ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the representations of U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese civilians in American narratives of the war. It focuses on the various dynamics of victimhood developed in American narratives, and various strategies of representing Vietnamese suffering—such as naturalization, instrumentalization, equalization, and obfuscation—in relation to American suffering. One of the major conclusions is the proposition that, due to the omnipresence and centrality of the theme, the American Vietnam War literature in fact be read as war crime literature. The chapter also discusses the convention of referring to the Vietnamese as “they’re all V.C.,” and the theme of Vietnamese betrayal justifying the crimes perpetrated against them, as well as the significance of these tropes to the argument, also presented in the chapter, that the American policy and conduct in Vietnam be viewed as democidal. The chapter argues that the view of the war’s atrocity as an “American tragedy” transitions into a complex discourse of American victimization in and by “Vietnam.” Texts analyzed include Tim O’Brien’s “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, James Webb’s Fields of Fire, Seymour Hersh’s My Lai 4, Daniel Lang’s Casualties of War, and the films Platoon and Casualties of War.
