Vietnam and the Southern Imagination.

Wilson, James R.

Shortly before sunrise on September 21, 1967, Jerry Wayne Boutwell, an eighteen-year-old Mississippian who had never been more than one hundred miles from his home in Pearl River County, rolled out of his bed, took a bath and got dressed. His father was waiting to drive Boutwell to Poplarville, where he would board a bus for Jackson and induction into the Army.

Twenty-one years after that day, Boutwell would remember how much his mother cried when he left home and how little his father talked on the half-hour trip to Poplarville. "I got checked in," Boutwell recalled in 1988, "and then I sat on the bus and just watched him stand there." During the drive to Poplarville, neither father nor son had uttered the one word on both their minds: Vietnam.

Like 825,000 other men from the eleven states of the Confederacy, Boutwell was destined to serve his tour of duty in the combat zone. And like many of his fellow Southerners, Boutwell would undergo both basic and advanced training at a military base in the South. The youthful conscript was forged into a soldier in the pine barrens of "Tigerland," the Army's nickname for nearby Fort Polk, Louisiana. Polk taught Boutwell the rudiments of war and certified him to practice it. He left Tigerland with an MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) of 11B20 - combat infantryman. That code became Jerry Boutwell's ticket to the reconnaissance platoon of E Company, 501st Infantry, 101st Airborne Division.

Boutwell went to the war shortly after the 1968 Tet Offensive, the turning point for U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. Tet was one of those world-historical events that are so often seen through a glass darkly, for few people outside the American command in Vietnam realized that the bloody holiday offensive, far from being a humiliating defeat, had in fact delivered an astonishing victory to the United States and its South Vietnamese ally. The Viet Cong insurgency, Hanoi's lethal surrogate in the South since the 1955 partition of Vietnam, was virtually finished as a fighting force. Nonetheless, as Ho Chi Minh reportedly said, Hanoi intended to win the war not on the battlefields of Vietnam but in the minds of the policy makers in Washington. Lyndon Johnson lent enormous credence to that strategy only a month after Tet, when he announced that he would not seek a second term as president.

Despite Johnson's stunning admission of personal defeat and a growing realization among many Americans that Vietnam had become the most divisive national issue since the Civil War, Jerry Boutwell never doubted that he had an obligation to fight. It was an obligation that he shared with many of his new buddies. "We might not have liked it," he told me one evening as we talked over coffee in his home near Bolton, Mississippi, "but we believed it was our duty to be there." So strong was the call that one of Boutwell's fellow inductees arrived in Jackson with a metal plate in his leg. Rather than seeing the plate as a serendipitous medical asset, as many another young man would have done in 1968, Boutwell's fellow draftee feared the prosthesis would keep him out of Vietnam.

Although Boutwell fought in I Corps, the northernmost and arguably most dangerous of South Vietnam's four military zones - the area was notorious for mines and other booby traps - he came home without incident in March 1969. He had won a Bronze Star for bravery during a year in which you were on your own, from your way to Vietnam until you got home." Whatever Boutwell's final judgment about the worth of the effort in Southeast Asia, he believed then, and he believes today, that he fulfilled his duty. He had served with honor, both as a native Southerner and as a loyal American.

Southerners like Boutwell carried much of the burden of the war in Vietnam, whose official period lasted from January 1, 1965, until March 31, 1973. Almost one of three Americans - thirty-one percent - who served in the combat zone were from the eleven states in the Confederacy. Not surprisingly, the fatality rate among these soldiers was high - twenty-eight percent - but so was their battlefield bravery: twenty-nine percent of the Medals of Honor went to Southerners. Moreover, many of their officers also were from the South, which during the war years contained only twenty-two percent of the U. S. population.

Despite their combat proficiency, Southerners in Vietnam were frequently viewed by soldiers from other regions of the United States with considerable curiosity and stereotyping. Both the speech of Southerners - invariably described as a "drawl," whether real or imagined - as well as their music, which wailed of one broken love affair after another, seemed strange to many of their comrades. And, like Jerry Boutwell, many of these soldiers still in their teens had never been far from home.

Southerners, in other words, were provincials. It was a stereotype so strong that in my interview with William Tant, who fought in the Battle of Hue, I was struck by his casual statement that because he was from Alabama many of his fellow Marines unthinkingly dismissed him as a "redneck" and expected him to act accordingly. Such typecasting within the military of the 1960s wore many guises. Because so many Southern soldiers came from rural backgrounds, for example, they were thought to be born marksmen with virtually any weapon, from a .45-caliber pistol up to the tank-busting 106mm recoilless rifle. It was an assumption fed by the Army's own boasting of the exploits of Tennessee-born Alvin York in World War I. Southerners were also believed to hold up better in Vietnam's withering heat and humidity (they didn't), possess a sixth sense for reading terrain and weather, and exhibit a clannish preference for being with their own kind. Such beliefs were not always unfounded. On the recoilless rifle, Charlie Earl Bodiford, a Marine who grew up in Selma, Alabama, probably was as facile in his own way as Sergeant York was with his Springfield |03 - and at a much greater range.

By the final years of Vietnam, the South was undergoing such fundamental cultural, political and economic changes - changes fueled to a large extent by enormous military spending for the war - that the region's partisans began to fear it was in danger of losing its distinctiveness. University of North Carolina sociologist John Shelton Reed would lament that Atlanta was on the way to being "what a quarter of a million Southern soldiers died to prevent, in the Civil War. The cultural capital of the South was becoming a trendy, postmodern outlier of moral relativism. Implicit in Reed's quip was a justifiable fear that the South was not only threatened with losing its "Southernness" but with it such celebrated qualities as its sense of place, its sense of time, and, perhaps most important, its sense of honor.

In no other part of the United States does the concept of honor hold such a grip on the imagination. Americans do not talk about or believe in Western honor, New England honor, Midwestern honor - only Southern honor. The term retains a strong and altogether mythic connotation in the region to this day, but its roots lie deep in the ability of Southerners to temper triumph with noble defeat. When all else was lost in 1865, when the siren's dream of Confederate nationhood was stilled, the South's sense of honor remained. The Lost Cause passed into legend not in a fiery Wagnerian Goetterdammerung, or so the greatest of all Southern myths would insist, but by the Christian grace of Robert E. Lee and his fellow generals who fought courageously to the last, giving up their arms but never their honor. Thus could the soldiers of the magnificent Army of Northern Virginia walk away from the surrender at Appomattox with their heads not only held high, but, with an extraordinary recognition of their valor, a salute from U. S Grant's troops.

A century later another civil war far removed from the Virginia countryside would again test the South's sense of honor. A place whose name was unfamiliar to most Americans in 1961 - Vietnam - was destined to become this nation's most morally agonizing conflict since Edmund Ruffin touched off the first cannon to fire on Fort Sumter.

Since the late 1970s, an impressive and growing body of literature based on the experiences of Southerners in Vietnam has made its way into the national consciousness. By 1992, the corpus had reached a critical mass large enough to sustain both a meditative book-length study of Vietnam's literary relation to the South as well as a volume of probing interviews with American writers who found themselves bound up in a war that was not only unconventional but surreal.

In vietnam and the Southern Imagination, Owen W. Gilman, Jr., a professor of English at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, has expanded into a monograph part of his contribution on the South and the Vietnam war written for The Encyclopedia of Southern History. Gilman examines the work of fifteen Southern writers with actual or imaginative links to the war, ranging from James Webb (Fields of Fire) to James Dickey (Deliverance). In between are writers and poets of lesser fame like Barry Hannah, Bobbie Ann Mason, Clyde Edgerton, Gustav Hasford, David Huddle and Yusef Komunyakasa. These writers may not be as well known as Webb and Dickey, but their fiction and verse are fully charged with a creativity that Gilman, who can turn a provocative phrase himself, sees flowing from the South's 'sense of the abiding past."

With those words, Gilman bares the heart of his provocative argument: Southern writers have approached the ambiguity of Vietnam not only with the burden of the South's history on their shoulders but within the living context of that history. Their fiction and poetry is thus different - indeed, must be different - from that of non-Southern writers like Robert Stone and Tim O'Brien, whose novels deal with Vietnam themes in terms of present time. The Vietnam in Stone's Dog Soldiers, for example, is a steady-state war without beginning or end; the conflict seems to possess little or no historical context. Southern writers, on the other hand, inform their Vietnam fiction and poetry with what Gilman astutely identifies as a historical consciousness rising "out of a past that is both long and richly moving."

A skillful essayist, Gilman draws a memorable word picture of historical consciousness and its inescapable influence on Southern writers by asking the reader to imagine their works as a large, growing tree. At the top are many branches - the writers themselves in all their variety. The roots of the tree spread out, some plunging deep into Southern red clay, others shallow enough to crisscross the region's vibrant multicultural boundaries, yet all working toward a common purpose. The trunk of Gilman's tree represents history itself, a thick, tough conduit for transmitting to the branches above nutrients drawn from the very bosom of the earth. It is the same tree that grew the branches called Faulkner and Hasford, O'Connor and Webb.

Enveloped within history and time, Southern writers have taken a far more sanguine view of the loss of American hubris in Vietnam than their literary counterparts from other regions of the country. Gilman moves confidently through this difficult but little-discussed subtext in Southern fiction about the war. He concludes that for the South's writers, the experience of defeat in Vietnam was not as demoralizing as it was for the rest of the country - indeed it could not be, for the South already knows a great deal about losing a war. And it knows with the wisdom that only such an experience provides that to lose a war is not necessarily to lose one's honor. Southerners, perhaps more so than other Americans, can thus draw a much clearer and life-affirming distinction between a lost cause and the quality of their service to that cause. Even if the cause began in idealism and slowly devolved into a savage war of attrition in which the goal simply became killing enough of the enemy to make him stop fighting, as Vietnam did, that distinction could still be made.

It is a distinction that I see today in many fellow Southerners who fought in Vietnam. Even if they have come to disagree with the political and military dimensions of American intervention, these veterans hold so fiercely to their pride that former Army medic Ted Burton of Poor Valley, Tennessee, spoke for many of them when he said, "If I had it to do over, I'd go again." For others like Donald Lewis Whitfield, a machine gunner with the 82nd Airborne Division in the Mekong Delta, echoes of the bugle's call are all they have left. Whitfield lives alone in a weathered mobile home at "Fort Reagan," his two-thirds of an acre just outside Eutaw, Alabama. Whitfield, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, built an imposing bamboo fence around the perimeter of his personal firebase several years ago. It is a barrier that strangers violate at their own risk.

Despite his substantial and impressive analysis of the war's influence on Southern writers, Gilman exceeds the grasp of his argument in his final chapter, which is devoted to an engaging but ultimately unconvincing discussion of James Dickey's Deliverance. Gilman maintains that the descent of Dickey's urban protagonists into savagery and death in the North Georgia wilderness is an analogue for the American experience in Vietnam. Any direct similarity to the war will be difficult if not impossible for many of Gilman's readers to discern, for he cites no persuasive evidence that Dickey wrote his novel as an allegory of the war or intended it to be read as such. Gilman may well be correct in supposing that Deliverance 'smoldered in James Dickey's imagination through the most crucial and trying years of the Vietnam War," but a supposition is by no means proof of cause and effect. Perhaps a card-carrying deconstructionist can impart the horror of Vietnam combat unto Deliverance, but for most people Dickeys novel is, I suspect, nothing more than a splendid adventure yarn based on the familiar literary theme of a wilderness passage. Few readers are likely to transliterate the Cahulawassee River into the Mekong and the degenerate mountaineers who confront Lewis Medlock and his rafting party into Viet Cong.

Read as a complement to Gilman, Eric James Schroeder's Vietnam, We've All Been There: Interviews with American Writers moves effortlessly into a series of eleven probing interviews. Schroeder's subjects range from John Sack, whose M was among the first "grunt-level" narratives on the war, to David Rabe, a Vietnam veteran whose politically charged plays like The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Streamers earned critical acclaim in the 1970s. Gilman's discussion of the cultural themes in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country takes on a particularly poignant resonance after one reads Schroeder's conversation with her. Unlike Norman Mailer (also interviewed by Schroeder), Mason is a writer capable of crossing the psychological DMZ that separates so many Vietnam veterans from a society that remains deeply suspicious, even hostile, toward them. This ability to cross boundaries has also been mastered by journalist Wallace Terry, author of one of the few books on the black experience in Vietnam and another of Schroeder's subjects. Terry reported from Vietnam for Time magazine and collected some of his early material in the war zone. His resulting oral history, Bloods, would gestate eleven years before a publisher took a gamble on it - a period coincidentally as long as the American combat presence in Vietnam.

If one writer dominates Schroeder's book and admiration, however, that writer is Michael Herr. To this day, Herr's Dispatches remains the standard against which the literature of Vietnam must be measured, both in the book's unconventional approach to the war and in its enormous influence on journalism. Herr himself has seemed remarkably ambivalent about the success of Dispatches, which took six years to write and technically is a work of non-fiction. Or is it? Dispatches clearly breaks the "rules" of conventional journalism with its almost cavalier disdain for facts. Herr has even admitted that, like biographer Joe McGinnis in The Last Brother, he invented dialogue for Dispatches.

For journalists who tried to cover the war (and as Robert Stone correctly notes in his interview with Schroeder, virtually anybody calling himself a journalist could get accreditation in Vietnam), the Kafkaesque conflict constantly threw up moving shadows to hide the truth. David Halberstam, writing for the New York Times in the early 1960s, was among the first journalists to observe that the "facts" he was being fed by briefing officers in Saigon didn't square with what he knew was happening in the rice paddies and straw villages of the interior. By the time Herr and other writers went to the war in the latter years of the decade, the gap between such wishful reports and reality had become unbridgeable. Herr came to believe that the conflict had succeeded in neutering conventional journalism, a form too ossified to cope with what was both a war and an altered state of consciousness. In Schroeder's words, Herr recognized "the importance of facts but also their limitations."

Perhaps the best-known example of such a limitation occurred in the spring of 1969. JUSPAO, the big U. S. press office in Saigon, announced that an operation conducted by the Americal Division had netted 128 enemy bodies in I Corps. This "fact" was duly reported by the New York Times, CBS and other media shackled to what John Sack calls their Galilean credo of objectivity - it was, after all, information from an official source and thus by the rules of journalism had to be reported at face value. The Americal Division operation, as later events would reveal, was actually the My Lai massacre in which more than two hundred civilians were gunned down by frustrated American troops. Even if the briefers at JUSPAO's notorious Five O'clock Follies" had their own doubts about the report from the Americal Division (128 dead was a suspiciously high body count) they too were working within a system that gushed forth such spurious "facts."

The writers in Vietnam: We've All Been There are obsessed with the poignant human dimensions of a conflict that was not one war, as Bill Tant told me, but rather a bunch of nasty little wars. Perhaps the cold fusion of history will someday merge the parallel worlds of Vietnam into one. Until then, as scholars like Owen Gilman, Jr., and Eric Schroeder seem to sense almost instinctively, the closest we can get to the killing fields that Jerry Wayne Boutwell and his fellow veterans revisit every night is through both the imagination and an imaginative breaking of the rules. Vietnam was that kind of war.