704 The American Century: Literature since 1945though, such as the detective story, the thriller, and the police procedural, the area
where it has had most conspicuous impact in recent times is in the various accounts,
in fictional or nonfictional terms, of the war in Vietnam.
Certain of the best of these accounts in fiction circulate around memories of the
Vietnam War: In Country, Machine Dreams, The Floatplane Notebooks (1988) by
Clyde Edgerton (1946–), Ray (1980) by Barry Hannah (1942–2010), whose
protagonist, a Vietnam veteran, appears to live by the maxim “It is terribly,
excruciatingly difficult to be at peace when all our history is war.” Others are devoted
to the combat zone. The military experience of Tim O’Brien (1946–), for instance,
has been the material of most of his novels, especially in the three most notable,
thinly fictionalized ones. If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
(1973) is a series of linked sketches; The Things They Carried (1990) explores the
futility of searching for the truth about what happens, or why, in war; Going for
Cacciato (1978) stretches into magic realism as it follows a breakaway group of
soldiers marching across Asia to Paris. O’Brien has also explored the legacy of the
Vietnam past as it haunts the American present, in Northern Lights (1975) and In the
Lake of the Woods (1994). So, in very different terms, have Robert Olen Butler
(1945–) and Robert Stone (1937–). Butler, who served in the American army in
Vietnam as a Vietnamese linguist, produced in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
(1997) a collection of tales about Vietnamese Americans that capture the fluid world
they navigate, caught between the memories of the Asia they have left and the
mysteries of America they now encounter. In Dog Soldiers (1974), a story about drug
dealing from Vietnam to California, Stone brought the Vietnam War to the home
front. It is one of several fictions in which he has used the adventure story format to
explore what he sees as the ineradicable American inclination toward violence.
Others include A Hall of Mirrors (1967), A Flag for Sunrise (1982), Outerbridge Reach
(1992), Damascus Gate (1998), and Bay of Souls (2003).
Among all the literary treatments of the Vietnam War, though, the one that stands
out is a work of nonfiction, very much in the vein of the New Journalism, Dispatches
(1977) by Michael Herr (1940–). There have been many other nonfictional accounts,
of course, notably A Rumor of War (1977) by Philip Caputo (1941–) – which Caputo
tersely described as “simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and
the things war does to them.” But no account matches Dispatches in its narrative
power, its ability to capture the brutally material yet dreamlike, hallucinatory quality
of combat, its strangely unreal reality. Almost at once, Herr plunges the reader into
the middle of the action: “Going out at night the medics gave you pills.” You the
reader are snatched into the world of “you” the narrator and “you” the “grunts,” the
ordinary infantrymen who are at the center of the action. The erratic rhythms of
war dictate the rhythm of the narrative. “Sometimes everything stopped,” Herr
records; then, suddenly, everything will slip into hysterical, high velocity action.
Herr deploys direct address, pacy language, the syncopations of jazz, rock, and pop
to register a battle landscape that is also a sixties spectacle. Here, the phrase “theater
of war” takes on a series of haunting multiple meanings since this is a real conflict
shot through with alternative realities: media events, bad drug trips, John WayneGGray_c05.indd 704ray_c 05 .indd 704 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM