Can Vietnam awaken us again? Teaching the literature of the Vietnam War - 1

When I assigned Passing Time in a graduate seminar, five graduate students independently decided to assign the book in their freshman composition sections. All reported that it was by far the most effective and best liked text in their course.

Ehrhart's deep probing of his own consciousness and of American history helps prepare for that great text about memory and denial, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods. This is such a demanding book that I was quite hesitant about assigning it to my students, who have not been well prepared for sophisticated reading. But again and again, I see it work as a breakthrough text, as students become absorbed in its psychological, historical, and philosophical challenges. For many, the novel makes the My Lai massacre a crucial nexus between what O'Brien calls "story truth" and "happening truth," and a devastating revelation of the horrors America is inflicting on the world and itself. Introduced as the sole Vietnam War text into my course "Crime and Punishment in American Literature," In the Lake of the Woods brings home with full force the devastating and timely issue of crimes committed by a nation, particularly our own nation.

This year offers a special opportunity for teaching Vietnam War literature as an awakening. Almost half a century ago, Graham Greene's The Quiet American foresaw how America, convinced of its own righteousness, preaching democracy and spewing bombs, might bathe the world in blood for decades to come. Greene saw the quiet American, affable and amiable, armored with innocence and the best intentions, as the archetypal terrorist of our epoch. When the novel appeared in 1955, it was savaged by the critical establishment. In 1958 the novel was made into a movie that turned Greene's message into its exact opposite: exalting anticommunism and American political missionary zeal, the movie was dedicated explicitly to the puppet America had installed to rule Vietnam. But in 2002, The Quiet American was made into another film, one faithful to Greene's vision. After September 11, Miramax Films tried to deep six the movie, but it has risen like the phoenix, opening wide in early 2003. The film makes a perfect bridge back to the novel, allowing its message to travel forward half a century into our own era, with its terrifying enactment of Greene's prophetic vision.

Poetry by Vietnam veterans not only explodes the phony history of the war but also demystifies poetry itself.

Marilyn McMahon's devastating poem "Knowing" obliquely illuminates Washington's professed outrage about Iraq's chemical weapons by reminding us of the most intensive chemical warfare in human history, that used by the United States in Vietnam. As a combat nurse, she knew the stated purpose of "defoliation" was destroying "the hiding places of snipers/ and ambushing guerrillas," but she did not know "the price" until all the nurses with whom she served had either multiple miscarriages or children with deformities or cancer. The poem concludes: