Undoubtedly, one of the most controversial conflicts of the 20th century was the Vietnam War: a twenty-year-old conflict that had a long-lasting effect on both Vietnamese and American people alike. What once was a red scare offence against the possibility of a Vietnamese communist state, quickly became a divisive topic amongst the people of the United States. Authors like Tim O’Brien gave voice to the horrors of war from the point of view of the American soldiers, many of whom were young boys unaware of what they signed up for. Political reasonings and implications were also questioned through literature – as seen in Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American, which questioned the USA’s involvement in Vietnam while the war was still ongoing. However, the American perspective is not the only voice in this war, especially considering how divisive the conflict in Vietnam was: Viet Thanh Nguyen offers this dual experience in his 2015 novel The Sympathizer.
The Vietnam War cannot be understood without considering the context of French colonialism in the region, which began decades before the conflict. In 1887, the French established a colony in Vietnam, and ruled it ruthlessly, exploiting its resources , until an independence movement emerged in the 20th century. Led by Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh sought to end French rule and establish an independent communist state in Vietnam. The Vietnam War followed World War II and The First Indochina War, both of which had a profound impact on the region: Vietnam was first invaded by Japan in 1945, declared independence and was again recolonized by France in 1946. Needless to say, by the time American soldiers set foot on Vietnamese ground, the country had already experienced the dominance of imperialist powers.
The Geneva Convention divided Vietnam into North Vietnam and South Vietnam, with the former being communist and the latter not. At that time, the United States was deeply entrenched in the Cold War, and hence knee-deep into anti-communist fear. This fear led them to send financial, and eventually military, assistance to South Vietnam in an effort to curb the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.The Viet Cong,guerrilla fighting from North Vietnam, launched numerous offensivesagainst American forces during this period.
It is in this setting that Tim O’Brien writes The Things They Carried, published in 1990, yet written semi-autobiographically about the author’s own experiences fighting in Vietnam. Through a series of interconnected short stories, O’Brien retells the horrors of the war experienced byhim and his fellow squadron members, as well as the difficult moral decisions they had to make, including ruthless killings of people that may not have posed a direct threat. In one of the stories, “The Rainy River”, O’Brien narrates his personal struggle with being drafted and his internal conflict about wanting to escape but ultimately choosing to join the war reluctantly, unable to face the the consequences of running away. O’Brien also wrote Going After Cacciato, a novel published in 1978 that follows an American soldier who decides to go AWOL and walk all the way from Vietnam to Paris. The narrator, Paul Berlin, is the leader of his division and decides to follow Cacciato before he gets too far. Deep down, manysoldiers secretly wish they too could escape in the same way Cacciato did. The Quiet American by Graham Greene, published in 1955 during the Vietnam War, revolves around the story of a British journalist named Fowler and his relationship with both an American CIA agent and a Vietnamese woman. Pyle, the American agent, is described as naive, so blinded by American propaganda that he fails to realize what is going on around him – but also what is happening directly as a consequence of his actions.
The novel begins with the announcement of Pyle’s death, but it is not until the end of the story that Fowler’s implication is unveiled: Pyle’s blind trust in American ideas had led him to unintentionally participate in the murder of innocents, so Fowler decides to help in his assassination. When it was first published, the novel was deemed anti-American by the public in the United States, for its portrayal of Americans as unwitting murderers, led by their own propaganda.
The Vietnam War has been Americanized in all aspects of Western culture and history, to the point where it is viewed as a tragedy only about and for the United States. However, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about the war through the eyes of a half-Vietnamese, half-French communist agent in The Sympathizer, published in 2015. Nguyen’s novel serves as both a counterpoint and a complement to the conventional American retelling of the Vietnam War. In The Sympathiser, the story not only explores the war itself and the sense of personal struggle of the narrator with his divided identity, but also explores the aftermath of the conflict and the lives of refugees and immigrants the following decades. The novel highlights how America decided to turn the war into a Hollywood trope, a portrayal that the narrator tries to redirect, to no avail. Nguyen’s The Sympathizer sheds light on the process of Westernisation of the Vietnam War, and the complexities and dualities faced by the citizens of Vietnam, who had already endured two colonial invasions in the decades leading to the war
Overall, the Vietnam War remains a deeply polarizing and multifaceted conflict From the conflicting opinions of a communist-fearing America to the impact the war had on the citizens of Vietnam, the conflict was one of dualities. Literature became a perfect symbol representing all these different points of view: O’Brien established the canonical American view of the war, capturing the experiences of American soldiers. Meanwhile, Greene enraged the citizens of the United States by providing the view of an outsider who saw them as blinded by their own politics. Nguyen adds another layer by narrating the complexities of the war for the people of Vietnam, both during and after the conflict
Works cited
Greene, Graham. 2002. The quiet American. N.p.: Viking Press.
Nguyen, Viet T. 2015. The Sympathizer. N.p.: Grove Press.
O’Brien, Tim. 1989. Going after Cacciato. N.p.: Delta/Seymour Lawrence.
O’Brien, Tim. 1998. The things they carried. N.p.: Broadway Books.