Review, Tobey C. Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (Routledge Press, 1992)

Columbia Missourian, December 6, 1992

In his brilliant 1935 antiwar novel Paths of Glory, Humphrey Cobb described the conversation of foot soldiers as an ongoing dialogue that is “inexplicably, always the same and always new. It seemed to be part of a larger conversation which had been begun way back in the past and was going to be continued monotonously into a future whose duration no one could guess. It had a strange quality of self-perpetuation which made one feel that, while men might die or go away, the talk never would, because other men would come and give it fuel, negligently and in passing.”

Similarly, Tobey C. Herzog characterizes the literature of the Vietnam War as a continuation of a public discussion, beginning in the early twentieth century, regarding the effects of war on modern culture. Focusing his discussion on ten major texts—nine by Vietnam veterans—Herzog traces the thematic development of the standard Vietnam War story through four stages: innocence, experience, consideration and aftermath.

Herzog, a Vietnam veteran who teaches English at Wabash College, adapts his model from Paul Fussell’s classic study of the effect of World War I on British literature, The Great War and Modern Memory. As Fussell wrote, “Every was is ironic because every war is worse than expected.” The disparity between the idealism with which young men enter war and the horrors encountered on the battlefield forces soldiers to come to grips with both the falsity of the culture that sent them to war and the depths to which human nature can sink.

For American soldiers in Vietnam, Herzog labels major cultural influences “the John Wayne syndrome.” “The name of John Wayne was invoked as a verbal shorthand to describe the larger-than-life character of the American warrior gentleman and to represent for young males the elements of manhood.”

Fueled by images of heroism and patriotism drawn from popular culture, American soldiers entered the early days of the war with a strong sense of confidence. But fantasies of John Wayne-style heroism bore little resemblance to the reality of the war.

Herzog terms the resulting process of disillusionment the “heavy heart of darkness trip,” after Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

In the 1902 novella, the mysterious character Kurtz utters with his dying breath the final cryptic words: “The horror! The horror!” Herzog sees this encounter with the “horror” at the bottom of the human soul as the second stage of Vietnam War stories, or, as war correspondent Michael Herr called it, “the fascination of the abomination.” Soldiers who witness the destructive capacity of modern technology and of humans turned into killing machines cannot come away unchanged.

Having confronted the savagery of which humans are capable, the next stage for Vietnam authors is a period of reflection, in which soldiers, having understood the capriciousness of modern war, seek to establish some sort of personal strategy for coping with this realization of their own powerlessness. This theme is common in the literature of all modern wars, Herzog says, but it is especially acute in writing on this war. “Vietnam with its fragmentation, complexity, and seeming illogic presents special problems for an author attempting to order the chaos in a meaningful way.”

There are two primary, contradictory responses to this sense of impotence, Herzog says. First, some soldiers harden themselves, accept the nature of the war and give up any sense of self-control. The protagonist of Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters reaches a point where he says, “All I wanted to do was kill and kill and burn and burn and rape and pillage until there was nothing left.” The other response is for the soldier to create some sort of mental order out of the chaos surrounding him. In Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, the main narrative takes place entirely within the imagination of a soldier as he stands guard duty one night and seeks to find a meaning for his tour in country.

Finally, many stories about Vietnam feature a discussion of the residual effects of the soldier’s experiences, especially after he has returned home. Vietnam provides many unique variations on this theme because of the nature of the fighting itself, the unpopularity of the war, and the fact that it was the first war the United States lost. Thus returning veterans met a variety of responses, from those who branded them baby-killers, to those who felt they had given the military a bad name, to those who wanted to forget the whole thing. Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country, for example, focuses on the interaction between Sam, a 17-year-old girl whose father died in Vietnam before she was born, and her uncle Emmett, a veteran who had done little with his life since returning from the war.

Herzog’s book admirably fits the major themes of Vietnam War literature into the broader context of writings on modern war, indicating how Vietnam introduced some new variations but basically fit an older thematic pattern.

But without denying the thematic continuities in modern war literature, Herzog fails to emphasize adequately the specific socioliterary context of the Vietnam era. The soldiers who fought in Vietnam were products of a culture marked both by the existence of the atomic bomb and material abundance which, to many critics, seemed to foster an increasingly bland and homogeneous society. Thus, in Susan Sontag’s words, “We lived under continued threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror."

Similarly Herzog fails to emphasize how Vietnam provided authors the opportunity to convey the nature of war, in Fussell’s words, with a “full, appropriate obscenity.” Before Vietnam, Fussell said, various cultural constraints had prevented authors from using the kinds of language and description necessary for a graphically realistic portrait of war. The problem is crucial because obscenity is an integral part of a true war story. As Vietnam veteran Gustav Hasford wrote in his 1979 novel The Short-Timers, “The ugly that civilians choose to see in war focuses on spilled guts. To see human beings clearly, that is ugly. To carry death in your smile, that is ugly. War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere.”