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Introduction:
One theory suggests that Britain lost the war against its American colonies because its troops stood unprepared for the harsh New England winters and the seemingly barbaric manner in which these people waged war upon the Crown. Continuing along these lines, one assertion proclaims that the British did not understand, or simply did not want to acknowledge, a new nation with somewhat radical ideas and desires for a new form of government. The Americans won the war because they fought for their own land, and therefore, their own country. Britain lost because it fought for a distant idea that few of its subjects could fully comprehend. Over a hundred and fifty years after struggling for its own independence, the United States fought another war, this time assuming the role the British had previously held. Before sending American soldiers into Vietnam itself, however, the United States watched as Vietnamese troops defeated the French in the battle of Dienbienphu.
When the Viet Minh finally did attack, the French were "'all surprised'" and wondered "'how the Viets [had] been able to find so many guns capable of producing an artillery fire of such power. Shells rained down on [them] without stopping like a hailstorm on a fall evening. Bunker after bunker, trench after trench, collapsed, burying under them men and weapons.' By midnight of that first day, strongpoint Beatrice was wiped out; its artillery commander a suicide" (Young 33). The French immediately proposed a cease-fire. The Vietnamese, ill-equipped and seemingly overpowered, defeated their French colonizers in the name of independence, employing unorthodox fighting methods, much as the Americans had in the American Revolution centuries before this current conflict. Again, this technique proved successful and demonstrated to the world, at least in the minds of the Vietnamese, that they were truly prepared and willing to govern their own country, free from the influences of any other nation. The United States, however, immersed in the Cold War and fearing the spread of Communism, believed its military ability far surpassed that of the French, and thus entered a war for which it was not prepared to fight or understand. The Vietnamese employed these same guerrilla tactics, in such designs as the Tet Offensive, against the United States military, making the heavily-equipped American soldiers who fought using a strategy of "search and destroy," targets as easily definable as the eighteenth-Century British military in their striking red uniforms. Regardless of endless amounts of money, highly advanced weapons, and educated military training, American soldiers during the American-Vietnam War failed, at times, to even identify the enemy. As a Vietnamese woman explains, "'[d]uring the war, the Americans thought anyone who wore a black ao ba ba [standard peasant dress] was Viet Cong'" (Borton, After Sorrow 28). Americans stood unable to understand the land, the people, and the belief systems of this foreign nation. The Vietnamese won the war because they fought for their own land, and their own chance and ability to rule their nation. The Americans lost the war because they struggled against an idea, Communism, a notion far removed from the reality of everyday American life. When I proposed this project, I wished to examine the differences between American and Vietnamese cultures. I wanted to discover why the Vietnamese people love, admire, and aspire to be like Americans, individuals from a society that waged war in Vietnam for over a decade, while Americans have remained uneasy about Vietnam and its citizens thirty years after the end of the conflict. I chose to focus my attention on six texts: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler, A Time Far Past by Le Luu, In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason, The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, and The Dragon Hunt by Tran Vu. I believed these books would grant me insight into the two completely different cultures. In his collection of short stories,
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Butler focuses on the lives
of various Vietnamese refugees now living in the New Orleans area. His
characters struggle to bridge the gap between old and new cultures. As
Richard Eder explains, "[f]or the Vietnamese immigrants in [his]
stories, distance is sentient. It buzzes inside them like a crossed telephone
line, a haunting syncopation under the forthright American rhythms they
are trying to learn" (Eder, "Seeing the Vietnamese" 3).
Within each of his stories lies an internal clash between longing for
the old life and desiring to accept and succeed within the new culture
that moves far beyond the differences between Vietnam and America and
includes gender and generation issues. "Butler writes essentially,
and in a bewitching translation of voice and sympathy, what it means to
lose a country, to remember it, and to have the memory begin to grow old.
He writes as if it were his loss, too" (Eder, "Seeing the Vietnamese"
3). Sam, the central character of Mason's In Country, is the daughter of a soldier killed in the war and the niece of a soldier who returns from the war severely affected, both mentally and physically, by the horrors associated with his time in combat. Throughout the course of the novel, Sam struggles to find out about Vietnam and the war. She wants to discover both what the country and the war were like because she feels a tremendous distance exists between herself and her uncle. "Sam stretches the imagination of our times. Ten years after the end of the Vietnam War, in the most prosaic and magical way possible, she stubbornly undertakes the exorcism of a ghost that almost everything in our everyday life manages to bury" (Eder, "In Country" 3). In this mindset, she pushes the limitations of understanding brought on by gender and generation gaps. Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War is one of the most successful war novels in the history of Vietnam. The novel also stands triumphantly next to American war literature because as Stephen Amidon points out, "[o]ne of the many stark absurdities of the Vietnam war is that the vanquished, not the victors, have been able to write its history . . . the North Vietnamese perspective, left in the often cloddish hands of the likes of Oliver Stone, has remained as hidden as their troops during the fighting." Amidon continues, "Bao Ninh's remarkable The Sorrow of War goes a long way to redressing that imbalance. This hauntingly beautiful novel, written by a North Vietnamese army veteran, manages to humanize completely a people who up until now have usually been cast as robotic fanatics" (Amidon, "A Soldier's Story"). Bao Ninh examines the war through Kien's eyes. A young man when the war begins, Kien enlists in the army. Bao Ninh follows Kien through his life as a soldier, revealing how combat situations and the loss of friends, family, and loved ones destroy his life, bit by bit. He retires a crazed man, driven only to write the stories of fellow soldiers who died in the line of duty. Once he completes this project, he simply disappears. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien explores the life of a group of soldiers in country. He recounts both amusing and horrifying stories from the front lines, focusing on the camaraderie of the unit. O'Brien also examines returned veterans, and the problems they face as they go home where their loved ones expect them to be "completely normal" and melt back into their previous lives. "But most of all there is the war: the smell of it, face of it, unshakable fact of it. It's there in the sun-filled seconds when a man steps on a mine in the middle of telling a joke," Caldwell suggests in her review of the book (Caldwell B49). This particular piece of writing mixes the novel, the short story, and the memoir; "[t]he arc of the interconnected narrative covers a life in the field with men who emerge as fully as O'Brien, with micromoments of the war that seem as long in their timeless flash as a tour of duty" (Caldwell B49). Finally, Tran Vu's The Dragon Hunt, like Butler's book, is a collection of short stories that deals with the issue of refugees, only from the viewpoint of a Vietnamese author. In his work, Vu examines the determination and desperate nature of those fleeing the country in the hope of finding better lives elsewhere. "The Coral Reef," the first story in his collection, "displays real originality in the use of its striking title metaphor . . . to suggest the impediments to complete escape sought by 'boat people' leaving Saigon in the late 1970s" (Kirkus Reviews, "The Dragon Hunt"). Tran Vu also addresses how these individuals try to assimilate into another culture and the hardships they must face and overcome along the way. "The density of emotion that suffuses Tran Vu's stories, along with a vigorous style that subtly uses the conventions of melodrama, make this vivid collection arguably the best fiction we have seen yet from Vietnam" (Krikus Reviews "The Dragon Hunt"). Spending the last eight months working with these texts, in addition to several others, my assessments of American and Vietnamese cultures have altered. As the first three pages of this paper suggest, I have unveiled many more similarities between these two cultures in regards to the war than I have found differences. Therefore, the majority of this work reveals my belief that people faced with a crisis such as war share fear of the unknown, hope for a future life, trust of one another, alienation from pre-war existence, loss of love and disjointed relationships between generations. The cultural and societal backgrounds of these peoples influence the ways in which they cope with and overcome these hardships, and from this point of view, the differences between American and Vietnamese cultures do indeed arise. However, the basic human needs and wishes remain almost identical. Conclusion: Another cause for this distinction might come from Vietnam's extended history of continuously fighting a foreign people in order to rule their own country and constantly losing battle after battle to larger and more powerful armies. On the other hand, the United States, had until this point and with the exception of the Civil War, never tasted defeat and knew only the role of the victor. I also thought that the distinction might link with the fact that Ho Chi Minh told his people that they fought the United States government, not the United States citizens. The Americans assumed a different stance entirely, battling against the "evil ideal of communism." Finally, I thought about the fact that seventy percent of the population of Vietnam is under the age of thirty, and therefore, individuals simply fail to remember the war. The Baby-Boomer generation of the United States stands tall in all aspects of American culture, especially politics, and remembers the horrors young men and women faced in a distant land called Vietnam. While all of my assertions do contribute to the distinction between the Vietnamese and the Americans, as I read and wrote, I discovered that these differences I perceived to substantially impact the people and cultures in question seemed inconsequential. In fact, the distinctions are minor in my estimation, at least in regards to the war. Soldiers on both sides of the war feared for their lives before they entered the battlefield. The powers of love drove these young and innocent men to live through their time at the front lines and return home to safety. They killed not because they wished to shoot another human, but because they were forced to kill others in order to survive themselves. They all loved and lost. They left the battlefield, carrying the horrors of it with them. The Vietnamese and the American authors present similar feelings regarding all of these ideas, which leads me to the conclusion that people are people, and that a certain innate reaction process occurs in all individuals when faced with destruction and violence. All people, no matter what ethnicity or culture from which they hail, experience pain and the subsequent recovery process. How do I answer my question? As I spoke with Dr. Salotto, a member of the Sweet Briar English department, one day about my project, she offered some insight. She related the American-Vietnam War to the American Civil War, and as I assembled this project, my understanding of the American-Vietnam War shifted to the War Between the States and its effects. The North, embodying the victors, has moved past the war. The conflict no longer defines the cultural identity of the people; it is a history lesson. The South, on the other hand, continues to fly Confederate flags and mentions occasionally the goals and ideals for which young soldiers fought over a hundred years ago. This response relates to the matter of the victor vs. the defeated. The American-Vietnam War can be viewed in much the same way. On the most basic of levels, Vietnam won, at least to the degree that they freed their country of foreigners. The United States lost, at least to the degree that communism exists today. Vietnam has put the war behind it and moves toward the future. The United States still lingers at the war, wondering what our government, armed forces, and citizens could have done differently, wondering why we lost. Works Cited |