Aleksandra Musia

University of Silesia

John Wayne(s) in Vietnam: The changing

representations and victimization of the
American soldier in the cinematic and literary
narratives of the Indochina War
In the thirty years separating the Allied victory in World War II in 1945 and the
fall of Saigon in 1975, among the many things to have changed in America was
the nations image of its soldiers. This was aresult of awhole matrix of historical
processes and events, the decadelong American war in Vietnam naturally being
the chief one among them, and it is in the narratives of that conflict that the
transformation becomes the most glaring. The purpose of the present essay is,
firstly, to propose a set of circumstances that brought about the change in the
typical representation of aG.I. (asoldier) in Vietnam; and secondly, to delineate
this very representation, focusing on the soldiers victimization as atheme found
in the narratives.
One particularly useful point of reference, against which the common
perception of the war in Vietnam and the American soldiers fighting it might
be compared, is World War II, or more precisely the ways in which its memory
has been enshrined, so to speak, in the American mind: [t]he damage the
[Second World W]ar visited upon bodies and buildings, planes and tanks and
ships, is obvious. Less obvious is the damage it did to intellect, discrimination,
honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and irony, not to mention privacy
and wit [T]he Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond
recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the
bloodthirsty.1 This mythundoubtedly constructed from the very beginnings
of the U.S. involvement in the war, by the government as well as in the press,
and perpetuated until today (see, for example, HBOs Band of Brothers, made
as recently as 2001, agritty enough TV drama, but one in which the American
hero can do no wrong) exerted special influence on the socalled Vietnam
generation, even before the latter became all too familiar with the countrys
name or its location on the map. Firstly, this was the generation that followed
the Great one, the previous generation of veteran fathers, celebrated warriors
who had defeated evil itself. Apart from the fathers, among the semimythical
1 Paul Fussell, Wartime. Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. ix; see also: Daniel C. Hallin, The Living-Room War.
Media and the Public Opinion in a Limited War, in: Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land. The Vietnam
War Revisited, ed. Andrew Wiest (Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2006), p. 290.

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figures most often evoked as having the greatest impact on the boys who would
soon be departing for Indochina are also Audie Murphy, an exsoldier and later
aHollywood actor, and John F. Kennedy, himself adecorated war hero, with
his harangues and frontier rhetoric on the eve of the Vietnam War. However, in
playing up the gungho and patriotic ideals, and in creating along the way the
fantasies of what war and combat were like, none could surpass John Wayne
and his films. This is the second point: his name appears as often as any in the
Vietnam narratives, especially in the soldiers stories and memoirs.2 When in
Full Metal Jacket (1987) Private Joker does aWayne impression during aspat
with Animal Mother, and the latter respondsYou talk the talk. Do you walk
the walk?the reference, and the comeback, seem deliberate in bringing up
both the mans myth and the reality it came up against in Indochina. T h i s
reality, of course, could never match the ideal, and in the case of Vietnam it is
difficult at times to escape the impression that anumber of factors intertwined
to make that reality worse still. The list of the issues and frustrations specific to
that conflict typically begins with the complexity and sheer multilateralism of
the political and military situation, with real consequences in policy, strategy
and tactics: Vietnam was simultaneously arevolution, acivil war, astruggle
for independence reaching back to encompass decolonization and the fighting
against the French, atotal war, alimited war, awar of attrition, aguerrilla war,
atechnological war, an air war, apsyop (psychological operations) war, and
ahot war in the Cold War. Not only did the Americans find themselves fighting
along the everchanging South Vietnamese regimes and their Army of South
Viet Nam (ARVN) against both Ho Chi Minh and the proper North Vietnamese
Army (NVA) based up in Hanoi, and the South Vietnamese Communist guerillas
and insurgents of the Viet Cong (also known as National Liberation Front, or
NLF), but the period of their presence in Indochina also spanned the terms of
office of no fewer than three presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon), all of whom
approached the conflict in markedly different ways.
For the soldiers in the field, the limited war and attrition strategies meant
that the full extent of the U.S. military might be able to not be utilized and
the combat efforts were often frustrated, limiting considerably the scope and
durability of success. Moreover, warfare based on survival and wearing down
the enemy was historically something of aspecialty of the Vietnamese, amode of
resistance that most recently had brought them the victory against the French in
2 On the impact of John Wayne and World War II in general, see also: Hallin, The Uncensored
War. The Media and Vietnam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 142; Myra
MacPherson, Long Time Passing. Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (London: Sceptre, 1988),
pp. 58, 81; Michael Anderegg, Hollywood and Vietnam. John Wayne and Jane Fonda as Discourse,
in: Inventing Vietnam. The War in Film and Television, ed. Michael Anderegg (Philadelphia: Tem
ple University Press, 1991) pp. 1928; Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows. The War, Its Ghosts, and
Its Legacy (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 47; Tobey C.
Herzog, Vietnam War Stories. Innocence Lost (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 1719.

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the First Indochina War (1945/61954). As aresult, the initiative was largely left
to the Communists, who could effectively harass the Americans, engage them in
skirmishes, sniper away from the distance, and then safely retreat, sometimes
without asingle man or awoman even being seen. As such, Vietnam turned out
to be asmallunit war, with battalionsize and larger battles occurring rarely;
for the grunts, no visible progress was made, as the hills and other strategic
locations fought for and won would be deserted, only to be reclaimed again
by the replenished enemy. The lack of distinct battlelines, the nofrontand
norear nature of the fighting, the prevalence of smallunit engagements, the
oppressive humid landscape (the impenetrable jungle, the swampy paddies)
made impossibly worse by the everpresent, everdeadly trip wires and invisible
snipers, the frequent patrols and other details that were often as meaningless
as they were dangerous: all of these rendered being an infantryman in Vietnam
apeculiarly harrowing experience.
Psychologically, the war took its toll, too. In Vietnam, the American
soldierstypically, especially over time, reluctant draftees, statistically five or
six years younger than their fathers had been in Europe and the Pacific thirty
years earlierfaced the at best forced and calculated friendliness of the natives;
it was apeculiar kind of misfortune to be sent to fight such an incomprehensible
war in an incomprehensible and hostile land. Added to this was the frequent
impossibility of distinguishing civilians from the Viet Cong; combined with
the increasing antipathy towards the Vietnamese and the pressures of the
infamous body count policy,3* incidents of aggression against the civilian
population occurred often, occasionally erupting into criminal acts such as the
highly publicized massacre at My Lai in 1968. Furthermore, on the home front
Vietnam was an unpopular and controversial war that had inspired an antiwar
movement which, even if not as widespread as usually thought, was nonetheless
exceptionally vocal and proactive within the countercultural movements of the
already tumultuous 1960s. 4
What does all this have to do with World War II and, more specifically, John
Wayne? John Wayne killed many Japanese, John Wayne won wars, John Wayne
could ride off into the sunset, jumping fences and firing off his sixshooter into
the sunset sky. The American soldiers in Vietnam, who as boys watched the films
and idolized the man, could kill many Vietnamese, but perhaps these were not
3 * One of the peculiarities of the U.S. strategy during the middle phase of the Vietnam War
(19641968) was that military success was measured according to the body count, i.e. the number
of enemy soldiers killed; this led to certain abuses on the part of American personnel, who, in order
to bring the body count up, would sometimes resort to assigning the enemy status to non-enemy
casualties, or indeed become a little too trigger-happy.
4 On what made Vietnam a different war, see: MacPherson, Long Time Passing, pp. 5474; An
drew Wiest, The Vietnam War 1956 1975 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002), pp. 2958; Lucas
Carpenter, It Dont Mean Nothin: Vietnam War Fiction and Postmodernism, College Literature,
Vol. 30, No. 2 (2003), pp. 325; Herzog, Vietnam War Stories, pp. 4550.

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the right kind of Vietnamese. These American soldiers could not win the war;
America could talk the talk, but, ultimately, it could not walk the walk. Writing
about his decision to join the Marine Corps in the early 60s, the soontobe
Vietnam vet and author Philip Caputo recalled: Already Isaw myself charging
up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, and then
coming home asuntanned warrior with medals on my chest5; in hindsight, in
another memoir, another exsoldier wrote that [t]here was no doubt that they
had tricked us, deceived usthem with their John Wayne charging up Mount
Suribachi We had imagined amovie; we had envisioned afeast. What we got
was areality removed from all other realities; what we got was garbage pail.6
This disparity between the expectations and the experience, the myth and the
reality, has in fact been called by one scholar the John Wayne Syndrome, which
he identified as one of the major tropes found in the Vietnam narratives.7
Vietnam, therefore, turned out to be nothing like World War II; there was
little, if anything, for America to be proud of. Despite the common although now
debunked myth of the wartime watchdog press radically opposed to the conflict,
throughout the 1960s editors and publishers were in fact remarkably uncritical
and happy to comply with the governments propaganda concerning the progress
in Vietnam. In the coverage, the U.S. soldier almost infallibly remained ahero
fighting arighteous and patriotic war. Nonetheless, in the later part of the war, the
tone of the reporting changed somewhat, following the traumatic Tet Offensive
in 1968 and the revealing of the My Lai massacre ayear later, as well as the
drop in prowar sentiments among the American public. Nixons proclamations
concerning policy and strategy were still pretty much taken at face value, but the
newspapers and magazines now focused more on the problems gnawing through
the ranks: the racism, the drugs, the despondency, the violence against the
civilian population, the fraggings (the killings, accidentally on purpose, of the
officers and NCOs who were too gungho, too lifer, too demanding, by their own
troops). Importantly, it was the media coverage of this final stage of the war that
has persisted in memory and found reflection in the cultural representations of
the conflict.8
There was one more aspect of the Vietnam reporting that is significant here
as it has adirect connection to the issue of victimization. Throughout the war,
the American pressand, as it seems to follow, the American publicwas
markedly uninterested in covering the fate of the Vietnamese. When in 1969
Seymour Hersh began researching the My Lai case, no major newspaper would

5 Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (London: Arrow Books Limited, 1985), p. 6.

6 Michael Clodfelter, untitled work, quoted in: Vietnam Voices. Perspectives on the War Years
19411971, ed. John Clark Pratt (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), p. 648.
7 Herzog, Vietnam War Stories, pp. 1724.
8 Hallin, The Living-Room War, p. 291.

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buy the storyout of the question said an editor at Life magazine9and

although the incident did make big news eventually, it was one of few exceptions.
Instead, the editors responded to the peoples desire to read about the American
soldiers, especially when the latter still looked like the good guys; as the war
dragged on, the public opinion was turning against it, and the coverage from the
front was becoming gloomier, Vietnam lost its prime spot in the news. America
was warweary.
It was in the postwar narrativesmemoirs, novels, filmsthat it resurfaced
again, and it was clear by then that the image of the American soldier had
suffered. Above all, there were the biting disappointment, even disillusionment,
and the humiliation of defeat; Vietnam, after all, was the first war America has
ever lost, and in asociety with such intimate relationship to its military and
strong identification with its troops as representatives and agents of the country
abroad, some of the failure at least had to fall to the fighting men. The reallife
consequences of this would of course be felt most acutely among the veterans,
who found themselves returningas losers, basket cases, babykillersto
communities that were either indifferent and eager to forget Vietnam as soon as
possible, or unsympathetic and hostile. In the memoirs that treat the subject, the
hurt upon the lonely return is often felt: no parades, no heroes welcomes, often
not even as much as apat on the back.10
In the narratives that concern themselves with the veterans fates following
the war amodel of representation emerges, even as the exsoldier, the Vietnam
vet, becomes the principal victim of the war: apsychopath, aparalyzed man.11

The current classification and understanding of posttraumatic stress and anxiety

among combatants dates back to the 1970s, and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, these
afflictions are often the focus of the veteran stories. Lieutenant Dan Taylors
character in Forrest Gump (the film, 1994) provides something of a template
here: adouble amputee, he is damaged in mind as much as in body. Embittered
and hateful, he is found by Gump living as ahobo and adrunk, destined to reach
the very bottom before he can be redeemed. The profound effects of combat
experience are also prominent in Bobbie Ann Masons In Country, anovel about
ateenage girl coming to terms with Vietnam, whose main story is abarely
concealed allegory for the country coming to terms with its bad war. One of the

9 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty. War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth
Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam (London: Purnell Book Services, 1975), pp. 3903.
10 MacPherson, Long Time Passing, pp. 545.
11 Michael H. Hunt, Introduction. The Vietnam War: From Myth to History, in: A Vietnam War
Reader. A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives, ed. Michael H.
Hunt (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp. xviii.; Peter C. Rollins, Using
Popular Culture to Study the Vietnam War. Perils and Possibilities, in: Why We Fought. Americas
Wars in Films and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. OConnor (Lexington: The University
Press of Kentucky, 2008), pp. 3823.

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veterans in the story is the main characters uncle, ablatant depiction of the
inability to forget and to readjust. The uncle, Emmett, not only an exsoldier
but also an exhippie, is neither capable nor willing to find a job or maintain
a romantic relationship; there are the inevitable flashbacks and night terrors,
the reluctance to talk about it, the dope smoking, the asocial quirks (wearing
askirt), the heavily emphasized fixation on sighting in America an exotic bird he
had seen in Vietnam. The books other significant veteran is Tom, with whom
the protagonist, Sam, is infatuated. Tom has bad back; Tom cannot have sex with
Sam because the memories of the war render him impotent. America cannot yet
embrace the Vietnam vets, the reunion cannot yet happen, since the country is
unwilling (symbolized in the novel by the indifference and lack of interest on the
part of all other characters but Sam) and the vets are unable. Nonetheless, the
two narrativesForrest Gump, In Countryoffer the hope of deliverance of the
vets as the wars most obvious victims. Taylor finds his way eventually, receives
prosthetic legswhich means he can walk againand even becomes engaged
(to aVietnamese fiance). In Masons book, in lieu of aclear happy ending (which
is not ruled out), Sam travels to the newly dedicated Vietnam Veterans Memorial
in Washington, D.C., where she locates the name of her father, whom she knows
to have killed aman before dying himself in Indochina, and forgiveness is
heavily implied; not coincidentally, the unveiling of the monument in 1982 is
considered an important milestone in the relationship of the American people
and the Vietnam vets.
These veteran stories are simple and ultimately optimistic, or at least
hopeful. The exsoldiers, haunted by their experiences, are separated from the
society into which they must be fitted back, so to speak; while perhaps it would
not be true to say that they stand for America itself, the dormant nationwide
trauma of the war may begin to be gotten over only once the relations with the
maligned veterans are settled. The other Vietnam stories are more ambiguous
in their representations of the soldiers. As they are set during the war, on the
battlefield, they present the readers and the viewers with different problems and
different solutions as to how interpret the American conduct in Vietnam.
One immediately apparent feature of these stories is that in Indochina the
protagonist can no longer be ahero, but that he is at best aspectator and awitness
to the horrors and the depravation: there is usually aBunny to every Chris Taylor
(Platoon, 1986), an Animal Mother to every Private Joker.12 In asense, this is
avariation on the canonic war tale of the corruption of innocence through the
experience of combat.13 However, when in All Quiet on the Western Front Paul
12 The Vietnam-related action films of Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris et al. should perhaps be
excluded here; continuing a long cinematographic tradition and often falling within the brackets
of a different ideology (the so-called Reaganite), they demand separate treatment that shall not be
undertaken here.
13 On the impossibility of heroism in the Vietnam narratives, the spectatorship and the corruption

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Baumer narrates the dreadfulness of the front, the moral withering of war and
his own bitter suffering, his story is that of any soldier, his complaint political in
the universal sense: this is what happens to boys sent to fight wars waged by old
men. In the Vietnam context, on the other hand, some of the narratives move
their concerns onto an almost metaphysical level; the war, even with its politics,
and with its uniquely psychedelic conditions of combatas enumerated briefly
in the earlier part of this essaybecomes aliterary, or imaginary, setting within
which adifferent tale may be told. Such narratives employ what Tobey Herzog
recognized as one of the leading motifs in the Vietnam stories, one peculiar to this
war specifically, namely the Heart of Darkness trip. The theme was engendered
in Michael Herrs Dispatches, acorrespondents memoir, and visualized most
memorably in Apocalypse Now (1979; Herr had helped to write the script); in it,
the simple melodrama is substituted with adensity, and intensity, of concerns:
confrontation with the self, the lack of civilisational constraints, evil, primal
emotions, savagery, chaos, the conflict between idealism and reality, violence,
vengeance, hatred, powerthe list goes on.14
Who is the victim on aHeart of Darkness trip? Herrs sympathies seem to lie
with the grunts, whose tragedy makes them beautiful, even if in the book one
encounters from time to time the warcrazed psychopath, whether afoot soldier
on one tour too many, or a lifer warmongering officer like Apocalypse Nows
Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore of the Ilove the smell of napalm in the morning
fame. In Platoon, Chris Taylor, the narrator, follows the classic corruptionof
innocence storyline. Unlike in the case of Remarques Baumer, however, his
journey is not occasioned by combat alone, but rather by the confrontation
with the films bad guys: Bunny, the kid trooper alittle too enthusiastic, alittle
too businessasusual, about killing, and above all Sergeant Barnes, who by
the end of the story becomes afigure of evil; in that, Taylor resembles Captain
Willard in Apocalypse Now, who, too, is awitness to the insanity and the horror.
Moreover, in Platoon there is yet another soldier who is an even better candidate
for the victim figure. In certain ways, Sergeant Elias represents the old ideal of
an American G.I., as he is presented in afar more heroic light than any other
character in the Vietnam narratives discussed here. It is symbolic, therefore,
that he ends up shot in cold blood by none other than Barnes himself, the
implication presumably being that having gone through Vietnam and having
confronted the darkest corners of his soul, the American soldier of the Great
Generation is finally, once and for all, dead.
of innocence theme, see: Gordon O. Taylor, American Personal Narrative of the War in Vietnam,
American Literature, Vol. 52, No. 2 (1980), p. 300; Tony Williams, Narrative Patterns and Mythic
Trajectories in Mid-1980s Vietnam Movies, in: Inventing Vietnam, pp. 1235; Herzog, Vietnam
War Stories, pp. 1316, 317; Rollins, Using Popular Culture, p. 383.
14 Herzog, Vietnam War Stories, pp. 2531; see also: Taylor, American Personal Narrative, pp.
297308.

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If such interpretation is true then it is America at large also that is victimized

here15 even though the violence is selfinflicted, occasioned by delving too
deep, by giving up too much control of itself, by letting itself lose the war.
The war itself is the perpetrator, personified in characters such as Kilgore,
Kurtz, or Barnes; the spectatornarrators are the ones to come out worse for
the experience: Iwent to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story,
unless of course youve never heard it, wrote Herr.16 The cherries have popped
all around.
Then there are of course the truest victims of the war: the Vietnamese. The
press had been reluctant to report on the civilian plight during the conflict,
but in the postwar narratives something else happened. In these stories the
Vietnamese are violated, raped, or murdered, and yet, if one may use such
description, their victimization is of adifferent kind to that of the soldiers. This,
of course, is true in the simplest material sensethe Vietnamese population was,
after all, the passive recipient of aggressionbut in the narratives their suffering
becomes anatural element of the war, as obligatory atheme as, for example,
the whirring of the helicopter rotors or the characteristics of the Vietnamese
landscape. Moreover, and more importantly, their suffering serves as atrigger
for the soldiers own horrification, the spectacle the soldiers observe that brings
about their loss of innocence, disillusionment, confrontation with wickedness,
and effectively their victimization.17 In Platoon, it is adisabled Vietnamese
boy and aVietnamese mother who are killed so that Taylor may tell his war
tale (i.e., the plot of the film). Daniel Langs New Yorker article, Casualties of
War, later extended into abook and made into a1989 film, is the story of Sven
Eriksson, an infantryman who witnessed apremeditated multiple gang rape and
murder of aVietnamese girl by his squad leader and buddies, and who reported
the crime to see the men courtmartialed; although the girl is presented in the
narrative in amore human, personal way than usual, the article focuses on
Erikssons immaculate and determined morality, and his struggle to cope with
the incident after the war. Even in Full Metal Jacket, afilm that leaves no doubt
that America is not so much the victim but very much the villain, the characters
of the prostitute and of the Viet Cong woman shot by the soldiers, are again
instrumental in bringing out the aggressors iniquity and degradation. ARumor
of War, the memoir by Philip Caputo, an exMarine, is professedly astory of
what war does to men; toward the end of the book, Caputo is implicated (as
the junior officer responsible for his mens actions, but not present at the scene)
in amurder of aVietnamese teenage boy and consequently brought before court
martial. The author is sorry for the boys fate, but the narrative is constructed
15 Hunt, Introduction, p. xviii; Williams, Narrative Patterns and Mythic Trajectories, p. 114.
16 Michael Herr, Dispatches (London: Picador, 1979), p. 24.
17 See also: Hunt, Introduction, pp. xviixix.

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in such away that as it approaches its finalethe charges against Caputo are
eventually droppedthe reader is compelled to root for him and be glad when
he walks free. The argument here is not that Caputo should or should have not
been found guiltyprobably he was notbut rather that the moral of the story
has little to do with what was done to the Vietnamese, in their own country,
in aspecific political situation; instead, Caputo uses the death of the boy, with
which he was intimately familiar, once again to prove that it was the American
troops who are the victimsbecause of what the war had done to them.
The sociopolitical and cultural milieu of the American 1960s rendered the
countrys war in Vietnam an experience unlike those of the previous conflicts.
When the first U.S. combat troops were disembarking in Indochina in 1965, the
mythology of World War II still reigned as the defining imagination of what war
and combat should be like. By the time they were leaving in 1973, the image
of the soldier had been transformed. Not only did America lose aparticularly
morally ambiguous, divisive and traumatic war, but also the discrepancy of
its selfimage, evident in the representation of the G.I.s, widened out over no
more than adecade, between the previous unproblematic heroism of World
War II and the complex darknesses of Vietnam proved aformidable force for
soulsearching. Consequently, no longer aJohn Waynewannabe, the trooper
appeared in the narratives of the war as Captain Willard, Chris Taylor, Bunny,
Animal Mother and so on. The particularities of the fighting in Vietnam and
the common perception of the conflict became the setting in which the friction
between the soldiersasevil and the bemused soldierspectators denied the
possibility of glory but offered instead asolution as to how to cope with ones,
and the countrys, involvement in the war. The potential guilt came to be tinged
with, or even buffered by, the notion of victimization, both an inevitable part
of the sense of humiliation and apotent defense mechanism that helps divert
the attention inwards. The representation of the Vietnamese experience in
these narrativesthe anonymity, the unquestioned, instrumental nature of
the sufferingis the representation of the dehumanized victims, as opposed to
the profound, metaphysical consequences for the American soldiers and their
nation; the Vietnamese agony thus turns into yet another plane upon which the
American tragedy might be dissected and contemplated.
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Anderegg, Michael. Hollywood and Vietnam. John Wayne and Jane Fonda as
Discourse. In: Inventing Vietnam. The War in Film and Television, ed.
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Caputo, Philip. ARumor of War. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1985.
Carpenter, Lucas. It Dont Mean Nothin: Vietnam War Fiction and
Postmodernism. College Literature, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2003, pp. 3050.
Clodfelter, Michael. Untitled work. In: Vietnam Voices. Perspectives on the War
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Zeszyty naukowo-dydaktyczne Nauczycielskie Kolegium Jzykw Obcych w Zabrzu

Years 19411971, ed. John Clark Pratt. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
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