Friendly fire: American identity and the literature of the Vietnam War

In Friendly Fire: American Identity and the Literature of the Vietnam War I argue that the Vietnam War has been almost exclusively represented as fought by Americans against Americans. From the fragging of an incompetent officer in Going After Cacciato and the bootcamp stabbings of Streamers to matter-of-fact non-fiction accounts of American soldiers burned by napalm or shot re-entering their own perimeter, Americans are portrayed as victims of their own ideals, practices and beliefs, while the ostensible enemy, the regular forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong guerrillas remain shadowy figures glimpsed only occasionally. The repetition of this trope across genres and mediums, at the most obvious level of plot and in the most subtle symbolic and allegorical patterns signifies a crisis in American identity which I locate in the contemporaneous changes in attitudes toward race, sexuality, and the ideology of power constructed on those categories. My study begins with a consideration of the first symbolic victim of the war, John Wayne, as an opportunity to interrogate the connections between semiotics and ideology, the ways in which institutional power is reified through myth and extended through popular culture. The chapters which follow offer readings of Vietnam narratives including Michael Herr\u27s Dispatches, Tim O\u27Brien\u27s Going After Cacciato, Larry Heinemann\u27s Paco\u27s Story, and Bobbie Ann Mason\u27s In Country in which I seek to extend consideration of the historical and formal revisions which mark a rethinking of American identity. Central to my project is a detailed consideration of the body of African-American war literature, particularly John A. Williams\u27 Captain Blackman, A. R. Flowers\u27 DeMojo Blues, and Wallace Terry\u27s Bloods, as the basis for rethinking the significant place of black soldiers in all representations of the Vietnam War