ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how canonical American narratives of the war in Vietnam reconstruct the country and the war as a mythological place, understood along the lines of Roland Barthes’ theory of myth. The chapter also argues that representations of the Vietnamese landscape have in turn been central to both the process of the war’s mythologization and to centering American victimhood. Accordingly, the rest of the chapter is devoted to the creation of the mythical “Vietnam” by American authors and, in particular, the strategies of representation that bolster the idea of American victimization in the war, such as: naturalization of war as the Vietnamese landscape itself, the notion of a “homicidal environment,” the relationship between the U.S. soldier and the land of Vietnam, the use of Vietnamese place names to signify the alienation of the Vietnam veteran, and the theme of a heart of darkness. Michael Herr’s notion of “Landing Zone Loon,” as a particularly productive mythic construct, serves as a framework to analyze the reconstructions and reimaginings of “Vietnam” in other texts. Other narratives given particular attention include the works of John Del Vecchio, Larry Heinemann, Tim O’Brien, James Webb, and Philip Caputo.
