“Free Fire Zone”
In these stories, veterans reflect on the Vietnam War (from The Nation)
This book couldn’t have appeared more precisely on cue. As the nasty shadow of post-Vietnam retrospection seemed about to ruin TV dinner, our attention was turned to the POWs–they had Cornish game hen tonight, would they be impotent, they’re flirting with stewardesses. Cameras zoomed in to catch “candid” and “personal” shots of a wife’s first call from her husband in years, without a twinge of conscience on either side. Free Fire Zone comes like a brisk light rain at a voyeur’s picnic.
These twenty-four stories are published by 1st Casualty Press, the group of Vietnam veterans that brought out the highly praised collection of veterans’ poetry Winning Hearts and Minds. They were our “surrogates” who, whether we agreed to it or not, carried out Vietnam policy in the name of the American audience. But they are victims as well by the same inexorable logic that dulls the axe as the wood is chopped.
If Aeschylus is right — “In war, truth is the first casualty” — then there are a great number of things we have to unlearn before we can see, as these writers do, “behind the pasteboard mask the demythicized reality.” It is the situation described by George Davis, whose novel Coming Home is excerpted in the book:
Walking through ghosts, we used to call it down South, before Harvard, before everything became literal and scientific, and then became more unreal that it ever was before, leading straight to Vietnam. Before a million explanations came down between me and what I feel, and then all the explanations proved to be lies.
The recognition of the lies leaves these men estranged in a demythicized loneliness, part of an alien segment of American culture called the Armed Services, in an alien country that for the most part doesn’t want them. The stories are full of interior monologue and estranged narrators who make Henry of The Red Badge of Courage look like a moral goldbricker. The heroes of these stories are and are not part of the American tradition — Sad Sack, Sgt. Bilko, Mauldin’s characters, Gomer Pyle. They are drawn more along the lines of Thersites, the cynic who badmouths the Greeks during the siege of Troy–the army’s greatest curse, the bitter mumbler. Aitken’s Lederer in “Lederer’s Legacy” is of this ilk. He is almost impishly perverse with his conversational and conspiratorial pot shots. Karlin’s Joshua, in a number of stories, is a sardonic mumbler, not like John Wayne, for swagger, but because the war has made him jaundiced and mean.
There are others who have seen the reality concealed by myth and tried not to become estranged cynics. They try to keep up the pretense of the hardened veteran but, as John Kimmel observes, it is like “melting wax inside the granite,” and the result is further confusion of the spirit. The world breaks into fragments. The characters try to put the pieces together, resorting to elementary and reductive obsessions. The narrator in “The Candidate” becomes obsessed with trains, and Lederer consoles himself with magical beliefs–for example, that he will remain unharmed if he kills no one.
In the face of reality, words, too, become suspect. They have been the masks, the vehicle of deceptions and atrocities. In “Bangalore,” for example, porno-language masks feelings, people are designated by rank (‘Cruit, Sarge), army jargon replaces facts (“Max” for death); in the same way “gook” makes murder easier. “Majors,” James Dorris observes in his story, are “never at a loss for words.”
In Jim Aitken’s “Lederer’s Legacy,” the finest story in the collection, we are left with silence. It is Lederer’s task to write up thousands of commendations for heroism, a task made a bit easier by his catalogue of fifty stock phrases. Unlike Howard in the story, who talks continuously and compulsively so as not to think about the war, Lederer is often silent because he has found how empty words are:
He gets killed. . . . What are you going to say . . . that would make any sense? In 250 words? Maybe the problem is being too close to words for too long . . . . When something that screams of it comes along, you only have the same words left to try to make it come alive.
When Lederer does speak to the narrator, his words are carefully chosen, cryptic, allegorical. His true legacy to the narrator is a fable he admits may or may not be true about the death of a Vietnamese woman. Like the Ancient Mariner, he acutely observes, “The nice things about this story is now that you ave heard it, what happened is a part of you.’
It is probably for this reason that the fables of the collection — “Meeting,’ “Out with the Lions,” “Temporary Duty” — are most effective. They are landscape paintings, not symbolically pointing elsewhere but demanding attention and meditation on the facts. Wayne Karlin’s pieces of this kind (“The Vietnamese Elections” and particularly “Search and Destroy”) are brilliant and hierophantic. Divorced from a need for contextual reality, his emotional truths depend upon the reader’s discovering them and are doubly powerful, doubly transfiguring.
Other stories work by a different method–humanizing the “gook”: Rottman’s “Thi Bong Dzu,” “The Interrogation,” “Children Sleeping.” Their effects are like close-up photographs of the Vietnamese people, a healthy alternative to the fleeting and panoramic glimpses afforded this war’s audience.
On the other hand, in Paquet’s “Warren,” the sense of Vietnamese humanity is totally absent and the reader stares at the “psycho-sexual sickness” that the editors suggest is at the bottom of the causes of the war. Warren, like Melville’s Pierre, is full of ambiguities. He is at once the bright-eyed and complacent soldier-redeemer and perversely sexual. He continually strokes his chest with pride and at other times engages in behavior that smacks of necrophilia, vampiric whoring with the “natives,” and unrecognized mental illness. He is strangely and eerily uncomprehending, believing at times, by a kind of pathetic fallacy, that the Vietnamese women desire his perversities.
“Warren” and many of the other stories link the war with depraved sexuality. Even to a nation inured to the polite obscenities of Playboy, the “psycho-sexual sickness” revealed in these pages will shock as it is intended to. There is a failure in many of these stories “to represent the human condition in the central tradition of natural feeling” — as Allen Tate observed about “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe” — “the natural affections are perverted by the will to destroy.”
Karlin’s Joshua, like Warren, is engaged in a kind of sexual imperialism. After making brutal love to a Vietnamese whore, Joshua is startled when she turns to him with a “question and her humanity.” Shocked by that, disgusted with the recognition of his own need, he snaps back, “What the hell do you want?” The complacent redeemer needs and wants nothing.
We are faced again and again in these stories with the ambiguous problem of Melville’s Pierre, that of the paradoxical redeemer in need of redemption. The circle is only broken in one story, “The Rabbi.” When his superior adamantly suggests to Rowan that, with his faculty in the language, he should switch to another unit so he can help the people, he replies: “‘I like them. . . . I don’t want to help them in the sense of . . . ‘ his voice trailed off. ‘It’s hard to explain, sir.’”
Free Fire Zone is not war literature. It doesn’t provide the vicarious thrills of rising alongside the ace in the cockpit. And it is not intended to provide liberals with the fuel to feed the fires of outrage. Free Fire Zone is not even anti-war literature, for what is wrongheaded in that is caught in the anonymous Zen poem “Anti-War Warrior”:
I said the way to end the war
Was to be nice to other people.
He wanted to argue.
It is much more subtle.
Free Fire Zone has a structure despite the fact that it is a collection. It moves backward, from stories of those who are aware to those who are complacently unaware of the sources of confusion and self-deception. And the reader is only fully prepared to read the book after he has come to the end of it the first time. The authors have ceased to believe in an ideal America needing no improvement, hence burdened with the task of saving others. As George Davis says: “I don’t know how I can ever feel right about America again, after what they got weak-assed me to do over here.”
These writers have ceased to believe in the myth of an imperfectible America, and their stories are meant to make uncomfortable the complacent who do believe in it. But the stories reveal the writers themselves–they can’t be comfortable in their disbelief either. It would be wrong to step back and say, America must be a great place if writers like these are concerned with perfecting it. That is the kind of complacency this book argues against. Its contributors have a kind of higher patriotism for which we can be grateful but for which we can scarcely take credit.
This essay originally appeared as “Truth is the First Casualty” in The Nation (November 19, 1973). Remastered 11/8/2019.
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