ABSTRACT
In discussing modern war fiction, Alfred Kazin in Bright Book of Life mentions authors’ difficulties in presenting realistic accounts of war: “No individual experience, as reported in literature, can do justice to it [war], and the most atrocious common experiences will always seem unreal as we read about them” (p. 81). And Marlow in Heart of Darkness laments the problems his listeners have in understanding his own story of violence and atavistic regression:
“You can’t understand. How could you?—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman…how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into….” (Conrad [1902] 1975, 70)
Both of these are literary versions of soldiers’ common retorts to civilians’ inquiries about what it was like to be in heavy combat. As a Vietnam veteran from In Country tells his niece. “Unless you’ve been humping the boonies, you don’t know” (Mason [1985] 1981, 136). This issue of the inadequacy of language to convey accurately and meaningfully the sights, sounds, and feel of war for the uninitiated is central to this chapter. Our particular interest is in three Vietnam combat novels, all “first novels,” containing realistic and imaginary treatments of combat: Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters (1977), James Webb’s Fields of Fire (1978), and John Del Vecchio’s The 13th Valley (1982). Pertinent to these works is the title of this chapter representing the second stage of Fussell’s description of a soldier’s evolution in war. Authors of the
books discussed in the previous chapter trace a soldier’s battlefield education through all three stages, from innocence through experience to consideration. But a significant body of war literature, although briefly touching on innocence and reflection, emphasizes the second stage, the combat experiences, which according to Fussell are “always characterized by disenchantment and loss of innocence” ([1975] 1981,130). Also a prominent theme in these books is a soldier’s culminating journey into the heart of darkness: the face-to-face confrontation with the horrors and evils associated with combat along with the resulting guilt-both collective and individual.
