Background
The texts and films in this unit require a certain amount of prior knowledge about the Vietnam War and America in the 1960s and 1970s. This is not prior knowledge that I can assume my students possess, but much of this material will be covered in the American History side of my integrated course. I expect that students will become familiar with causes and effects of the war, social issues of the time period, geopolitical issues around Communism and the Cold War, as well as geographical and historical context for Southeast Asia. In my course, I will draw on and reinforce this content knowledge as we work through The Things They Carried and the films, but I will not explicitly include this material in my unit.
Cultural critics and historians have a lot to say about the ways in which Americans do and do not discuss the Vietnam War. The legacy of the war is bound up in feelings about ideology, national politics, foreign policy, and personal experience. Some critics, like Sharon Downey, lump these conflicting perspectives into a narrative whole, "a mass-mediated struggle over the meaning of Vietnam [that] seems remarkably unified - almost a generic Vietnam War Narrative.e."2 It can be useful for students to recognize the unifying principles and generalizable aspects of the stories about Vietnam. It is for this reason that we will spend class time looking at genre conventions and seeking points of comparison among films and text. Still, it seems dangerous to conflate too many different points of view in the attempt to hear Vietnam as a single storyline.
In this unit I choose to emphasize the plurality of perspectives in the Vietnam narrative. I have chosen a few voices in the crowd to hear reinvent, and grapple with the war. These selected pieces represent some, but by no means all, of the possible stories of Vietnam. I will delve more deeply into these works to better serve educators looking to replicate this unit, but I have also included other supplemental or alternative texts which I have outlined in the Annotated Bibliography section of this unit plan.
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien classifies The Things They Carried as "a work of fiction." This collection of stories which share common motifs and characters can be (and often are) read linearly, almost like a novel. It is worth noting that O'Brien did serve as an infantryman in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970; other biographical facts about his education and family which are introduced throughout The Things They Carried also appear to be true. Our main narrator, Tim, tells his stories with a descriptive urgency and a strong first person perspective. But O'Brien's decision to insist upon the "fictional" characterization of the work raises important questions about truth and perspective, which are central to this unit.
Throughout the book, O'Brien makes bold claims about the nature of war stories. He tells his reader:
- 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
- they 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.3
This quote appears in the story or chapter titled "How to Tell a True War Story." In many ways this piece, which is often reprinted on its own as a short story, is central to O'Brien's project and this unit. This section is rich with plays on the idea of stories, listening, and telling. Even the title is a pun. One can "tell" a story in a way by speaking or writing it, but the chapter is also prescriptive- itself a guide for how to "tell" or "identify" a true war story as opposed to a falsified one. In continuing to play with the auditory theme, one of the war stories told with embellishments in this chapter is about a listening patrol that hears things that might not be there.
This story and the collection as a whole are about the tensions between a "true" war story and the deceit of a moralizing tale of war. O'Brien is interested in intentions; he encourages his reader to distrust the instructive. But O'Brien is tricky, always playing with his audience. His very insistence on the "truth" throughout a book he clearly classifies as a work of fiction makes his commitment to truth suspect. He warns his reader that war stories are necessarily distorted, "in any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen." He implies that the narrative of war has a force and truth of its own: "what seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way."4 In the end, many readers (including the students with whom I have read the book in the past) find O'Brien manipulative and didactic in his own right.
Another section of the work, "Good Form," further meditates on the fractured relationship between war stories and truth. This short section appears towards the end of the book and changes the tone. It opens, "it's time to be blunt" and follows with the admission that most of the book is made up. This two-page section then goes on to divide truth into the "story-truthh" and "happening-truth."5 When I read this book with a class of 10th graders this was where they turned on O'Brien. My students had been absorbed in the book up until this point. The characters were real to them, the action was compelling. They found the writing - which reads often as speech - fast, crude and gripping. Then suddenly around page 180 the author changes things up and students feel like a rug has been pulled out from underneath their feet. This moment of transparency or meta-analysis is often a new literary tactic for my students. They aren't familiar with this kind of disclosure in storytelling or writing. It makes them uncomfortable. It casts doubt on all that came before - in this book and others.
As a teacher, this disconcerting chapter and the strong reactions it elicits are what make The Things They Carried worth teaching. I love that this book makes my students think about stories and telling them in a new way. This is the very goal of this unit. The questions Tim O'Brien raises about war stories and how and why they are told are the essential questions of this unit.
The Green Berets
John Wayne and Roy Kellogg's The Green Berets is widely regarded as a propagandistic piece and is often criticized for its naïve (or worse, callous) simplicity. Released in 1968, it was met with aggressive criticism from the Left and ridicule from servicemen who reportedly laughed at the film's attempts at military accuracy.6 I do not include it in this unit to mock its shortcomings. Rather, I see this film as a starting place for our study of films about the Vietnam War. I would hope that as we progress through the unit my students will develop the strategies and language to critique the film on their own.
The film is conventional to a fault. One of the heaviest criticisms launched at the film was that it oversimplified the dynamics of the conflict. For the purposes of this unit, the simplicity allows us to clearly outline some component pieces of the War Film genre. The stakes are high, the sides are clear. Aside from the obvious "good guys" and "bad guys," almost all supporting roles are caricatures clearly drummed up to serve narrative purposes - the moralizing Medic, the cushy enlisted man who needs to be taught a lesson, the orphaned Vietnamese child whose future is bound up in the success or failure of the American military mission. As unsatisfying or insulting as these characterizations are, the heavy-handedness actually lends itself to useful analysis of stock characters and provides a framework from which to discuss the other films.
It is also significant that The Green Berets is one of the few films about combat in Vietnam that was actually filmed and released during the war. The film's timing and politics raise some urgent questions about why war stories are told. What purpose is served by this kind of a jingoistic, celebratory film? It is significant that John Wayne wrote to Lyndon B. Johnson to request support for the production and to negotiate use of US Military materiel. The Johnson Administration's response is even more telling. Despite his staunch support of Johnson's Republican rivals, John Wayne and his producer (his son Michael Wayne) were granted full cooperation from the Department of Defense. White House Press Secretary, Jack Valenti, justified the arrangement as a matter of common goals, "Wayne's politics are wrong, but in so far as Vietnam is concerned, his views are right. If he made a picture he would be saying the things we want said."7 There is clearly an intended message in this picture. It is therefore fair to characterize this government sanctioned film as the official popular story of the War and useful to teach the film as such.
Platoon
If The Green Berets is one official narrative of the Vietnam War, Oliver Stone's Platoon is the official counter-narrative of the Left. Unlike the relatively benign and banal war of The Green Berets, in Platoon war is hellish and unreasonable. Platoon belongs to a larger cadre of films that treat the stories of Vietnam in big, bold terms. Films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, and others could also have been my counterpoint to The Green Berets. However, these films might complicate the comparison. They were not necessarily made to instruct. In the "war as narrative" conceit some of these films do not even tell a coherent story. They are not films which let you get your bearings. You are hurtled through plot and confronted with visual and auditory experiences. You are meant to sense and feel but not necessarily think about or analyze these films. This is not to say that these films lack a narrative argument or are not themselves dogmatic. In many ways the argument is in the slippery and jarring qualities of the films. Platoon does both - it attempts to jostle its audience, but it also maintains strong conventional features.
In Platoon, the protagonist, Chris Taylor, can be seen as a stand-in for Oliver Stone who wrote the semi-autobiographical original screenplay, , Break, when he returned from combat in 1968. Chris is situated in an interesting middle ground between a series of binary forces. It seems that if the film has an argument, it is trying to be more complex than the simplistic Good vs. Evil outlined in The Green Berets. Early in the film we learn that Chris chose to enter the narrative of war in Southeast Asia. He voluntarily enlisted as a slap-in-the-face to his privileged parents and a show of support for the he "bottom of the barrel" grunts that got drafted and shipped off against their will. Chris is positioned as both of, but removed from, the American elite whose sympathies seem to guide the film. Over the course of the movie he will find himself similarly sandwiched between dual forces of two sergeants and the attitudes and values they represent. Chris articulates this in the closing narration of the film:
- I think now,looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The
- enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest
- of my days. As I'm sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called
- "possession of my soul." There are times since, I've felt like a child, born of those
- two fathers.8
This final thought lingers, and I believe is intended to do the work of recasting the narrative. Instead of being concerned with the larger politics of the war, the film attempts to bring the argument down to a personal level - a personal story of conflicted loyalties. The drama is no longer about the warring forces of the American troops and the Viet Cong; it is not about Communism and Democracy. The conflict between Elias and Barnes is about reason and reaction, mercy and madness, ethics and self-preservation. In this reduction, we are supposed to complete the departure from the moralizing and celebratory tone of f The Green Berets.
I am not sure that Platoon works as a smaller, personal narrative. There are still many stale genre conventions that rear up in the film. I would want my students to be able to address the similarities and differences between this film and The Green Berets. After viewing both - two of many sides in the American narrative - I would hope my students would have some probing questions about the war and about these stories' greater context. These questions, which may need to be stimulated by conversations about who and what is s "missing" in these films, would lead us into viewing of the two foreign films I am including in this unit.
The Abandoned Field
The Abandoned Field was made in Vietnam in 1979, by Ngyuen Hong Sen. The film is based in part on the director's experiences as an army-camera man during the war.9 Like many Vietnamese films it was released to Vietnamese and Soviet audiences but went virtually ignored in the states. In fact, Vietnamese cinema was almost entirely unavailable and unknown in the United States until 1985 when the Vietnam Film Project was undertaken as a cooperative venture between cinema organizations and the American and Vietnamese governments.10 Even now these films are hard to locate, which I recognize is one of the challenges of using this film in my unit.
[I was unable to find any copy of the film in the States that was available to borrow, rent or purchase, outside of a few university collections. I was fortunate to obtain such a copy. There are some more widely available films (and some equally obscure ones) that could also be included in this unit and I have included some of these in the annotated resources section of this document.]
I have asked myself many questions about why I am including a Vietnamese film and specifically The Abandoned Field in this unit. It seems superficial to bring a single Vietnamese voice into what is mostly an American study of Vietnam War stories. I also worry about reducing the entire Vietnamese perspective in this unit to a single film and I want to be very clear when using this film with my students. Still, I want to make space in this unit for the war stories that are ignored by both the Conservative and the Radical, distinctly American, narratives of The Green Berets and Platoon. Both of the American films and The Things They Carried are concerned with telling soldiers' (and notably a group of soldiers) stories of the war. The Abandoned Field, on the other hand, while involved in the military project of local resistance forces, is the war story of a family.
There is much for my students to observe in this film that is indicative of the kind of war story a Vietnamese civilian or even soldier might tell. The narrative is slow at first; the film focuses on the daily interactions and experiences of a husband (Ba Do) and wife (Sau Xoa) living in a marsh with their young son. The couple works as liaisons for local military operations, trafficking in materials and information. Their world is full of the sounds and images of helicopters and gunfire, but it is not until the last scenes of the movie that either of our lead figures picks up or fires a weapon. Much of the film feels remote and understated, especially when compared to films like The Green Berets and Platoon. The Abandoned Field seems more concerned with the interruptions of daily life and the threat of imminent danger than it does with the larger politics of the war.
Another aspect of the film that we will linger on in class is the depictions of Americans in this Vietnamese project. We will contrast this with the depictions of Vietnamese in The Green Berets and Platoon. Again, it is important to remember that the film was hardly intended for a Western audience. The film was also made in Vietnam at a time when there certainly was not a population of White or Western men to play American soldiers. Instead the film uses Vietnamese actors with some slightly more European or Western features, and then to further indicate their "American" identity they wear their hair long, unbutton shirts and move with a general swagger that must read to Vietnamese audiences as American. This kind of casting should be familiar to American audiences and can even be contrasted with the choices made in casting Native Americans and Mexican actors to play Vietnamese enemy soldiers in John Wayne's The Green Berets. Scholar John Charlot reads the depiction of Americans in The Abandoned Fields as generous and universalizing. I would not go as far as to say the depiction strives for sympathy, but I do think the film's desire to show actual American soldiers - and not just faceless helicopters or directionless strategies - suggests something about the way this story is being told and an emphasis again on the human dimensions of war.r.
White Badge
Finally, I have chosen to include a Korean film in this unit because it offers up a truly different and yet wholly familiar variation on the war story of Vietnam. In addition to being geographically and culturally distinctive, White Badge also occupies a different chronological perspective. White Badge is the most recent of the films we will study and it also may appear the most removed from the central narrative. It is a war story told from the perspective of a Korean soldier-turned-writer who fought in the Vietnam War against the Viet Cong. This makes it a kind of Vietnam Vet's story in the tradition of f Taxi Driver or Born on the Fourth of July. It is a film is about memory and aftermath, not about the urgent present of battle.
Those who encounter the film, or the book it is based on, may not even realize that South Koreans fought in Vietnam. In fact from 1965 to1973, over 300,000 Korean soldiers went to Vietnam.11 What is more, civilians and industrialists in South Korea were also engaged in Vietnam and saw economic gain as a result of their involvement in the war.12 But unlike Americans who obsess over the country's conflicted emotions regarding Vietnam, "the Vietnam War is a forgotten, even forcibly suppressed, experience in South Korea."13
The variants of this cultural legacy are acknowledged throughout White Badge. The film's main character Sergeant Kiju Han is a literary scout working on his own serial novel about his experiences as a sergeant in Vietnam. When one of the members of his battalion, Pfc. Chinsu Pyon, hears about the book he begins to call and stalk Han until the two actually meet. It immediately becomes clear that while Han suffers the memory of the war, Pyon is worse off - his paranoia, delusions, and manic bouts reflect the kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder we come to expect in American films about Vietnam vets.s.
White Badge plays with the idea of time and memory. All of the film's battle sequences and images of soldiers in Vietnam come through flashbacks, mostly from Sergeant Han's perspective. There are flashbacks within flashbacks, in which the Korean soldier interacts with a Vietnamese child and during the interaction recalls his own experience of American soldiers in Korea when he was a child in the 50s. The scene seems to draw a positive parallel between Americans and Koreans and their involvement in these wars, but it hints at a more complex relationship between the three parties. The American Vietnam Veteran's experience is also signaled in the film when a troubled Sergeant Han encounters a poster for The Deer Hunter after being visibly distressed by children calling him "Uncle Vietnam" and a street vendor singing a song celebrating returning soldiers.
The film's narrative aspects fit will into this unit's understandings about war stories and memories. In many ways White Badge engages in storytelling in ways that compare directly to The Things They Carried. Both are the accounts of veterans. Both harbor ambivalence about the protagonist's survival, the memory of dead compatriots, and national reactions to veterans. Both works even play with a motif of listening and sound in similar ways. In a war story scene that could come straight out of an O'Brien story, a few Korean soldiers on night watch think they hear an enemy approaching. They grow ever more agitated listening in the dark and eventually open fire. In the morning their commanding officers arrive and witness the carnage - a massacred field of water buffalo. The Things They Carried also includes scenes of soldiers killing water buffalo, this time for sport, as well as plays on the dynamics of listening and the anxiety of listening patrols.
There is something about the familiarity of the narrative of White Badge that I think will intrigue my students. It is certainly possible that both the author of the novel Junghyo Ahn and the director Ji-yeong Jeong had read and viewed American war stories and films. Keeping the possible effects of these influences in mind, I imagine we can have fruitful class discussions about the narrative similarities and differences between White Badge and the other works included in this unit. Like the other films, White Badge gives us ample opportunities to look at artistic choices and analyze the intentions in them.
Alternate Texts or Films
It is important for me to acknowledge that the films I have chosen only give voice to some of the multitudes of Vietnam War stories that are out there. There are very few women in the films and text, with the exception perhaps of The Abandoned Field which ends with a striking scene in which the wife (Sau Xoa) fights to defend her baby. African-Americans, Latinos, and other minorities play a limited role in the American films about Vietnam, but certainly played a large role in fighting the war. It is therefore important to be mindful and explicit about these and other absences in the films. I have included some possible alternative resources in the annotated bibliography below. I would also encourage other teachers to explore this through films and texts of their choosing.
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