Academic Manuscript
DISARMING MEMORIES:
JAPANESE, KOREAN, AND AMERICAN LITERATURE ON THE VIETNAM WAR
by Richard C. Kagan (1)

There is an ever-expanding library of American Vietnam War fiction by which Americans are trying to find a way to understand the War and go on. Novels such as Rumor of War,(2) Dispatches,(3) and The Things They Carried (4) chronicle the development of the American consciousness. As readers of this American literature on the Vietnam War well know, these accounts and confessions lead one into a complex psychological journey of initiation into , experience with, and survival from the war.

On the surface these novels and stories narrate the tale, catalog the props, populate the encounters, and provide, when well written, the dramatic tension. On a deeper level, however, like subterranean echoes, they press hard and deep on those human experiences which gnaw at the soul, which have no resolution, and which threaten never to let go. As we burrow into the complexity of these narratives we venture into the war's horror and fascination. In the writings of the most artful, the war becomes a story about death but with no meaning - only a feeling like an unwanted dream. And like a night filled with dreams of terror, we wake up in a place far, far away - our room, our home, into our new life. But we can never wake up completely.

Reading the American literature that the War produced forces us to re-pack our baggage of past terrors. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien catalogs in numbing detail the baggage American military personnel toted into battle. They carried letters, can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, two or three canteens of water. Some carried maps, radios, assault rifles. Others carried rabbit's feet, chess sets, and even unwanted infections and sores. O'Brien concludes with the obvious message: "the moral is that they would never be at a loss for things to carry" (O'Brien, p. 16). On their bodies they carried unbearable things, and inside they carried more.

O'Brien and his colleagues dramatize these burdens into a new reality. The way they shape and describe their experiences in Vietnam forces us to expand our own understandings and sensitivities about the reality of death, war, existence, and self. By reading and accepting their interpretations of their experiences, we are compelled not only to relive them, but to accept or dismiss the realities that they recount.

And here is the rub. Although these writers appear to be describing what they have seen and felt, what they have witnessed and experienced, what is unique and common, they all have a shared view which makes them very American. Their own interior and exterior baggage, their dreams and possessions are, at times, vastly different from Asian writers who have witnessed the War.

It is the thesis of this paper that the literature of the War, though often brilliant and insightful, has acted as an accessory to aims and goals of the American War in Vietnam. The literature has reflected our understandings of the "quagmire." Although the literature on the war attempts to humanize the meaning of the conflict, it actually maximizes the terror and reinforces the popular attitudes toward the War itself. Therapy is not the responsibility of literature. But good literature does have a responsibility to increase the reader's appreciation and understanding of shared external and internal experiences; daily lives and nightly journeys. It is the artist's ideas and interpretations of reality or subjectivity which produces literature. It is perhaps fitting to cite the Frenchman Paul Bourget who lived through the nadir of the French colonialization of Vietnam: "Ideas are to literature what light is to painting." The Americans, despite their skillfulness, lit up only that part of Vietnam which they understood. Their cultural baggage, when unpacked and worn, allowed them to discern and walk through a limited part of the War and of Vietnam. By looking at the Asian views of Vietnam, we can appreciate the War with new understandings and with a better awareness of the strengths and faults of our own domestic interpreters. By acknowledging the existence of a countervailing view of reality, we will be better able to obtain a greater sense of the meaningfulness of our own dreams and fears.

Our American writers have given us images of Vietnam that have been based on their experiences and knowledge, no matter how sparse, of Vietnam's history. Just as we have created an image of the Vietnamese and of Vietnamese history, the Asian writers have composed an image of the American and a history of America out of their experiences as an Asian and their participation in the Vietnam War. Their portrayals of America may be just as limited and as skewed as ours are of Vietnam. However, an understanding and comparison of their views with ours can result in a greater appreciation of how we continue to create realities which are sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict. And they may provide us with a synthesis that we can live with-one with less terror and with more understanding.

Japanese View: Sadness and Frustration

To borrow a trope from Tim O'Brien, let us begin by looking at the "things" the Asians carried. Takeshi Kaiko, a Japanese war correspondent who was briefly detained by the Viet Cong, wrote several books on his experiences. What items did he carry? In his award winning book, Into A Black Sun6, Kaiko proudly declares that the items which gave him the best guide to interpreting the significance and outcome of the war were books! He has brought to the war zone the Western classics that he had studied at Osaka City University. They included Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Saul Bellow's Henderson The Rain King, Feodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. These books become dominating signifiers for understanding wars of colonialism and self-destructive political drama. In the same way that a few films or books create our stereotypes about Asia, the Asians developed their images of us from a few, mostly American, narrowly selected works. However, what is striking is that the writers we will discuss had read the very best of American and Western literature to unravel the mysteries of America's actions. Their take on America was much more revealing and helpful than our readings on their culture because we relied on works about Asia which were irrelevant, at best, and deceitful, at worst6. The very title of Philip Caputo's book, A Rumor of War, suggests that there really wasn't a war at all. It was the figment of the imagination of Americans who traveled to the far ends of the world and returned with fantastic stories and contrived memories.

Kaiko, who was in Vietnam from 1964-66, ruminates throughout Into A Black Sun on the Connecticut Yankee because of the parallels he sees between the modern-day technocrat visiting an Arthurian England which he ultimately destroys through his technological and political reforms, and the American military industrial complex rescuing South Vietnam, but also in the same way, destroying it. His book was published in Japanese in 1968, five years after the death of Kennedy and the demise of America's self-annointed modern Camelot. For his Japanese audience, he spends many pages summarizing the self-destructive tragedy in Twain's novel. He then concludes in his own words:

American, French, English, Japanese, the left, the unaligned, and the Right: from almost every conceivable angle, people have written about the United States, its foreign policy in Asia, its military policy, and I had read many of them and been impressed. Yet none had the devastating reach of Twain's fantasy. I found all my answers in this book. The Americans were spending astronomical amounts here, perhaps as much as six million dollars a day; and yet we'd known the outcome all along, from a novel written seventy-five years ago (Kaiko, p. 46).

Kaiko's rational response to Twain's story certainly derives from his own experience while living as a young man under the rule of Japan's wartime regime in the second world war. The Japanese then believed that they could use their superior civilization to modernize the Asian masses. This wild belief in themselves and their advanced technology resulted in their military and spiritual defeat in World War II. A world order based on technical superiority was seen by many Japanese writers as an enemy of the human spirit.

Kaiko compares the futility of America's strategy to burn Tokyo, Osaka and other cities to the ground with the policy of free fire zones in the Vietnam countryside. Both policies are viewed as savage and basically useless. Although he does not analyze the fire bombing of Tokyo, he was most likely aware that the bombs destroyed the poor neighborhoods and basically left in tact the residences and offices of the ruling elite. In the same way, our bombing destroyed the peasants and villages of Vietnam while re-enforcing the security of the corrupt and powerful elite in the main cities.

Whereas the Yankee from Connecticut represents America's rational prioritization of technology as the main mark of progress and civilization, Melville's Ahab and Bellow's Henderson represent the American personality itself. The American soldiers are "a strange, obsessive species, driven to fill their tormented souls with purpose and action" (Kaiko, p. 165). Under this "Black Sun" Americans are incomplete, despite the enormous weight of their own baggage filled with tools. In Kaiko's depiction they are like souls in hell mistakenly substituting theory and motion for meaning and substance.

Macbeth and Henderson The Rain King implant the Woods of Elsinore and the American fetish with wilderness and the primeval into the jungles of Vietnam. The American soldiers feel trapped by a landscape that seems to surround them, defeat them, and predict their ultimate annihilation. The Americans feel that they are, in the words of General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire bombings of Japanese cities, close to the "Stone Age." The pull of Vietnam's black hole of history plunges the soldier deeper and deeper into darkness- an archaic civilization, mountain tribes whose members are black skinned yet covered with tatoos, and a culture which is enigmatic. This experience is America's "Heart of Darkness."

Kaiko relates to us that he spent his nights reading The Idiot. One is reminded of Robert Mason, the author of Chickenhawk who describes a grunt in the Air Cavalry reading Bernard Fall's superb account of the French disaster in Vietnam. On account of his bookishness, he is criticized and made fun of by his colleagues. Other than this one American soldier who is trying to read about the meaning of the war, there appears no other American serviceman absorbed in literary pursuits in the war zone. In his list of things that were carried, O'Brien makes no mention of any classics or analytical works on the war.

We can just imagine how the Americans thought of Kaiko when he was reading The Idiot. Kaiko associates Dostoyevsky's hero-- who is consumed by thoughts of redemption and sin, and who is obsessed with the painful dilemmas of the human condition-- with the American G.I. Whether reading Bernard Fall or Feodor Dostoyevsky, one can predict that the American foray into Vietnam will be doomed-either because of strategic error or psychological failure.

Kaiko carries all of these books into the final battle or Apocalypse which ends his own narrative. Clutching onto the books throughout the ensuing deadly fire fight, where the trees seem to participate in an ambush of the Americans, he feels that the novels are "a fragment" of his own self. As he is running in a mad dash retreat, he gives a final account or summary of his readings: he confides to us in his parting words that his interest in The Idiot was nothing more than his own pride, his own attempt to understand war and death.

And in pride's place a fleeting freedom came, and I relaxed, and soft waves warmly lapped around me, untangling nerves, like death's sweet lure that had touched me with its wing, a deep, inviting purity. I flung my book bag away and, open-mouthed, ran on; and with me moved a herd of soldiers, like homing cattle without a herdsman or a dog . . . And tumbling from the hot, black belly of the whale into its bowels, I ran on, panting gasping, through the vast, hairy, primeval night (Kaiko, p. 214).

Stripped of all pretense, of all morality, of all civilization, Kaiko nonetheless survives, physically. And it is with his physical senses that he realizes how different he is from the Americans. It is not just in the literary and thus spiritual realm that he discovers the nature of the American. Kaiko's first encounter with Americans was with a bucolic Minnesotan named Captain Wain. This looming officer was advising the Vietnamese forces in 1964. Kaiko is fascinated with Wain's corporeal existence:

[I] used to feel awed whenever I saw a brawny American coming toward me, breasting a wave of slow air; but now that awe was gone. Once the vitality, whether yellow or white, has drained out through a hole only slightly larger than the diameter of a fountain pen, what remains is little more than a collapsed bag, a jellyfish washed ashore. The captain's intestines, too, were kept from spilling only by a fragile membrane over a trellis of bone. Looking at him I thought of the thousands of hamburgers, tens of thousands of Cokes, that had been consumed to form this body; it intrigued me to imagine how far they would stretch put end to end" (Kaiko, pp. 8-9).

This discussion of food is not just about Captain Wain's quantity of consumption. For the Japanese, eating food is a ritual. Food is to be as pleasing to the eye as to the palate. It is to be enjoyed in physically pleasant surroundings, and in a physically pleasing way. Vastly more than fuel to carry one through the day, it is sacred, symbolic, fulfilling. American fast food, in contrast, saturated in salt, grease, and sugar, is drawn from limited menus served up in identical food shops. In these restaurants for transients, eating is essentially a quick fix which is best when it takes as little out of you as possible in terms of time, money, and personal investment. Kaiko's meditation on the captain's gastrointestinal tract is about an organism fed by a daily schedule of ingestion that has become routinized and sterile rather than ritualized and fertile. Perhaps, this is the sort of life form which would blunder thoughtlessly into Vietnam .

Kaiko also relied on his senses. For Tim O'Brien, the "true war story makes the stomach believe." But for Kaiko, the nose brought one closer to reality.

If I want to write about anything, it'll be about smells. I want to write about the different smells around us. The essence of any object is its smells. . . the interpretation of man's purpose changes with time. Smells don't. Sweet papaya doesn't smell of anything much, but its odor doesn't die out, and it doesn't change. I want to write about smells that don't fade (Kaiko, pp. 75-76).

Throughout Kaiko's description of Vietnam, we are exposed to the juxtaposition of contradictory smells and textures. The atmosphere is constantly changing. The Americans are befouling the powerful scents of Spring with their engines of war. But they do not destroy the essence of Vietnam.

The [Mekong River in Saigon] was periodically lit by flares; the date palms and the water glinted; but the boulevard was bright, decorated with long, horizontal banners reading 'Tet, Tet, Tet,' strung out between trees. . . The air one breathed was oxygen, nitrogen, and Tet. . . Chrysanthemums, narcissus, peach and plum blossoms, rose, carnations, hibiscus: a mass of flowers from the temperate and tropical zones were displayed in oil drums. The tropics are fecund and bountiful; but they're remorseless in their abundance, indifferent to the glut of honey, the ooze of putrification" (Kaiko, pp. 54-5).

Compare and contrast this glorification of all of Saigon's smells with the disdainful description by Michael Herr in his novel, Dispatches:

Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower . . . Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like a toxin, Shit, Piss and corruption. Paved swamp, hot mushy winds that never cleaned anything away, heavy thermal seal over the atmosphere of diesel fuel, mildew garbage, and excrement" (Herr, p. 43).

No wonder the war was perceived so differently by the Americans and the Asians. Even in something as vital as smell, they experienced only the deep differences that they carried within their own senses. But, for the American writer, this "difference" was abnormal; like the culture and fauna of Vietnam.

Just as the same smells were transfigured into different perceptions, common children's games reflected different habits of competition and strength for the two sides in the war. Games like American checkers and Vietnamese chess appeared to be simple repetition and interaction of pieces on a board. Child's play. For example, when Tim O'Brien's characters , Norman and Henry, played checkers: "There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring. There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. . . . there was a winner and a loser. There were rules" (O'Brien, p. 36).

However, when Kaiko played Chinese chess with the Vietnamese, they used their own rules rather than the ones with which he was familiar. He suddenly felt like the Americans who thought they were all playing by the same rules but were not. Kaiko describes his consternation. He was "slaughtered every time: sieges were broken; lines of retreat were blocked; broadsides were smashed; and last-ditch schemes of ambush were immediately seen through" (Kaiko, p.6). To change the rules of a child's game, even slightly, will bewilder the uninformed player. What grander confusion will be caused by changing the rules of warfare? His final flight through the forest seemed a replay of many of his unfortunate chess games with his Vietnamese competitors.

Women and the way they are portrayed in stories of war are indicative of societal and moral values. In American literature on the war, the young prostitute or pretty pubescent girl is brought to the reader's mind. From Graham Greene's Quiet American7 where the Americans in a bar are hustling women, to Rumor of War, which has women portrayed as only pleasure for purchase, the authors disregard any narrative that discusses deep relationships between American military and Vietnamese women. The women are seen primarily as service providers and quick comfort dispensers.

In Kaiko's book there are two narratives dealing with women. In both cases the women are older-one has a child, and one is fifty with wrinkled skin. Kaiko forms an intimate and loving relationship with a prostitute. Her son has dragged Kaiko to the first meeting. Throughout the book he tells of his meetings with her and the nature of his relationship. Later, Kaiko actually gets jealous when she has a trick with another man.

Kaiko's friend, Yasuda, compares older women to young girls. He finds the former to be more needy of love, more grateful in finding a sensuous mate, and more willing to be a partner in the relationship. Yasuda is contemptuous of American soldiers who favor Vietnamese virgins or childish girls. The Americans are not blamed for being immoral but for being superficial.

For both Kaiko and Yasuda, these older women are how they learn about Vietnam, about the war, and about Vietnamese. The women are the cultural medium through which these Japanese come to understand the war. These sexual and familial interludes portray a Vietnam never mentioned by American writers. It is a Vietnam where the war is peripheral; where streets are not just vectors for bombing raids but are places where people live, fix meals, make love, and talk about the future.

In none of the major pieces of American literature that I have reviewed is there any discussion of the principles of Buddhism or the role of the Buddhists in the war. Here again, Kaiko spends many pages of text taking us to a Buddhist temple where he talks to the Buddhists about their ideas of the war and their hopes for peace. This section is very endearing because it is so naive. Kaiko and the reader leave the temple feeling helpless to stop the coming apocalypse. To the Buddhists, there is no way to understand the rationale for this war. Their voices were not heard and their tales not told by either our government or our writers.

Kaiko's response to the war is based on his experiences as a Japanese who grew up during World War Two, and as an observer of America's occupation of Japan. His recollections of the past form the basis for his sense of helplessness in face of the cruelty of the war. He understands war. He and his family were the objects of the American attack on Japan. For him, war is not a phantasy to be spun out in dreams.

The Americans do not look to history for an explanation of the war. They cannot find memories of the war that have any meaning. O'Brien's celebrated essay entitled "How to Tell a True War Story" concludes with a justification for ignoring the experience of the War itself. "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and there it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true" (O'Brien, The Things They Carried, p. 88). The stories became a substitute for a concrete memory of the war.

Korean Views: Criticism

The Korean writer, Ahn Junghyo, shares much of Kaiko's knowledge of America and is also well-read in Western classics. He is a prolific writer and translator of American literature. He has written a novel on the Korean War, The Silver Stallion8, which looks at the war through the eyes of children and the experiences of the Korean prostitutes. The subtext of his tale about the war is the crumbling of tradition, the breakup of families, and the overwhelming destruction of Korea by the major military adversaries in the conflict.

In his novel on the Vietnam War, White Badge9, he makes a direct connection between the Korean war and the war against the North Vietnamese. The English title for Ahn's novel, published in 1989, was titled White Badge. Its original Korean title was called White War. The original title reflects Ahn's real feelings about the war. Unlike Kaiko, he blames the Americans and their Korean allies for devastating the lives and countryside of Vietnam.

Ahn had been a child during the Korean War. During the Vietnam War he was one of the 65,000 Korean soldiers who had been sent to Vietnam to fight with the Americans. In his search for international support President Johnson had created the "More Flags" campaign to entice foreign governments to provide troops, personnel, supplies, and various forms of support. Korea was paid generously for the dispatch of its troops. While in Vietnam they were segregated from the other armed forces and were despatched to war zones that were remote and extremely dangerous. There was little oversight of their activities by the American Armed Forces or justice system.

The Korean troops were even more isolated than the Americans. They had no knowledge of the operative languages-Vietnamese, French, English. And they were under the warlord-like rule of their officers. Much of their activities are still submerged under the terms of government secrecy, military pride, personal humiliation and guilt. For instance, it is still not publicly acknowledged by the Seoul authorities that 8,000 to 15,000 Korean-Vietnamese orphans exist in Vietnam-primarily in Saigon. Some Koreans in Vietnam, primarily civilian personnel who rendered support services to the Army, and some military staff in general headquarters in Saigon married Vietnamese women and brought them back to Korea. Many of these women could not stand Korean culture and returned to their homeland. When Ahn filmed his novel in Vietnam, he unexpectedly found that there were Vietnamese who could interpret for his film crew.

Ostensibly about the Korean warriors in Vietnam, the movie leads us through the growing sense of alienation, of claustrophobia, and of brutalization from their own leaders and the Vietnamese enemy. The movie also reflects much of the styles and themes of American movie culture: in one scene the main protagonist of the film is walking through a darkened Seoul. We barely see a movie poster on the wall of a building advertising "The Deer Hunter." The message is that the Koreans are merely following in the tragic footsteps of the American youth who destroyed their lives in Vietnam.

In terms of describing the young conscriptees, Ahn seems to echo Tim O'Brien's litany of the things that the soldiers carried. O'Brien's description of the young soldiers arrival in Vietnam mentioned that they carried memories of the "dented relics of [their father's] history10. For Ahn, the war is also a "dented relic." But there is little , if any, reference to one's private home or upbringing. Whereas the Americans write about individual suffering and "meaning", Kaiko and Ahn concentrate on the universal principles and the historical links. The "dent" is not familial but historical. It is South Korea's trauma in the Korean War. Ahn's own experiences in Vietnam remind him of Korea's civil war between 1950-53, and the ambiguities of playing invader/liberator like the Americans did in Korea11.

The movie ends with a dramatic panorama that synchronizes General Chun Tu-hwan's massacres of Vietnamese while he led the Tiger Division in Vietnam, with President Chun Tu-hwan's massacre of students in Kwangju a decade later when he organized the suppression of a democracy movement in Korea.

Like Kaiko, Ahn carries books and quotations with him. He even cites Macbeth. In addition he gives the reader of his novel a reprise of Huck Finn, as well as Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea. Both Kaiko and Ahn acknowledge the lessons of Western literature in their pursuit of trying to explain the meaning of the war. Ahn expands the repetorie to include classical works in Chinese which repeat the conclusion that a tragedy occurs when one does not understand the forces of nature or of culture.

Although there is no direct reference to Twain's Connecticut Yankee, Ahn shares Kaiko's disdain for America's technological arrogance and idolatry. Most American writers are in awe of our mechanical superiority. Robert Mason spends many pages just introducing us to how the helicopter works, and praising the power of their weapons. O'Brien prettifies the red tracer bullets from the Huey helicopters comparing them to bright red ribbons. This metaphor suggests dress-up, partying, the joy of a festival.

Ahn regards this technical power as a sign of moral weakness at best, and physical illness at worst. The performance of the Pentagon's military machines is described in scatological terms: "In the evening of the second day we heard the first combat sounds of burping machine guns and flying mortar shells. Like the bloody urine of an invisible giant, tracer bullets streaked down to the dark plain from a chopper hovering in the dark sky." (White Badge, p.93)

The weapons of destruction did not produce a sense of awe or power. In the hands of the Americans and Koreans, they were self-destructive. Ahn compares the power of animals to the "power" of human soldiers:

A cheetah chasing its prey with overwhelming concentration, a galloping horse, a bird skimming over the placid surface of a lake, the majestic submergence of a great big whale-animals at least possessed their own natural beauty. But we displayed only squalor, cunning and insanity in the jungle. The fight was without honor or dignity, without even masculinity-the base acts of a cowardly war. We simply murdered our own species in the most despicable, contemptible, dastardly way. Here even death was insulted (White Badge, p.261).

Ahn does not see a positive value in the mammoth size of the American soldier. He recognized that the Americans always viewed themselves as bigger, stronger, and more capable of enduring fierce combat. But this was hubris. The American was really a poor fighting machine. He was more like a water buffalo-a large lumbering target for the VietCong.

I pitied the American who was too big for this war fought by small people in small ways. Whenever I came across the Caucasian and Negroid soldiers who would fight and die for the Vietnamese but who were rarely welcomed or respected by this yellow-skinned dwarfish race, I felt I was watching the fall of a swaggering idol, a boastful giant who had never learned how to live outside his own world (White Badge, p. 154-55).

The historical significance of the war is made explicit in a fictional meeting between an old Vietnamese peasant and Ahn. The Korean forward military unit wants to evacuate a small village in order to stage a major assault against the communists. Because Ahn's alter ego/protagonist speaks French, he is delegated to negotiate with the elder. The local villagers do not want to leave their village and their fields. They experienced the same problems of resettlement with the French. As Ahn's character hears the village elder describe the past, he remembers his own history: Japanese colonialists removing Korean peasants from their land, and the U.S. Army forcing Koreans to flee from the approaching Korean Communist armies. He was committing the same crime against a fellow Asian. He was becoming an accomplice to a long line of imperialists and colonialists who were exploiting the land for their own economic and political success.

We can more fully understand the significance of this experience when we compare it to a similar incident in Robert Mason's Chickenhawk(5). There a French speaking American soldier approaches an old peasant. Because the American speaks French, the Vietnamese peasant believes that the French have returned. He is resigned to the fact. In the literary fingers of Mason, the American presumes that the war is hopeless and futile. The U.S. is no different from the French. It is time to go home. The American G.I. did not have any sense of association with the elderly Vietnamese. Indeed, it was just the opposite. He wanted to flee, to dissociate, to return to his own roots. Ahn finds a universal (or Asian) meaning; the American finds a personal (or parochial) meaning.

Korean Views: Hostility

Hwang Suk-young, author of The Shadow of Arms13, has written a powerful polemic against the Vietnam War. He sees little difference between the anti-imperialist struggles of North Korea and North Vietnam. His novel is fiercely anti-American. As a Korean marine, he served in Danang where he experienced the venality of the black market, and learned of many American atrocities. Because he had a desk job in a major city, he does not write of the Korean soldiers, nor does he mention their atrocities, Hwang regards the American war as merely an opportunity to exploit the resources of Vietnam. The only reason that President Johnson was able to obtain Korean soldiers was because he paid for them. President Johnson could count on the venality of Korea's leaders to take money in return for sending troops to the battlefields of Vietnam. After publishing this book in Korean in the late 1980's, Hwang further enraged the Seoul government by secretly traveling to North Korea. Upon his return he was arrested, and sentenced to a jail term of six years.

If Hwang has read any American literature, it is not apparent here. Indirectly he reveals a strong Marxist view of American capitalism and imperialism. Perhaps this view was deepened and enhanced by his experiences in Danang-the major entry point of the Americans to Vietnam. (Historically, Danang was the harbor that greeted the first westerners: the Portuguese, and the French. It was the landing site for the first Marines who hit the shore in March, 1965.) Danang had become the mother of all black markets. Everyone was involved: the Vietnamese from Saigon, the Viet-cong from their southern hideouts, the North Vietnamese and their spies from Hanoi; the Americans and their allies from around East Asia; the Thais, the Cambodians, the Filipinos; and any hustler who knew the ropes or was willing to pay.

Hwang's novel is an excellent "how-to" study of establishing or at least working with a Black Market. Even in the most academic American works, there is almost no discussion at all of this sordid pre-occupation for many servicemen, officials, revolutionaries, and just plain gangsters in Vietnam. Hwang's purpose is to reveal the larcenous nature of American capitalism and imperialism. In the words of one Korean black-marketeer, "There's no business greater than a war. Those Yankee bastards, they have all kinds of teams formed solely for economic operations, concentrating only on black market dealings. Those few crates of TV's and refrigerators we think of as loot as we carry them off are only drops of water in the ocean" (Hwang, p. 29).

Hwang has politicized his novel to the point that he does not blame the Koreans or the South Vietnamese for their brutality, or corruption. These activities are all caused by America's economic and cultural domination. Hwang repeats or fictionalizes many American atrocities-against Vietnamese, against women, against anyone who gets in the way.

His most vicious expression of anger at the Americans reveals itself in an AWOL incident. A young American named Stapley approached the Korean black marketeers who could get him safely from Danang to Saigon, from where he could secretly leave Vietnam for the safety and anonymity of a foreign port. He had gone to ground for several days. Hence his body smelled, his clothes were rumpled, and his few possessions were dirty and haphazardly packed. On the eve of his departure he told his Korean saviors: "If not for the war, I wouldn't mind living here in one of the seaside villages." To which the Korean in charge coldly responded: "Right, thanks to American tourists like you, before long this place will soon become a hell of a place to live. You'll turn round and round a few times [like a dog] and then end up back in your own country."

Later that night, the Koreans escorted Stapley to the drop-off point. He was disguised as a hippy tourist. He was to pass through a U.S. sentry gate in front of the docks and the ship that he would take to Saigon. Let Hwang finish the story:

Stapley walked] around with the American guards who seemed] to ask more questions. Then, suddenly, Stapley took off running toward the pier. They (the Koreans) could hear someone shout "Hey!" and what was distinctly audible even from where they were: "Come back! Halt! Halt!," then the sound of gunfire. {They} saw Stapley fall but could see nothing more. . . . (Hwang, p. 470ff).

The Koreans left the scene discreetly. One said, "Bad luck." The other "wanted to cry, not just for Stapley but also for himself. No tears, however, came out." The American war would kill anyone who could not successfully manipulate the rules.

The Viet-cong quickly learned how to use the perceptions of the G.I.'s to their own advantage. It was well known that the Americans hated the smell of fish sauce. This sauce was the major ingredient in much of Vietnamese cooking. Only soy sauce could compete with the desirability of fish sauce. According to Hwang's story, the Viet-cong smuggled American weapons in vats of fish sauce. The American inspectors did not want to become contaminated by opening up these large containers and searching through them. The weapons were wrapped in special bags and sunk or held in place in the fish mixture. It is not important if Hwang's tale is true or is only partially accurate. As in any autobiographical novel, or for that matter any writing at all, we do not know what is historically true or false. We do know, however, if what is written is believed and appealing to many readers. Hwang's anecdote about the fish sauce corresponds well to the perceptions of the Americans. The politicalization of this perception by means of a moral tale of the victory of the oppressed V.C. fighter may be of Hwang's creation. But it definitely is readily accepted by many Asian observers of the War.

Let us return to the beginning of this essay. What "things" did the Asians carry back to their homelands? And how were they different from the Americans?

Robert Mason's Chickenhawk concludes with his surprise that he ended up divorced and in jail in Florida for drug possession. He, like many other literary autobiographical tales, found that the Vietnam War drove him into a life-path that was destructive, and filled with grief and horror. The memories of the war constantly ran offensive raids on one's psyche, and drove one into unexpected despair and fear.

Kate Beaird Meyers deftly observed that the American narratives about the Vietnam War present their experiences in a series of fragments which "mimic or recreate the atmosphere of the war and the experience of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam."14Works by Tim O'Brien, and Michael Herr reflect the "frustration and confusion" that the combatants themselves experienced.15The reader is bounced around from narrative to descriptive, from flashbacks to the explosive immediacy of an ambush, from personal poetry to popular music, and from the danger of the threat of death to the induced euphoria of drugs and sex. Like the fragmentation grenade, the little deadly missiles of experience and memory flash through the brain in no particular order. No matter where you are when you return, you still feel the war like it is a fish bone caught in your throat.

Conclusion: History and Memory

Memories can possess a contradictory function. If they are treated in an ahistorical way, they can ritualize the past. Through the ritual of re-creating experiences of death, injury, hatreds, and fear they constitute freshly triggered emotional attacks on our consciousness. Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell A True War Story" epitomizes the ritualized memory of the war: "You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever...A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virture, nor suggest models of proper behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done" (O'Brien, pp. 76 & 83). The author constantly repeats the same themes, the same phantoms, the same meaningless noises that causes one to twist in their sleep.

If memories are treated in an historical way, they can disarm one's nemesis. Using history places one in the context of an event which is not repeatable. For the Asian writers, the memories of the war clarified, rather than fragmented, their own existence. Throughout their texts, there are running debates on history, political philosophy, and personal values. The purpose for these commentaries is to find a reason for the war. The American attempt to purify the memory by confusing it with reality, by claiming that it has no meaning, no ending, no context results in a utilitarian approach dictating that memory should be manipulated for the goal of therapy and art. The Asian writers stress that the Americans have neglected if not abandoned historical memory. They are like animals because they have no historical sense of time, causation, or consequences. They fail to read their own literature. And, of course, they do not read the literature of Asia - the American excesses in the fire bombing of Japan, the destruction of the Korean psyche in the Korean war, the consequences of French colonialism in Vietnam, and the hubris of the American soldiers and their government.

Memories of the war can disarm the psyche so that it cannot look at new reality without the shadows of the past, or it can disarm the experiences so that one can separate from the past in order to accept the future on its own terms. The Americans have yet to come to grips with the history of their involvement in their war in Asia. The Asian literature provides us with a working model that can help achieve a better understanding of how to include the other, and how to free oneself from the magnetic pull of a memory that controls one's future.

ENDNOTES