparent from the beginning), but to place us in the ethical jungle of the fighting man. He's a good leader and cares for his men. He follows orders. He knows his stuff. And when he first arrives in Vietnam, his high ideals are intact.

In the first village his platoon searches, an old woman is holding sharpened stakes over a fire to harden the tips. When the South Vietnamese regular starts slapping her around—because he recognizes her as being VC or aiding the VC—Caputo stops him. His cultural values are still strong and he cannot allow an old woman to be pistol whipped.

In the months that follow, he watches his men become casualties to booby traps, snipers, heatstroke, mines, bombs, rockets, and mortars, while they Charlie Mike (Continue Mission): “Kill VC.” Through all this, his moral compass is losing its heading. He stops fearing death, as well.

After many months, he sends his men to a village to bring in two Viet Cong. He doesn't have the authority to do it, but he is gripped by the need to do something. Without explicitly saying so, he communicates that if the VC are brought back dead, it wouldn't be a problem. Predictably, his men bring back two bodies, and one is their informant. They had the wrong man.

He and his men are court-martialed for murder.

See, the thing about memoir—other than having the most notoriously unreliable narrator in all of literature—is that you cannot help but be the person writing it in your experience of it. So yes...I force my students to read this and seriously consider the implications of it to their lives and their country, and it's uncomfortable.

I finished my class today with these thoughts:

I often have students accuse me of only teaching anti-war literature. I find this sadly amusing, because any person who has been to war or seen war will write about how horrible it is, and I view it as my duty to show you that horror.

You come to us as idealistic, patriotic young men and women. Then you spend four years having that patriotism built up, but here's the thing: If your patriotism is built on the notion that America doesn't screw up, it isn't the real thing. It's blind patriotism, built on a lie, and it's dangerous.

If you really love your country—and I hope you do—you will love it even when we mess up. If you're smart, you won't shy away from the ugliness. You'll study it and learn from it. You'll study the screw-ups so you—you, ladies and gentlemen, soon-to-be leaders—don't make the same mistakes.

This is the literature of your profession. I urge you to make a lifetime study of it. These men have much to teach you.

d