The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
Oral History
CHAPTER 1
The “Good War” and the “Bad War” in Oral History
World War Two for me is a sore asshole. World War Two for me is four years of nervous diarrhea.
-- Fighter Pilot Eddie Costello1
I enjoyed the [Vietnam] war ‘cause I was in Cam Ranh Bay. Cam Ranh Bay was paradise, man.
-- Radarman Second Class Dwight A. Brown2
In a few selective words, war veterans can depict the “Good War” as dreadful and the “Bad War”
as wonderful. This immediately indicates both the importance of individual memory of historic
events as well as the tension between those recollections and cultural memory. This chapter
will analyze three books of oral history on World War II and the Vietnam War to see the
interaction between the memories of the interviewed veterans and the master narratives of both
wars as those have been established in the introduction. Questions that are asked include: do the
interviews reinforce or contradict the narrative, and are there signs that the master narrative
has influenced individual memory?
The first books compared are Studs Terkel’s widely popular “The Good War” on World
War II and the less well known but equally insightful Bloods by journalist Wallace Terry on
African American veterans of the Vietnam War, both published in 1984. A comparison of these
two books will reveal the different sentiments on World War II and the Vietnam War in a specific
moment in American history in which the commemorations of these wars were publicly
debated. However, since Terry only interviews African Americans, “The Good War” will also be
compared with Christian G. Appy’s 2003 Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides.
Published decades after the war, Patriots, like “The Good War,” asks interviewees to recall events
that happened half a lifetime ago, at a time when the master narratives of both wars had firmly
1
2
Quoted in Terkel, “The Good War,” 211.
Quoted in Terry, Bloods, 266.
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taken shape. A close reading of these remarkable texts will therefore give insight into the
relation between the individual and the collective in memory.
Documenting history in the form of written-down oral histories has become immensely
popular. In the 1980s there even was, in the words of Steward O’Nan, an “oral history boom.”3
For the Vietnam War, this flow of books of oral history was triggered by the debates following
the decision to erect the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the success of mainstream fiction films
such as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now that, many veterans felt, had “bastardized” their
true stories.4 In interviews, Vietnam veterans believed, they could correct the exaggerations and
omissions of these movies. Oral histories on World War II were most likely initiated by the 40th
anniversary of D-Day and the end of the war.
The popularity of oral history can largely be explained by its perceived authenticity,
which is based on the notion that memory is “moral in character” and that witnesses are
therefore truth-tellers.5 Recently, audiences of films, plays, books, or TV-series on historic events
have increased and, with that, have become more diverse. As Jay Winter and Emanuel Sivan
argue, “history sells,” because it “locates family stories in bigger, more universal, narratives.”6
Therefore, the shared interest of audiences of history tends to lie with an as-realistic-as-possible
presentation of historic facts: people want to know what it was really like to fight in World War
II or in Vietnam, while sitting in their comfortable sofas with a beverage or snack within arm’s
reach.7 This stems from a contemporary “desire and conviction that actual history can and must
3
O’Nan, The Vietnam Reader, 299.
Ibidem.
5
Winter, Remembering War, 30.
6
Jay Winter and Emanuel Sivan, eds. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 2, 3.
7
In “Making the Pacific,” a documentary behind the scenes of the 2010 HBO TV-miniseries The Pacific on that
theater in World War II, director David Nutter repeatedly says the series attempts to be “as authentic as
possible.” Stephen Spielberg, executive producer of the series, states that The Pacific is “brutal, it’s honest, and
it’s right there in your face, as it was for [the Marines who fought there].” One of the actors, Jon Seda, agrees
that the series “pretty much had it down to exactly how it happened.” Such quotes illustrate the importance of
truth and authenticity of history in contemporary culture. Chris Spencer and Karen Sands, “Making the Pacific
(HBO),” February 25, 2010. Accessed via YouTube.com. Last visited: May 30, 2010.
4
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Oral History
be uncovered.”8 A desire and conviction that at least many Vietnam veterans share.9 In written
media, books of oral history seem to provide such a thing.
However, oral history is not the only form of personal documentation, and, in a sense, it
is even one of the least personal ones. Diaries, letters, and memoirs are types of personal
documentation that individuals initiate, rather than being asked by an author to tell about their
memories of war. Moreover, letters and diaries are more immediate than interviews or memoirs.
They reflect the “purest, most unmediated version of war, the least shaped, the least reflective.
[…] They simply report.”10 The difference between the two, of course, is the audience: letters are
written to someone, which can also result in censored reports.11 Diaries are written to oneself,
which turns the telling inevitably inward. Oral histories and memoirs are much more reflective.
According to Samuel Hynes, the further the recording is from the actual event, “the less pure
happenings will be, and the greater the element of reflection.”12 Such accounts no longer simply
report what happened, but circle around the question, “what did it mean?”13 With this
characteristic, oral histories and memoirs clearly reveal the interaction between individual
memory and political and cultural context. Since books of oral history in essence collect multiple
memoirs, albeit triggered by an author, they are the most representative form of personal
documentation and therefore the most useful for this study.
Most oral histories are compiled by journalists who want to tell an authentic, realistic
story rather than present scientifically verifiable data – which sets them apart from historians.
This is the case with the oral histories discussed in this chapter. As Studs Terkel notes in his
introduction, quoted from the introduction of his other successful book of oral history, Hard
8
David Wertheim, “Remediation as a Moral Obligation: Authenticity, Memory, and Morality in Representations
of Anne Frank,” in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, eds. Ann Rigney and Astrid
Erll, 157-170. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 167.
9
O’Nan, The Vietnam Reader, 299.
10
Hynes, “Personal Narratives and Commemoration,” 208.
11
A famous and commercially successful example of collected wartime letters is Bernard Edelman’s 1985 Dear
America: Letters Home from Vietnam, which was later adapted into a film version.
12
Hynes, “Personal Narratives and Commemoration,” 208.
13
Ibidem.
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Times, “this is a memory book, rather than one of hard fact and precise statistic.”14 Appy’s
Patriots is also described as “a vivid human history of the Vietnam War and its legacy today,”
rather than a “chronicle of facts and figures.”15 Yet, the trouble with oral history is precisely its
reliance on personal memory, which is an often-untrustworthy tool for factual recollections.
Despite these shortcomings, or perhaps because of them, oral histories are useful for examining
the interaction between individual memory and the master narratives of the Second World War
and the War inVietnam.
While they seem to present individual memories solely, oral histories also reflect cultural
memory. It could even be argued, as I do in this chapter, that oral history can, in some ways, be
more illustrative of cultural memory and master narratives than it is an authentic recollection of
personal experience and history. For one reason, there needs to be an audience for oral histories,
or any other kind of media, on a certain topic. In order for this to happen, the current master
narrative has to allow specific stories to be told. For instance, the master narrative of the
Vietnam War being the “Bad War” creates room for the detailed accounts of soldiers committing
atrocities in Terry’s Bloods or the gruesome details in Patriots. Master narratives direct to a large
extent what audiences want to know about a specific historic event. The fact that the master
narrative of the Second World War differs greatly from that of the Vietnam War partially
explains why stories of crime and violence are less common within that narrative.
Nonetheless, stories of atrocities or other kinds of actions that may not be in line with
the master narrative of World War II do exist and therefore the master narrative is often
contested. This illustrates that cultural memory might influence individual memory, but it never
completely dictates it. People who experienced the wars first-hand often have different
memories of those events and do not feel connected to, and represented by, the current master
narrative. As one World War II veterans says, “[p]eople talk about Iwo Jima as the most glorious
amphibious operation [warfare on land, sea, and in the air] in history. […] What in the hell was
14
Terkel, “The Good War,” 3.
Christian G. Appy, Patriots. The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides (New York: Penguin Books, 2003),
back cover.
15
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glorious about it?”16 Such sentiments create the need for individual memoirs. However,
according to John Bodnar in Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism
in the Twentieth Century, soldiers do not always experience or remember a conflict as people in
society describe it because the “accounts of how the war felt and was perceived by those who
were there” do not always “directly serve the interests of [society].”17 Therefore, “the shaping of
a past worthy of public commemoration […] is contested and involves a struggle for supremacy
between advocates of various political [and cultural] ideas and sentiments.”18 This struggle, as
well as its outcome, is the essence of any master narrative. The points of view advocated by
individual veterans are the main theme of this chapter and the next.
Memories of veterans are not an unproblematic source of information. Theorists of
Memory Studies point to the many difficulties with individual recollections. They persuasively
illustrate that no memory is purely individual. Instead, memories are influenced by countless
external factors that cause changes in memories over time. Such external factors include a social
framework, personal identity and group identities, and the political and cultural context of the
current master narrative. Analyses of oral histories make it impossible to take those personal
factors into consideration. On the other hand, group identity – of veterans in general, World War
II or Vietnam veterans separately, or Americans, for instance – and the political and cultural
context are easier to analyze and therefore important for this study. Moreover, individual
memories are constructed, not reproduced. Every memory is mediated and updated to fit the
setting in which the memory is shared.19 The setting of interviewing veterans years or even
decades after the events creates space for intentional or unintentional forgetting and
fictionalizing by the interviewees, as well as subjective, selective editorial adaptations by the
author to the final printed version of the interview.20 Before analyzing the content of individual
memories, we must first elaborate on these theories of cultural and individual memory.
16
E. B. Sledge in Terkel, “The Good War,” 65.
Bodnar, Remaking America, 8.
18
Ibidem, 13.
19
Thelen, Memory and American History, viii, ix.
20
O’Nan, The Vietnam Reader, 299.
17
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MEMORY STUDIES AND ORAL HISTORY
In the 1920s and 1930s, French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs introduced the
term la mémoire collective – one of the first studies on what is now referred to as cultural
memory. His theory points to the close connection between the memory of an individual and
that of their social environment. Not only will the reliability of a personal memory increase
when others have identical recollections, memories that are often shared with a group also
remain more vivid. These facts already reduce the authority of truly individual memory.
However, on the first page of his book, Halbwachs bluntly states, “every memory is collective”
because “so much of what people have seen was seen in the light of what others remembered,
wrote down, or said.”21 Social or cultural groups are therefore essential to personal memories; a
memory that is not connected to any collective point of view or cultural thinking patron will not
prevail because it has no reference. It is for this reason that even the most personal and
individual memories are unconsciously placed within a cultural or social framework. According
to Halbwachs, this is why people remember so little of their earliest childhood: at such a young
age, our impressions are purely observational and not yet formed by, or linked to, the ideas of
the people around us.22 Memories that are so remote and meaningless to our present social
environment simply dissolve. Halbwachs states, “every individual memory is a certain view on
[or version of] collective memory and those individual interpretations differ according to the
person’s social position.”23 This illustrates the power of collective or cultural memory.
Halbwachs sees collective memory as the memory of a group of people who, in the words
of German scholar Jan Assmann, “conceive their unity and peculiarity through a common image
of their past.”24 Memory is therefore important for group identity and group identity is equally
important for memory. However, Halbwachs limits the term collective memory to exist solely
within everyday communications, which sets his collective memory apart from the later used
21
Halbwachs, Het collectief geheugen, 7. Emphasis in original.
Ibidem, 10, 11.
23
Ibidem, 15.
24
Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” John Czaplicka, trans. New German critique 65
(Spring/Summer 1995): 127.
22
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term cultural memory. Collective memory relies greatly on oral history and is distinct from
history because Halbwachs claims, “history usually begins when tradition ends.”25 He sees
history and tradition as separate while in fact they often overlap. Halbwachs does mention two
important differences between history and collective memory. For one thing, collective memory
is a continuous “flow of ideas” – it has no obvious beginning or end – while history is marked by
clear-cut periods.26 Moreover, there can be only one single history based on the facts but there
are multiple collective memories.27 Obviously, history is often rewritten when new facts or
interpretations are presented but the difference is that history is, theoretically, purely based on
proof. This sets it apart from collective and cultural memory and it once more reveals the
problem of characterizing oral history as authentic or factual.
The distinction between collective and cultural memory is made evident in Jan
Assmann’s essay “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” Simply put: collective memory, or
communicative memory, as Assmann calls it, is limited to relatively small groups of people; is
based on the recent past and stretches only 80 to 100 years or 3 generations; and it is “history in
the frame of autobiographical memory,” usually presented in spoken words.28 Cultural memory,
on the other hand, is based on the mythical, absolute past, which can go back as far as 3000
years; and is presented in ceremonial communication via “texts, icons, dances, rituals, and
performances of various kinds.”29 Assmann, as an Egyptologist, focuses mainly on the mythical
past of ancient cultures and thereby leaves out the importance of current cultural memories and
the fact that such memories also exist of events in the recent past. However, he is correct in
placing cultural memory on another level than collective memory, the former being more
symbolic and ideological.
The connection between books of oral history and collective memory becomes clear
through these definitions, with the important difference that a contemporary book of oral
25
Halbwachs, Het collectief geheugen, 29.
Ibidem, 30.
27
Ibidem, 32.
28
Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory” in Erll and Nünning, eds. 109-118, 117.
29
Ibidem.
26
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history, in its mass-media form, is a crossover between collective and cultural memory. Although
such books are based on the recent past and rely on the spoken word, they are presented in a
form that could ensure their place in the absolute past: mass-produced print. Moreover, the
spoken word is edited, or mediated, by an author and therefore both the form and content of
books of oral history drift towards cultural memory yet, at the same time, remain within the
realm of collective memory. Despite this complexity, for the sake of clarity, the remainder of this
thesis will only speak of cultural memory because that is what we ultimately deal with in
discussing war in American society. It is nonetheless important to remember the different
definitions of a seemingly straightforward term as memory.
As mentioned earlier, identity also plays an important part in cultural memory. This is
true for individual identity as well as collective identity. A shared memory, or narrative, of the
past that is distinct is essential to group identity. Dietrich Harth states, memory is a “generator
of values which transcends the span of a lifetime and creates identity.”30 It enables a
“standardization of collectively accepted ‘self-images’” through the “sacralization” of historic or
cultural traditions.31 In other words, remembrance – the act of remembering – results in
standardized versions of self-images and the past. These self-images and the dominant
standardized narrative of the past ultimately become intertwined and are then the essence of
collective identity. However, neither these self-images nor the standardized narratives are fixed.
Self-images, or personal identities, “have to be constructed and reconstructed by acts of
memory.”32 According to seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke, this is done by
“remembering who one was and by setting this past Self in relation to the present Self.”33 Every
recollection of the past is thus inevitably linked to the present, which means that memories are
altered for every occasion. Following from this, David Thelen states, it is important “that the
memory be authentic for the person at the moment of construction, not that it be an accurate
30
Harth, “The Invention of Cultural Memory,” 90.
Ibidem.
32
Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction,” 6.
33
Quoted in Erll, 6.
31
34
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description of a past moment.”34 This characteristic of memory is particularly problematic for
the accuracy of oral history. Jürgen Straub summarizes the workings of memory and further
diminishes the often-perceived truthfulness of memories.
Memory, especially […] autobiographical, constantly arranges and organizes
anew what we remember (in this or that situation, for this or that reason, with
this or that aim, etc.). Memory is no […] blank wax tablet onto which any content
may be inscribed, nor a neutral storage medium which passively records just
anything and on demand reproduces it unaltered. It works and interferes with its
“contents,” arranging and organizing them. For this, it deploys “schematic”
possibilities, from the first operation of “conserving” to the topical rearrangements and pragmatic-semantic re-writings. A salient feature in these
operations is the narrative structuring of events.35
Not only are memories reflections of the present and the context in which they are shared, they
are also transformed into familiar or existing plots (romance, comedy, tragedy), images, and
symbols.36 It is for these reasons that individual memories are generally more telling of cultural
memory than they are factual recollections of the past. Moreover, it explains the dualism
between the “Good War” and “Bad War” narratives in American cultural memory.
Yet, master narratives are not fixed either. Halbwachs illustrated the need for memory to
be connected to a social framework but the dynamic characteristics of social frameworks, in
turn, create the need for cultural memory to adapt or adjust. Memories must therefore be
actualized, according to Astrid Erll. “Without such actualizations, monuments, rituals, and books
are nothing but dead material, failing to have any impact on societies.”37 This is comparable to
the memories of early childhood that Halbwachs mentions. In the introduction to his book
Memory and American History, Thelen hyperbolically links this actualizing to George Orwell’s
1984: Big Brother successfully altered the memory, and reality, of the people by changing the
content of ceremonies of remembrance and the events they commemorate.38 While the
comparison to 1984 goes too far since it refers to a totalitarian regime, it does clarify the
importance of identity for memory and vice versa. At the same time, it illustrates the changes
34
Thelen, Memory and American History, xiii.
Jürgen Straub, “Psychology, Narrative, and Cultural Memory: Past and Present,” in Erll and Nünning, eds.
215-228, 221.
36
Ibidem.
37
Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction,” 5.
38
Thelen, Memory and American History, xvi.
35
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that can occur within memory and narratives. Assmann rightfully states that cultural memory
therefore exists in two modes: first in the mode of the archive where “all texts, images, and rules
of conduct of a culture are accumulated,” and second in “the mode of actuality, whereby each
contemporary context puts the objectivized meaning into its own perspective, giving it its own
relevance.”39 This mode of actuality is important for understanding the relation between the
master narratives of World War II and the Vietnam War and the role of oral histories within
these narratives. It explains, for one thing, that the Second World War was reinterpreted during
and after the war in Vietnam to clearly contrast that new, confusing war.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, another way for memories to change is through
mediation and remediation. Remediation is the way in which events like World War II and the
Vietnam War are frequently represented in different media, often “with the aim of obtaining a
more direct connection with reality.”40 As Jay Winter states, memory is the product of “a
multitude of impulses” that people recreate and reconstruct by sometimes adding “feelings,
beliefs, or even knowledge [obtained] after the experience,” which are possibly based on the
ways wars have been presented in other media.41 Instead of a static product, memory is thus a
dynamic process. According to David Wertheim, the fact that such processes are ongoing is “at
least partly caused by a desire to represent the past as authentically as possible,” and, more
importantly, it “should be understood as the result of efforts to represent the truth.”42 Rather
than representing the factual truth, through remediation, memory becomes more reflective of
the master narrative. The crux of memory is this paradox; while perceived as authentic, static,
and individual, memory is actually dependent of and partially based on countless, ever-evolving
external factors.
This does not mean that every personal memory is in line with the current master
narrative or cultural memory. As mentioned, individuals have several group identities that can
39
Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 130.
Wertheim, “Remediation as a Moral Obligation,” 161.
41
Winter, Remembering War, 4. Analyses of influential media, such as film or photography, are left out of this
study due to limited time and space. This limitation will be briefly discussed in the conclusion.
42
Wertheim, “Remediation as a Moral Obligation,” 160.
40
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direct their attitudes and memories. Therefore, personal memories can evolve into a narrative
that is related to a social framework whose context is not in line with the dominant master
narrative – as is the case with some war veterans. Such counter narratives, or “resistance
identities,” as Manuel Castells terms them, challenge the master narrative and, theoretically, they
could alter it.43 If this is the case, we can speak of a circular interaction between individual
memories and the master narrative: while individual memories are often shaped by cultural
memory, alternative memories can rewrite cultural memory which can then, once more, direct
individual memories. The chances of individuals changing the master narrative are nonetheless
slim.
In his essay “Americans and the Writing of Twentieth-Century United States History,”
historian James T. Patterson describes the ironic contrast between the current “splintering of
modern American society,” encouraged by the emphasis of academics and universities on the
diversity of the American people on the one hand, and the centralization of culture by “mass
communications and political and economic forces” on the other.44 Following this example, the
minorities that represent the diversity of the United States can be seen as the veterans who want
to share their individual stories and the mass communications symbolize the homogenizing
master narrative. Not only does this, once again, reveal the tension between the individual and
the masses, it also illustrates the importance of the topic of individual and cultural memory for
understanding contemporary American society. By bringing together the cultural and the
individual, books of oral history are a good source to look for the interaction between these
elements of war and memory. Moreover, this interaction, found in “The Good War,” Bloods, and
Patriots, illustrates the different places World War II and the Vietnam War have in American
society while also revealing their reliance on each other. First, the similarities between the
“Good War” and the “Bad War” are discussed in relation to racism and discrimination, prominent
43
Castells, The Power of Identity, 8.
James T. Patterson, “Americans and the Writing of Twentieth-Century United States History,” in Imagined
Histories. American Historians Interpret the Past, eds. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, 185-205.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 186.
44
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themes in American history, and then we look into the images of veterans as victims or heroes
and what these labels say about American cultural memory of war.
PART I: RACISM AND DEHUMANIZATION
In 1984, the year of the 40th anniversary of D-Day and the unveiling of the Three Soldiers statue
of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, renowned author and interviewer Studs Terkel published a
book in which he interviewed people who had in some way experienced, or fought in, World War
II. He titled it “The Good War,” with quotation marks that had been added “not as a matter of […]
editorial comment, but simply because the adjective ‘good’ mated with the noun ‘war’ is so
incongruous.”45 That same year, a journalist for Time magazine, Wallace Terry, published a book
of oral history on African Americans who fought in the Vietnam War, called Bloods. Earlier in his
career, from 1967-1969, Terry had been stationed at Time’s Saigon bureau from where he
covered the tumultuous Tet Offensive in 1968 and reported on black soldiers in Vietnam.46 Both
books became national bestsellers. These diverse books on different, even contrasting American
wars, published in the same year, give insight into diverse views on the wars while revealing the
similarities in war experiences – especially regarding discrimination and racism, which are
problematic yet characteristic features of American society and culture – and the
constructiveness of the master narratives. The books’ covers and titles already tell two different
stories of war.
Terry’s title, Bloods, refers to the name African American soldiers in Vietnam gave
themselves. Fighting a war at the time of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, African
American soldiers chose not to ignore “the discrimination they encountered on the battlefield in
decorations, promotion, or duty assignment” or to overlook the “racial insults of their white
comrades. […] They called for unity among black brothers on the battlefield to protest these
indignities and provide mutual support.”47 Yet, the title also includes the noun ‘blood’ with its
45
Terkel, “The Good War,” i.
Terry, Bloods, 313.
47
Ibidem, xvi.
46
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connotations of violence, pain, and the reality of war, all clearly described in the book. On the
other hand, as mentioned, Terkel’s title is a reflection of how people often see World War II: as
far as wars go, this was a good one.
Terkel writes that the Second World War was not imperialistic and it was supported
enthusiastically because it was fought against a “patently, obscene enemy.”48 Most of these
typical characteristics, deliberately or not, also refer to everything the Vietnam War was
supposedly not. Arguably, such characteristics would not have been descriptive of the Second
World War if there had not been a war that was as dramatically different from it as the war in
Vietnam. In addition, the problems of the Vietnam War might also not have been emphasized as
much if one of the most justifiable wars in modern history had not preceded it. Herein lies a
complex problem: in many ways World War II was different – never before or since has the
United States seen such a collective war effort to defeat such an undoubtedly horrific enemy –
but by continuously stressing this difference, the reality of war can be transformed. The same
holds true for the Vietnam War. The fact that this war was seen as completely different from
World War II while the complicated, stalemated war in Korea (1950-1953) got far less attention
– negative or otherwise – suggests that there was something different about that war in Vietnam.
This points to the complexity of historic facts and comparative generalizations. While every war
is unique, there is also a universality to war. Terry’s mentioning of “the darkness that is at the
heart of all wars” illustrates that this universality is usually not pleasant.49 Perhaps taking this
into account, Terkel notes at the end of his introduction that World War II “was a ‘just war,’ if
there is any such animal.”50 Nonetheless, throughout the book, he tends to return to the
distinctive image of the “Good War.”
For one thing, the cover of “The Good War” simply shows an army-green American
helmet – an abstract reference to war – with the title in soft, orange letters. In contrast, the cover
of Bloods is vibrantly red, yellow and black and shows a chaotic, dynamic image of fighting
48
Terkel, “The Good War,” 15.
Terry, Bloods, xviii.
50
Terkel, “The Good War,” 15.
49
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African American soldiers. Esthetically probably less appealing and much more revealing of the
time the book was first published, but illustrative of the horrors of war and in line with what the
veterans talk about in the book. At the same time, it creates the illusion that war consists solely
of violent combat. The cover of “The Good War,” instead, reinforces the image of a clean, good,
even distant war, an image that is contradicted by the words of many veterans in the book.
Moreover, the seemingly floating helmet emphasizes the war more than the people who fought
it, as does the title. In several ways, the book’s cover and title do not appear to reflect the content
of the book, the words of the people who lived through the experience. This suggests that the
cultural memory of the “Good War” does not interact with the individual memories of the
interviewees.
Among the most obvious examples of this lack of interaction are the recurrent subjects of
the atom bombs, discussed in Part II, and racism, either towards African Americans and other
minorities who fought for their country in a segregated army or towards Japanese Americans
who were forced to live in internment camps during the war. The first chapter of “The Good War”
deals with the attack on Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. One of the first stories in the chapter is
that of Japanese American Peter Ota who remembers his father being taken to jail on the evening
of December 7, 1941 and later to an internment camp. His mother, sister, and Ota were also
taken to an internment camp until his eighteenth birthday: “I had turned draft age, so I had to
register. It’s ironic. Here I am being drafted into the army, and my father and sister are in a
concentration camp waiting for the war to end.”51 In that same chapter, Yuriko Hohri shows her
internee’s record that states her name, birthdate, internment date, and places of internment. “At
the bottom of the sheet, in large print: KEEP FREEDOM IN YOUR FUTURE WITH U.S. SAVINGS
BONDS.”52 Had it not been for the author’s note on the semantic justification for the quotation
marks, one could suspect that the term “Good War” was ironic. Nonetheless, Terkel’s mentioning
of these realities of World War II indicates his acknowledgement and disapproval of the less
favorable episodes of the war. This makes the choice of the book’s title even more remarkable.
51
52
Ibidem, 30.
Ibidem, 34. Capitalization in original.
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Another reason to question the label of the “Good War” brings us to Terry’s Bloods:
racism towards African Americans. Although other minorities were also discriminated against,
both Terry and Terkel only mention that sporadically. Therefore, the focus here will be on
African Americans, as well as Asians. During World War II, the American armed forces were
segregated. African Americans either held non-combatant positions or were in all black
battalions with white officers.53 One of those battalions was the 332nd Fighter Group of the U.S.
Army Air Corps, better known as the Tuskegee Airmen for their training in Tuskegee, Alabama.54
Partially due to the high standards for becoming a flyer as an African American, the Tuskegee
Airmen became somewhat of an elite group with a tremendously successful record.55 Lowell
Steward was a Tuskegee Airman and he remembers the bigotry and the humiliation of the
segregation, regardless of the incredible record of the 332nd:
The Isle of Capri, the rest [and rehabilitation] camp for the area, was off-limits to
black pilots. […] Somebody gave us a private, completely equipped rest camp in
Naples. […] [The American army was] fighting fascism and letting racism run
rampant.56
Although, as a result of the segregation, “[t]here was a wonderful camaraderie among the black
pilots.”57
Such camaraderie was also visible among African Americans in the Vietnam War. The
difference was that African Americans in Vietnam, fighting in an integrated army, were
confronted with racism in the rest camp in particular – or the rear, as veterans call it. Richard J.
Ford III says that the “racial incidents didn’t happen in the field. Just when we went to the back.
[…] In the rear we saw a bunch of rebel flags [the Confederate flag].58 Dwyte Brown recalls that
53
Ibidem, 266.
Tuskegee is also home to the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now Tuskegee University, founded by
Booker T. Washington. Washington, author of the autobiographical Up From Slavery (1901), opened the all
black institute in 1881 with a philosophy of increasing African American socioeconomic independence through
industrial education and social segregation. See: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, The Norton
Anthology of African American Literature. Second Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 570.
55
Terkel, “The Good War,” 345, 346.
56
Ibidem, 344.
57
Ibidem, 346.
58
Terry, Bloods, 40.
54
41
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one time, somebody “burned a cross.”59 Because of such events, African Americans often lived
separate from white servicemen in the R and R camps. We would “walk around to find a [bar]
that would be playin’ some soul music,” Harold Bryant confesses. “I would want to do my
drinking somewhere where I’d hear music I liked rather than hillbilly.”60 Yet, in the field, Charles
Strong remembers, there was no room for racism. “Maybe someone would first come in with it,
but after a while, he knew that you were working together as a unit and he needed each man.” 61
Nonetheless, more than twenty years after the integration of the armed forces, African
Americans were still faced with racism. William S. Norman bitterly recalls that “the Navy was
asking black people to take part in a war while subjecting them to institutional racism –
institutional racism intentionally.”62 This is another indication that the reality of World War II
and Vietnam were more alike than is usually acknowledged, especially for African Americans.
Racism was visible in other ways as well. A painful memory for many African American
veterans of World War II is the treatment of German prisoners of war. Dempsey Travis saw
German prisoners free to move around the camp, unlike black soldiers, who were
restricted. The Germans walked right into the doggone places like any white
American. We were wearing the same uniform, but we were excluded.63
Even American entertainers were asked to perform twice, once for the white troops and again
for the black troops and the German prisoners of war, leveling African American citizens with
the enemy.64
The attitude towards the Japanese enemy differed greatly. Admiral Gene Larocque
remembers the American racist arrogance of that time:
We were so proud, so vain, and so ignorant of Japanese capability. […] We’d
thought they were little brown men and we were the great big white men. They
were of a lesser species. The Germans were well known as tremendous fighters
and builders, whereas the Japanese would be a pushover.65
59
Ibidem, 267.
Ibidem, 27.
61
Ibidem, 62.
62
Ibidem, 191.
63
Terkel, “The Good War,” 151.
64
Ibidem, 369.
65
Ibidem, 190.
60
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The emphasis on a, in Larocque’s words, “subhuman” enemy was a part of the training U.S.
Marines received during the war. Roger Tuttrup was taught, “the Japs are lousy, sneaky,
treacherous – watch out for them.”66 Eugene B. Sledge, author of the 1981 memoir With the Old
Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, confesses to Studs Terkel that the “attitude toward the Japanese
was different than the one we had toward the Germans. […] When they surrendered, they were
guys just like us. With the Japanese, it was not that way.”67 These and countless other examples
of culturally and institutionally directed racism are a reminder of the enormous complexity of
the Second World War, in which the genocide of the Nazis could sometimes be overshadowed by
the appearance of a non-white enemy or even a fellow serviceman.
The dehumanization of the Japanese enemy was most visible in, but not limited to, the
armed forces, nor was the racism against people of Asian descent limited to this time of war.68
Marnie Seymour, wife of a veteran, reflects the civilian attitude towards the Japanese:
[w]e didn’t know much about the Japanese and Japanese culture. They were
yellow, they had squinty eyes, and they all looked evil. […] You begin to think of
them not as human beings but as little yellow things to be eradicated. They
looked different from the Germans [who] had been more civilized, at least in my
knowledge.69
Her statement reflects the apparent cultural racism in the United States, even at a time of a fullblown war against fascism. For the armed forces, according to Christina Jarvis in her research on
the Male Body at War, “dehumanizing the enemy made it easier for servicemen to kill them and
for the U.S. army to justify military actions,” a tactic noticeable in all wars.70 Because of their
physical features, it was easier for Americans to dehumanize the Japanese enemy. Yet, “the full
complexity of the war’s racial dimensions have only recently received attention,” Jarvis further
66
Ibidem, 178.
Ibidem, 61-62.
68
In the nineteenth century, Americans were concerned about the waves of non-white immigrants pouring in
on both shores, including Irish, Jews, Italians, and Poles who were not considered white in that time. For
Asians, the “yellow peril,” these concerns resulted in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, followed by more antiAsian legislation that further limited the immigration of Japanese and other Asian laborers. Finally, the
Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 banned East Asian immigration altogether. It was not lifted until 1952.
These quotas were primarily based on the notion that “Asians offered inferior racial stock.” See: Christina S.
Jarvis, The Male Body at War. American Masculinity during World War II (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2004), 122, 124.
69
Terkel, “The Good War,” 520.
70
Jarvis, The Male Body at War, 128.
67
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states.71 It was not until the 1980s, after the Vietnam War, that revisionist historians “began to
expose the complex racial discourse of America’s home front and the war in the Pacific.”72 This is
a good example of the dynamics of cultural memory. It is, however, a rare case of interaction
between an academic paradigm shift and the master narrative.
There are several accounts in “The Good War” of Americans killing Japanese civilians or
mutilating Japanese soldiers after they were killed by cutting off ears or knocking gold teeth out
of their mouths.73 This further proves why the “Good War” needs to be put in quotation marks.
Eugene Sledge remembers a man in his company “trying very carefully to blast off the head of [a
Japanese] corpse’s penis. He succeeded. As he exulted over his aim, I turned away in disgust. Mac
was a decent, clean-cut man.”74 Rather than a story of World War II, this sounds like something
that would be more typical of the “bad” war in Vietnam. Once again, racism seems to bring the
experiences of the “Good War” and the “Bad War” closer together. The Vietnam War, known for
the many reported atrocities by American soldiers, one of the reasons for it being the “Bad War,”
suddenly does not look so different from World War II experiences in the Pacific theater.
The dehumanization of the Asian enemy in the Vietnam War is a recurrent theme in
Bloods. More than in “The Good War,” the veterans Wallace Terry interviewed elaborate on the
treatment of Vietnamese people. Similar to what the Marines were taught during World War II,
Vietnam veteran Reginald Edwards remembers, “the only thing [the army] told us about the Viet
Cong was they were gooks. They were to be killed.”75 Haywood T. Kirkland recalls the attitude
towards the enemy enforced by the military:
Right away they told us not to call them Vietnamese. Call everybody gooks, dinks.
[…] They were like animals, or something other than human. […] They’d blow up
little babies just to kill one GI. [The army] wouldn’t allow you to talk about them
as if they were people. […] That’s what they engraved into you. That killer
instinct. Just go away and do destruction.76
71
Ibidem, 121.
Ibidem.
73
Terkel, “The Good War,” 67, 62.
74
Ibidem, 63.
75
Terry, Bloods, 7.
76
Ibidem, 94.
72
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Such name-calling and dehumanization is universal; it happens in all wars, with every enemy.
Bill Mauldin, a famous cartoonist of the Second World War remembers, “[t]here were a lot of
ethnic slurs: slopes, gooks, and things like that. I heard about krauts, squareheads. […] I think
that kind of attitude goes with infantrymen of any army in any war.”77 Nevertheless, there are no
stories in “The Good War” about torturing German soldiers that compare to the treatment of the
Japanese or the Vietnamese enemies.
This is not to say it did not occur, but veterans do not mention it. Or perhaps Terkel
decided not to write about such practices because it did not fit the story he wanted to tell. It is
possible that within the Cold War context in which the book was published, it was undesirable to
dehumanize the important ally that West Germany had become. Veterans might even have
forgotten about atrocities towards the Germans in the light of the Cold War and the new enemy.
Whatever the reason, it is in striking contrast to the stories of Asian enemies in both wars. It
reminds us of the probable influence of the author of any book of oral history, but more
importantly of the impact of the political and cultural context in which memories are recalled.
This, together with the resurfacing of racial aspects of the war in the Pacific in the 1980s, as
mentioned by Christina Jarvis, is an important demonstration of the influence of context on
memories.
Forty years after its end, the Second World War had fully turned into a myth of the “Good
War” in cultural memory. On the other hand, more and more people were discussing the less
glorious aspects of that war. Studs Terkel’s book illuminates both sides of this split and clearly
reveals the lack of interaction between the two. At the same time, Wallace Terry’s book on
African Americans in Vietnam shows the striking similarities between racism against minorities
in Vietnam and World War II. Moreover, the dehumanization of the non-white enemy in Vietnam
and the Pacific illustrates that the “Bad War” in many ways does not differ from that theater of
the “Good War.” The fact that the racism during the war in the Pacific was usually only briefly
discussed prior to the 1980s, explains why the links between these two wars had rarely been
77
Terkel, “The Good War,” 361.
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acknowledged at the time these books were published. This, by no means all-encompassing,
analysis of references to racism or dehumanization in veterans’ accounts diminishes the
generally perceived dichotomy between World War II and the Vietnam War and stresses their
resemblances.
PART II: HEROES AND VICTIMS
In 2003, the year in which the United States invaded Iraq, starting another long and officially
undeclared war, historian Christian Appy published a book of oral history on the Vietnam War,
entitles Patriots. Like Studs Terkel, who remarked, “of all the works on the Vietnam War […] this
is the big one,” Appy interviewed people that had experienced the war in different ways in order
to tell the story of the war from all sides.78 Unlike Terkel, however, Appy also interviews many
Vietnamese in the book. Patriots is in this way much more a reflection of the whole war, rather
than a report on the American war effort in particular. The cover shows a white star on a blue
background next to a yellow star on a red background, representing the flags of both nations.
The success of the book reveals the American public’s readiness to read that whole story.
Moreover, the home front plays a more prominent role in Patriots in order to include stories of
the social and political unrest in the U.S. during the war. The Vietnam War and the domestic
turmoil of the 1960s and ‘70s are inseparably related, which reinforces the image of the “Bad
War.” A recurrent question in all Appy’s interviews, but in interviews with veterans in particular,
on whom we focus, is a paraphrase of Samuel Hynes’ statement on the reflective nature of
narratives formed long after the events: what did it all mean? A comparison to how veterans in
“The Good War” answer that question explains the difference between the “Bad War” and the
“Good” one.
Stylistically, Patriots and “The Good War” are comparable. The majority of the veterans
recalls their experiences of the wars by talking about one or two events in detail and concludes
by making a statement on what their wartime experience has meant for them or for the country,
78
Appy, Patriots, back cover.
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or even the world. When speaking about the meaning of war in general, many veterans draw the
same conclusions. Vietnam veteran Bob Gabriel tells Appy, “I feel good about going and serving
my country. I wouldn’t take a million dollars for the experience I had. […] But I definitely
wouldn’t want to do it again.”79 Peter Bezich has a remarkably similar feeling about the Second
World War: “[it] was an experience that I wouldn’t wanna repeat, but I’m glad I did my share.”80
Robert Rasmus says of participating in World War II, “in a short period of time, I had the most
tremendous experiences of all of life: of fear, of jubilance, of misery, of hope, of comradeship, and
of the endless excitement.”81 Wayne Smith, a combat medic in Vietnam, elaborates on this sense
of comradeship alongside the fear and misery of war:
combat was horrible, but there was a beautiful side as well – the brotherhood
between black soldiers and white soldiers and Hispanics and Native Americans.
[…] I can honestly say that I felt closer to some of the people I served with in
combat – of all races – than my own family.82
Such quotes reveal the undoubtedly universal elements of war and dismiss the binary
opposition between the “Good War” and the “Bad War.”
Yet, many of the veterans’ concluding remarks about the wars in particular do
distinguish between these two wars. “There may be no such thing as a good war,” World War II
veteran Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. says, “but at least World War II had a purpose.”83 Ted Allenby says of
that war, “as I look back, it was a war that had to be fought. It’s probably the last one. […] What is
unthinkable is fighting a war that is unnecessary.”84 These men appear to place the meaning of
the Second World War in relation to that possibly unnecessary war in Vietnam, revealing how
memories can be reinterpreted after the event. George Watkins, who lost his sight and right leg
in Vietnam, refers to the lack of necessity of “his” war by recalling going to the Wall of the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
I don’t have much bitterness. […] I just wish none of it ever happened – for
everybody’s sake. It was a bad political mistake. Have you been to the Wall? I was
79
Ibidem, 301.
Terkel, “The Good War,” 84.
81
Ibidem, 48.
82
Appy, Patriots, 363.
83
Terkel, “The Good War,” 337.
84
Ibidem, 185.
80
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there in ’85. […] All those names. [I] picked out some that got killed in our outfit. I
felt them. Spelled them out even. Each letter. I sat right there and just tried to
think, ‘Why did all these people die?’ […] What was gained from it?85
Besides asking painful and unanswerable questions about the meaning of the war, Watkins also
explains he feels no bitterness. He reveals there is more to the master narrative of the “Bad War”
than anger, atrocity, and resentment. Eric T. Dean shows in Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic
Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War that in a 1980 survey seventy-one percent of Vietnam veterans
felt “glad [they had] served their country,” an outcome that hardly fits within the narrative of a
needless war.86 Moreover, World War II veteran Alvin (Tommy) Bridges further complicate the
contrast between the wars by bluntly stating that the Second World War “was a useless war, as
every war is.”87 This quote and the survey illustrate the diversity in the experiences and
memories of veterans and the one-sidedness of both master narratives.
Filmmaker Oliver Stone, whose 1986 film Platoon is based on his experiences as a soldier
in Vietnam, does distinguish the Vietnam War from other wars by saying the war “had no moral
purpose and it was fought without any moral integrity.”88 The constructed labels of the “Good
War” and the “Bad War” are thus closely related to necessity and morality, or a lack of it.
Seymour Martin Lipset illustrates that morality is a central element in American culture.
Protestant-inspired moralism […] has determined the American style in foreign
relations generally, including the way [they] go to war. […] To endorse a war and
call on people to kill others and die for their country, Americans must define their
role in a conflict as being on God’s side against Satan – for morality, against evil.89
Lipset reveals the centrality of morale in American culture, which was also discussed by Samuel
Huntington. As Yen Le Espiritu describes, the involvement of Americans in war is considered
“proper and just precisely because a liberal multicultural America is morally superior to the
putatively more stifling and repressive ‘regimes’ of the ‘unfree’ regions of the world.”90
85
Appy, Patriots, 24, 25.
Eric T. Dean, Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997), 182.
87
Terkel, “The Good War,” 387.
88
Appy, Patriots, 256.
89
Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 20.
90
Yen Le Espiritu, “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth
Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon.’” American Quarterly 58.2 (June 2006): 347.
86
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In her article “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome” on press coverage of the
25th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, Le Espiritu argues that the importance of morality in
American society resulted in a new reading of the Vietnam War: “that the war, no matter the
cost, was ultimately necessary, just, and successful.”91 By focusing on success stories of
Vietnamese refugees and stressing the innocence of Vietnam veterans, newspaper articles
turned the “Bad War” into a “Good War.” Despite Le Espiritu’s thorough research, Patriots
illustrates that this sub-narrative never became the dominant narrative. Nevertheless, “The ‘WeWin-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome” – a pun on the “Vietnam syndrome” from which the U.S.
suffered after the war – does point to the importance of an American national or cultural identity
of morality and the possible diversity within a master narrative.
Thus, the Vietnam War became the “Bad War” partially because it greatly challenged
America’s self-perceived moral superiority. At the same time, the Second World War’s necessity
turned it into the “Good War” and, as a result, often appears to justify every horrifying and
devastating thing that occurred during that war, despite the nuanced remarks of many veterans.
Perhaps the clearest example of this troublesome justification is the memory of, and debate on,
the atom bombs. Apart from the racism and dehumanization that was discussed in Part I, the
atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and Studs Terkel’s
discussion of them are another complicating factor for the qualification of the “Good War.” Not
only do many veterans in “The Good War” mention the bombs and their ambivalent attitudes
towards it, Terkel also dedicates an entire chapter to the bombs and the people who worked on
them, dropped them, or saw their aftermath with their own eyes and suffered the physical
consequences.
Ted Allenby, who fought at Iwo Jima, tells Terkel, “I feel split about Hiroshima. The damn
thing probably saved my life.”92 Roger Tuttrup expresses a similar sentiment:
I just can’t understand the second one, Nagasaki. They were beat on the first one.
Why do you have to do that twice? […] Hiroshima? I figure it probably saved my
life, okay? Can’t say much more than that.93
91
92
Ibidem, 329.
Terkel, “The Good War,” 183.
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Such remarks reveal the complexity of war and the wide range of emotions it invokes. It also
raises more troubling questions about World War II being the “Good War.” Victor Tolley points
out:
We didn’t drop those two on military installations. We dropped them on women
and children. The very minute I was jumping up and down and hugging my
buddy and was so elated, there was a little baby layin’ out in the street […] and
didn’t have a chance to live. There was seventy-five thousand human beings […]
that were in an instant charred. I think that is something this country is going to
have to live with for eternity.94
The danger of claiming to have fought a “Good War” is that horrifying, or even immoral, events
like the dropping of atom bombs tend to disappear from the master narrative because they do
not fit the positive reading. It is a reminder as well as an example of the importance of individual
memories and narratives.
However, the contrast between individual and cultural memory is not as black and white
as suggested above. Terkel also describes the complexity of the ongoing debates within
American society on the atom bomb. Throughout the book, he prints some of the questions he
asked the interviewees by which he often points to widespread sentiments or theories that
contradict the interviewees’ words. In an interview about the atom bomb with John Kenneth
Galbraith, an economist who studied the effects of the American strategic bombing in the Second
World War, Terkel asks: “Didn’t the dropping of the A-bomb […] shorten the Pacific war?,” a
popular opinion in American society. When Galbraith denies this, Terkel tries again by asking,
“[w]ould not millions have been lost. American and Japanese, in the projected attack on the
mainland, had it not been for the bomb?”95 These types of questions, in which Terkel plays
devil’s advocate, reflect the sentiments of many Americans who support the dropping of the
bombs. Later on, in an interview with a crewmember on the flight that dropped the bomb on
Nagasaki, Bill Barney, Terkel refers to the critical attitude many Americans have towards the
second atom bomb by asking: “I can understand why the first bomb was dropped. Why the
93
Ibidem, 177.
Ibidem, 545.
95
Ibidem, 210.
94
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second?”96 In the postscript of the chapter, the author describes a photo of Hiroshima taken
several months after that first bomb: “It is a crematorium. There are bodies and bodies. It is as
though it were Auschwitz. Bodies like cordwood.”97 In his own words, Terkel compares the
consequences of the bomb that supposedly ended the Pacific war to the appalling practices of
one of the crudest regimes in history. Despite the title of his book, these words illustrate his
painstaking awareness that there is much more to World War II than the master narrative
generally reveals.
The master narrative of the Vietnam War, on the other hand, revolves around it being the
“Bad War,” for many reasons previously discussed. One of the most obvious reasons for this
label, however, is the amount of reports of American atrocities during the war. Although such
stories are not unique to this particular war, the frequency with which the media has reported
on them and veterans have talked about them, has linked atrocities and the Vietnam War
permanently. It is plausible that this is why many veterans tend to speak openly about the
atrocities and violence in Vietnam. By sharing these kinds of experiences, veterans keep
reinforcing the master narrative – the same narrative that allows them to talk about it in the first
place.
Remarkably, over time, such ghastly accounts have turned the image of Vietnam veterans
from “baby killers” into victims of war. Arthur E. “Gene” Woodley, Jr.’s elaborate description of a
killing in Bloods reveals why.
I heard this individual walking. He came through the elephant grass, and I let
loose on my M-16 and hit him directly in the face. Sixteen rounds. The whole clip.
And his face disappeared. From the chin up. Nothing left. And his body stood
there for ‘proximately somewhat around ten, fifteen seconds. And it shivers. And
it scared me beyond anyone’s imagination. […] I had never experienced anything
quite as horrible as seeing a human being with his face blown apart. I cried. I
cried because I killed somebody.98
Apart from details of such a horrendous event, this quote also shows the vulnerability of the
veteran. At a certain point, a realization emerged in American culture “that veterans might be a
96
Ibidem, 530.
Ibidem, 557.
98
Terry, Bloods, 243, 244.
97
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victim […] of the horrors of war.”99 Contrary to what is often believed, Andrew Huebner
illustrates in his study The Warrior Image that this victimization is not typical of the Vietnam
War and its veterans. In fact, the image of the veteran as victim appeared directly after the
Second World War, as early as the 1940s. Nonetheless, during and after the Vietnam War, the
warrior image was updated to fit the particular circumstances of that war. Soldiers were
portrayed as victims of “the difficult terrain, a shadowy enemy, and an increasingly brutal and
stalemated war.”100 “Suicide, alcoholism, and homelessness dog the Vietnam vet[eran]” in
cultural portrayals.101 This victim image is related to “a gnawing sense of guilt,” states author
and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien.102 This is why it was more prominent during and after that
debatably unnecessary war.
Huebner’s study shows the lack of congruence between cultural memory and academic
research. Unlike the academic paradigm shift regarding the war in the Pacific in the 1980s that
altered the master narrative of World War II, Huebner’s well-conducted research of media
coverage and governmental documentation on the subject of the warrior image only partially
resulted in a changed master narrative. On the one hand, there is a tendency to view veterans as
victims. On the other, books like the 1998 The Greatest Generation, by the popular journalist Tom
Brokaw, and references to the Second World War in “The Good War” and Patriots, reveal that
veterans of that war are usually still seen as heroes and ignore the image of the victimized World
War II veterans that Huebner found in his research.
More than fifty years after the end of the Second World War, Tom Brokaw, son of a
World War II veteran, published a book on the generation that lived through the Great
Depression, won the war, and turned the United States into a prosperous superpower. It is a
book of unlimited praise, in contrast to the other books discussed in this chapter. It was also a
much bigger commercial success. Rather than elaborate descriptions of the war, the stories in
the book mainly focus on the life of the veterans after the war. One of the reasons for this might
99
Huebner, The Warrior Image, 276. Italics in original.
Ibidem, 277.
101
O’Nan, The Vietnam Reader, 541.
102
Appy, Patriots, 544.
100
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be the recurrent reluctance of the veterans Brokaw interviewed to speak openly about the war.
Different from the other interviewers, Brokaw paints a picture of the silent hero. James Dowling,
for instance, tells Brokaw he only started talking about his war experiences “a little more” in his
sixties, after he went back to the prison camp he liberated.103 He further shares that other
veterans he knows do not talk about it at all, because “they just [do not] want to relive it, I
guess.”104 Rather than victimizing the veterans for the reasons of their silence, Brokaw continues
to emphasize their heroism and thus moves away from the victim image Huebner describes.
The idea for writing the book, the author states in the introduction, came during NBC’s
coverage of the 50th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, when Brokaw was asked to define what
he was witnessing and thought to himself, “this is the greatest generation any society has ever
produced.”105 “I know that this is a bold statement and a sweeping judgment,” he goes on to say,
but “I believe I have the facts on my side.”106 This rather clumsy blurring of fact and opinion sets
this one-sided book apart from the works of Terkel and Appy. While Terkel’s title – reflecting the
master narrative – conflicts with much of the content of his book, Brokaw’s title and content
reflect and, because of the enormous success of the book, strongly reinforce the master narrative
of the necessary “Good War” and even more so the image that heroes fought it. His description of
“a generation birth-marked for greatness” illustrates a glorified image of World War II that
overshadows the “Good War” myth of the 1980s.107
At the same time, contemporary culture also tends to regard all men and women
participating in any war as victims. Examples of this can be found in the introductions to the
books compared in this chapter, with the exception of Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation. Terkel
speaks of the miserable essence of day-to-day war experiences: “Food. Fear. Comradeship. And
confusion. In battle, the order of the day was often disorder.”108 Appy articulates his book recalls
103
Brokaw, The Greatest Generation, 52.
Ibidem.
105
Ibidem, xxxviii.
106
Ibidem.
107
Ibidem, 11.
108
Terkel, “The Good War,” 7.
104
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The Good, The Bad, and The Memory
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a time when millions of people in several countries felt war had become a nearpermanent condition; when every day […] parents said good-bye to children who
would never return; when teenagers learned how to kill as patriotic duty; […]
when soldiers drenched in sweat and beyond exhaustion searched for an enemy,
[and] toxic chemicals fell like rain from the skies.109
And finally, Terry states that Bloods gives insight into “man’s most terrible occupation.”110 In one
way or another, the authors all victimize veterans and place their stories within that framework.
It appears from these books that the “gnawing sense of guilt” Tim O’Brien speaks of has become
a central part of American cultural memory of war. However, as Samuel Hynes correctly
formulates, “no man with a weapon in his hand can be entirely a victim,” revealing, once more,
the complexity of war and the images of heroes and victims.111
CONCLUSION
A close reading of veteran accounts in books of oral history, split into two thematic parts that
deal with warrior images and racism, have given insight into the relation between individual and
cultural memory of war. Recurrent reports of racism and the dehumanization of the non-white
enemy by veterans in these books show that the Vietnam War and World War II are, at least in
that sense, not the opposites their master narratives make them. Because of the image of the
“Bad War,” which, for one thing, came out of a blow to America’s sense of moral superiority and
the turbulent political and social context of the Civil Rights Movement, accounts of racism and
dehumanization fit the story of the Vietnam War. Naturally, such accounts reinforce the image of
the “Bad War” and it is plausible that the master narrative creates space for veterans to share
such memories, illustrating a circular interaction; i.e. an obvious influence of the master
narrative on recollections in oral history. Although possible alterations of actual memories
cannot be accurately tested, the placing of memories in that particular framework suggests a
reconstruction of recollections.
109
Appy, Patriots, 536.
Terry, Bloods, xviii.
111
Hynes, “Personal Narratives and Commemoration,” 219.
110
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On the other hand, the many accounts of racism during the Second World War, voiced in
“The Good War,” complicate the dichotomy between the two wars and, instead, reinforce their
similarities. In doing so, these stories contrast and therefore inevitably challenge the image of
the “Good War,” nonetheless without greatly altering the master narrative. The close reading
illustrates there is less interaction between individual and cultural memory of World War II than
there is with memories of the Vietnam War. For example, Terkel’s title remains “The Good War,”
despite the numerous accounts of Japanese internment camps, the horrors of the atom bombs,
and racism in the army. The master narrative prevails. Also, the striking absence of reports of
dehumanization of the German enemy in the oral histories suggests that the cultural and
political context of the Cold War has an influence on the accounts of veterans or the intention of
the author. Cherry picking leaves the master narrative unaltered. As Andrew Huebner shows,
the narrative of the “Good War” is so dominant that it even ensures a gulf between academic
history and collective memory of the war. The sheer power of the “Good War” image might
explain why individuals rarely modify the master narrative, even when their stories are printed
in popular books. The same holds true for the “Bad War,” with the notable difference that that
label is rarely contested.
While reflecting on “what it all meant,” American society sees World War II as the “Good
War” and the Vietnam War as the “Bad War.” The necessary war compared to a war with a
questionable moral purpose. Nonetheless, veterans in books of oral history illustrate that the
differences between experiences in these two wars are often more nuanced or even completely
absent. On the other hand, many veterans do signal key differences between World War II and
the Vietnam War, suggesting an influence of cultural memory. It must be noted that the quotes
used in this chapter are highly selective and that, in their totality, the three books paint an even
more complex and contradictive picture of war. Yet, despite the nuance of these books, cultural
memory repeatedly tends to stress contrasts when it comes to these complicated historic events,
illustrating the cultural need for dissimilarities between World War II and the Vietnam War.
Without it, the “myth of war” seems to lose its function of giving meaning to and making sense of
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war. Even the urge to turn the Vietnam War into a just and necessary war eventually gives way
to this familiar narrative of dissimilarity. Therefore, whether the memories of veterans have
been influenced by cultural memory or whether they explicitly contradict the master narrative,
it seems unlikely that their accounts in books of oral history can alter the powerful cultural
perceptions of these major wars.
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