ASIAN AND HYBRID VIEWS OF THE VIETNAM WAR(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 Rumour 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 moral, 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, 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. 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 our appreciation and understanding of our external and internal experiences; our daily lives and our nightly journeys. It is our 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 value and relevance 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 person and of Vietnamese history, the Asian writers have composed an American and a history of America out of their experiences 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 without terror and with understanding.

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 Sun(5), 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 the University in Japan. 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 America's actions. 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 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.

Kaiko was in Vietnam from 1964-66, and his book , Into A Black Sun, was published in Japanese in 1968, five years after the death of Kennedy and the demise of America's self-anointed modern Camelot.

Throughout Into A Black Sun, Kaiko ruminates 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. For his Japanese audience, he spends many pages summarizing the self-destructive tragedy in Twain's novel. He then concludes in his own words:

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." 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 American's 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 Fall or 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.

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:

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.

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.

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

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.

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 here you stood. . . . there was a winner and a loser. There were rules."

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." 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 American(6) where the Americans in a bar are hustling women, to Rumour of War, which has women portrayed as only women 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 quicky 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 personal and philosophical. Because he is not an American he need not be encumbered by feelings of guilt, remorse, or despair. But he does feel that he has lost his own humanity. He feels helpless in face of the cruelty and meaningless of the war. Even though Japan had suffered defeat from and occupation by the United States, he feels no ill will toward the Americans. He likes them. He just feels saddened at the ignorance that they have, and the phantasies that they try to force on the Vietnamese in their anti-communist ideology.

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 Stallion(7), 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 Badge(8), he makes a direct connection between the Korean war and the war against the North Vietnamese. 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 300,000 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.

The English title for Ahn's novel, published in 1989, was titled White Badge. Its original Korean title was called White War. 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."

In terms of describing the young conscriptees, Ahn seems to echoe 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] history. (9) 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 Korea. (See Eckert, Carter J. Book review of White Badge in the Journal of Asian Studies, May, 1990, pp. 420-21; and Michael D. Shin's reviews of Silver Stallion and White Badge in the Journal of Asian Studies, p. 574.)

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 while 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.

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.

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:

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 poor fighting machine. He was more like a water buffalo-a large lumbering target for the VietCong.

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(10). 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.

Both Ahn and Kaiko are professional writers. Hwang Suk-young, author of The Shadow of Arms(11), 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 Portuguese, and the French. It was the landing site for the first Marines to 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." (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:

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 really 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.

Japanese and Korean writers are specifically "Asian." In addition, there is a hybrid group who are Asian and non-Asian. Two categories of this group are the Australians who fought in Vietnam, but who were not considered part of the non-Asian alliance against Vietnam. And a group of Japanese-Americans who were culturally American, but who were not seen as Americans when they appeared in the war in Vietnam. Both groups provide a dramatic perspective on the War. Their views are related to their geographical and racial backgrounds. Their hybridity makes them take views that are neither totally "Asian" nor "Western."

The most well known Australian author on wars in Asia is Christopher J. Koch. His novel, The Year of Living Dangerously(12), was unfortunately made into a movie made famous by the likes of Mel Gibson, Sigourny Weaver, and Linda Hunt. "Unfortunately," because the Hollywood superstars made the movie revolve around their own love affair and their own personal dramas-the genocidal policies of Sukarno against the Chinese population in Indonesia, and America's complicity in these crimes against humanity were drowned in the sea of emotions churning through Gibson and Weaver.

Koch has re-focused Australian literature on the war. Traditionally, Australia's war literature has described the resentment of Aussie soldiers fighting an American War, and obtaining no compensation or recognition. Or some of the literature has reflected a debased view of Asia-mocking Asian culture, commenting on the corruptness of Asian regimes, and regaling in the sexual and psychological pleasures of dominating a "yellow" race. Most of this literature is reflected in the self-denigrating and alienated comment by a character in Frank Moorhouse's The Americans, Baby:

"We have nothing of our own to do, I contemplate, nothing. We are culturally incapacitated and dependent. Everyone has known this in his heart and for some time. Actually we're Anglo-American. A composite mimic culture. Miserable shits."(13)

The traditional Australian writer is still in a trauma about his country's genesis-a continent settled by miscreants, criminals, and incompetent bureaucrats and officers of the peace. The progeny of this British detritus does not want to claim genealogical descent, nor can he or she establish legitimate claim to a native place. Thus, in the descriptive prose of John Sutherland, professor of modern English literature at University College, London: "Nowhere is home; everywhere is abroad. . . . [the Australians] are the planet's 'resident aliens.'"(14)

Koch willingly separated himself and his creations from the angst of identifying with the Anglo-Americans. The American wars in Asia ( the C.I.A.'s support of Sukarno in Indonesia), and Southeast Asia elicited an identification with the geographical, political, and cultural existence of the continent to the West. Rather than seeking to purify a soiled identity with the past, Koch chose to project an Australian identity into the future with Asia. Robin Gerster credits the commentator John Thieme with the observation that Koch "fictionalizes the 'remapping of the Australian psyche' that took place in the 1960s, which involved the 'orientation' (in the word's primary sense) of Australian eyes and attitudes away from Europe to Asia."(15)

Koch is a superb writer about wars in Southeast Asia. His protagonists are journalists who cover the wars and who become part of them. In Highways To A War(16), Koch pursues the life and death of a photographic-journalist Michael Langford. Although a novel, Koch provides a great sense of realism by relying on historical and journalistic accounts of the war. He acknowledges his intellectual debts to Kate Webb, who was a prisoner of the Viet Cong, and Joe Lee, a Korean-American cameraman in Cambodia.

Koch explains that his characters, Australian journalists, were born in the farthest reaches of the Australian continent-Tasmania. On their isolated ranches where they grew hops for wine, they read about Asia through the comic book series, "Terry and the Pirates." This macho and poorly concealed sexual story narrated how Terry fought pirates in East Asia, and how he handled Asian vixens and Western beauties.

The most common hero for the American G.I. was John Wayne. He made the first major, and very popular, pro-war movie about the Vietnam War. Totally oxymoronic, the film closes by showing a sun setting over Vietnam's coast-which faces East not West. But for the idol worshiper, John Wayne was a model to be emulated. He was the very embodiment of the American male-strong, decisive, desired by women but always distant and cold. One wanted to become a John Wayne. This could be done in any environment. The development of an attitude which had no commitments, except to itself, allowed John Wayne to act basically the same way in every environment.

Admirers of Terry and the Pirates were engaged in the mysterious settings that Terry visited. Terry, full of emotion, was tangling with a current Asian scenario filled with lives of intrigue, sex, mystery, struggle, and exuberance. Terry catapulted one into a world with exotic wonders. To live in his world was to live outside one's own limited culture and universe. It was to enter as a tourist or adventurer into a whole new theater of events. One did not want to become Terry, one wanted to have his adventures an Asian scenario that was rich in culture, foods, people, and excitement. To exist in Australia in the 1950's was to live "outsidehistory." (P.94) For Koch's characters, Australians were waiting to be awakened, to be truly part of history, to engage in some meaningful act--an "act" that could not be found in Australia no matter how one behaved.

To the young Australian boy, the goal was not to go out and fight and kill in a manly way, but to go out and become involved in a rich, exotic, and meaningful society. As soon as Langford arrives in Singapore, his first stop on his way to Vietnam, he writes in his diary: "The is the place I've always been waiting for. If there's any way to stay here, I'm going to do it." Earlier that day, during his taxi ride to his hotel, Koch's narrator tells us that : "Asia was disclosed to him for the first time, like a video show arranged for his pleasure." (pp.70-73)

This "video" revealed "a life of medieval simplicity;" festive crowds of many races-Chinese, Malay, Indian-eating, walking, hawking their wares in a charmed bubble separate from contemporary history and politics. One could find a worthwhile life here.

Langford becomes enamored with the smells of the vegetables, the "sound of naked feet" that mimicked the rattling noise of the big black pods in the spreading trees when the evening breeze floated in. After an unfulfilled relationship with a crippled Vietnamese girl, and after several years of covering the war in Vietnam, he lands in Cambodia where he meets Ly Keang, a beautiful youthful Khmer who tries to enlist him in the struggle against Pol Pot's forces. She has come to his room in the darkness of the early evening to ask for his support. In a dialogue which forms the central theme of the book, Ly Keang asks him:

"---Don't you . . . miss your home?"

"---Sometimes I do, I said. Sometimes I miss the coolness, and the peace. But Cambodia's my home now. I love it here."

"---She frowned and cocked her head, and her tone got serious and sharp. You love Cambodia? Why do you love Cambodia? How can you love Cambodia? A country not your own. Is that possible?

"---I told her that I'd felt like this from the first time I'd come here. It wasn't easy to say why: I felt I'd always been meant to come to Cambodia. I liked the countryside; I liked the Khmer people; I liked the army troops I spent my days with. We understand each other, I said.

"---That's because you're from a farm, she said. Here we'd call you a buffalo boy.

I laughed and so did she. For a moment we stood looking at each other, saying nothing. I had a sudden hollowing in the stomach: something that only happens to me nowadays in a firefight. Still she didn't say what she wanted. . . . " (pp.278-280)

Koch leads Langford into the arms of the North Vietnamese guerillas who capture him and two other journalists on the eastern frontier of Cambodia. For weeks they wander toward the northern boundary with North Vietnam. They argue with their captors about Marx, Lenin, Tom Paine, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Sartre. They respect their captors-especially their sense of revolutionary morality and commitment to their cause. During weeks of grueling marches, malnutrition, and malaria they slowly understand that the North Vietnamese will win the war. They share their captors' animosity and fear of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Cambodians under Pol Pot's authority who are no more than a vicious street gang. For Langford, this experience is the catalyst for joining up with the Lon Nol forces against the depredations of the communist insurgents. He has joined himself with the forces of a losing regime. And he, himself, disappears into the countryside. His body is never found.

At the end of the book, Koch magically, like Hamlet's final exit, transports Langford back to the fields in Tasmania.

"In a region of Dis beyond the Thai border, a row of crosses rises from the paddy field's red earth, in the motionless and terrible heat. I see flames reach up for him, like the heat's choking essence. But then there are other upright poles about him; and now he's somewhere else.

"Orderly wires stretch away, and hidden voices murmur among bright leaves. Walled and roofed by green, by a green light itself, he hangs in a blessed coolness: the underwater cool of the hoop glades.

"Home." (p.469)

The Australian is a cultural mermaid: trapped in a land surrounded by waters of the South Pacific, he is culturally a European, but in fact he can also identify himself as an Asian. Four of the five poems which grace Koch's book were sourced in Asia. The Australian feels outside of the two major worlds-the West and Asia. Thus, his creations find that they can live and die equally in two worlds-southeast Asia and Tasmania. Their perceptions of the war are attempts to find personal and historical linkage-a pursuit of their own identity. Langford's unknown grave lets him float between the two worlds. His free-floating identity could only be attached to reality when he committed himself to the war. The cause of his demise was that the war he fought for was totally separate from and opposed to the war that the Americans had brought to Asia. The Americans perpetuated a war which they could not and did not identify with. They found that the war destroyed their own identity. Most wanted to return home and salve their wounds or take out their anger on their own society. A few, like Stapley, wanted to settle in Vietnam. But for them it was a paper-mache background, a mise en scene, to act out their own cultural fantasies. For Koch and his characters, Southeast Asia provided them the place to escape and the place to become more human.

The conventional Australians who fought in the war felt equally unrequited and abused by the American presence. In the typical Aussie war story, the grunts arrive in Vietnam, where they feel the tension, experience the paranoia, and wonder why they are there. . They see their return to home in Australia as only temporary. They see themselves as the gladiators protecting Western civilization. They are not really accepted as part of the West. They are like the ancient Roman soldiers stationed in England and Ireland. They are the first wall of protection. But Rome is far off and not very caring. And after several years on the frontier, Rome does not really want them to return home. They are no longer civilized. The mission of the Australians is to protect America and Europe. It has nothing to do with giving them a better democracy, or a more fulfilling existence. Like the Koreans, they are mercenaries. Unlike the Koreans, they are Caucasian. They too are a hybrid.

There was another type of hybrid. Toshio Whelchel's From Pearl Harbor To Saigon: Japanese American Soldiers and the Vietnam War(17)

is the first, and perhaps the only, study of Americans of Japanese ancestry who fought in the war. Based on lengthy interviews with eleven veterans, Professor Whelchel allows us to observe the recollections of these hybrid warriors.

In general, these men were born in Japanese families that had been interred in the concentration camps during World War 2. Their families had come from California and eventually moved back to the Los Angeles area after the war to jobs of gardening or running small shops. As boys, most of them were not very academically oriented. They hung out with gangs and had alliances with Chicanos and Blacks. Some had a few years of City College education, but most ended up in the draft during 1968 and 69.

The Vietnam War had gone through different stages: after Tet in early 1968, it became exceptionally violent. New firepower, the Nixon/Kissinger strategy of increased destruction, and the increased financial support to the war created an American presence that was overpowering and almost beyond control. The anti-war movement also increased in intensity. The war was displayed on the TV to such a harrowing extent that the public became disillusioned. In the early 1970's, it was clear that we were going to withdraw. The morale of the soldiers collapsed. Many just wanted to get out, get home, and try to get past their experiences.

The Japanese American soldiers depicted in this study reflect the anger of this period. On the whole they describe experiences with drugs, women, and hostility to the American command. Because of their background, they are not eloquent or literary. They are also circumscribed by the sociological questions that frame their interview. Consequently, the reader does not get beyond an autobiographical account of the war.

Yet, there is a perception that is peculiarly a mixture of American and Asian.

Whereas many of these eleven interviewees had very little perception of themselves as "Asian" while they surfed the beaches in Santa Monica, or cruised the streets of Hollywood, or smoked dope with their friends, they realized their "race" with a vivid shock when they arrived in Vietnam.

If they were out of uniform they were mistaken by the American military for Vietnamese or the enemy 'gook.' "If I could be mistaken for a Vietnamese, then I could be a gook; in the eyes of many Americans, I was already a gook! That really came home with me, that uneasy feeling, that sense that something was wrong, that there was a distortion." (p.43)

Others moved from a sense of personal threat, to a political analysis of the war. "That this was a war against Asians and my being Japanese, I always had the fear of getting shot by an American." (p.109) Or in the voice of another veteran, "As far as being Asian, I think the hardest part of the war was not so much any particular incident or experience but the knowledge of a latent racist activity going on all around me on a day-by-day basis. Every time I saw some drunk GI kick a Vietnamese girl, it reminded me that the GI was kicking her because she was Asian, a gook; if she were white, the GI would not be doing that. (p.165)

The prejudice was more than just the ugly treatment of the Vietnamese. Sometimes it was staged on purpose. "I was walking down this road after chow-all of a sudden I felt something on my leg. It's a fucking monkey on a leash about thirty yards long, leading to a white dude leaning up against the hooch of the guys going out. This motherfucker had a monkey trained to attack Asians!" (p.163)

All of these veterans had been brought up in a Buddhist religious atmosphere. Many had just ignored it while in California. But coming to Vietnam gave them a sense of association and identity that they had not developed before. They sought out Buddhist temples and had discussions with Buddhist friends. They realized a commonality beyond race, or language. As one put it, "Being a Buddhist American Marine was really unusual in Vietnam." (p. 42)

The Japanese Americans sought out social activities and friendships with non-Caucasian soldiers or civilians. Many found friends with the Thai troops, the Montagnard tribesmen, or with Vietnamese civilians.

Many actually took advantage of their Asian identity to manipulate their environment for their own enjoyment.

"When I lived in Saigon, I would stay out all night at the bars and clubs because I looked Asian. After work I'd change into civilian clothes; none of the American military police could tell the difference between a Japanese American GI and the local Vietnamese. The nightly curfew in Saigon was ten o'clock for regular military personnel. Officially, we were not allowed to wear civilian clothes into Saigon; on base we could wear civilian clothes but not off base. At that time there were a lot of American civilians working Saigon and they were out until the early morning hours. . .

"I was in hog heaven. I thought to myself, "Why give this up now?" Saigon had a great nightlife seven days a week. I usually went back to my apartment around 2 a.m. . . .The period of 10 p.m. to midnight was nice because the American GI's had all returned to base but the nightclubs were still going strong." (p. 139)

Many of these interviewees come close to bragging about their involvement in the black market, money laundering, drug deals, and other illegal financial operations. Unlike Hwang who found these activities as an engine of American imperialism, the Japanese Americans reveled in their freedom to become a middle-man minority which could buy from the Vietnamese and supply to the Americans. They could pass between the two racial and economic worlds with pride and a sense of superior accomplishment.

In sum, the Japanese Americans dominant perceptions toward the war was that is was a racist struggle. It was clear to them that the American GI's had absolutely no concern for the Vietnamese. In one particular case, the officer in charge sent the Japanese American medic out on a dangerous patrol without sufficient backup(18), thus endangering his life. In other cases, there was actual physical violence as a result of racist taunts. The Japanese Americans realized that without the protective covering of their military identification, they would have been treated just a recklessly by the Americans as the American GI's treated all Vietnamese. Although African American troops concluded that the war was racist, they did not, on the whole, draw this conclusion in terms of American relationships with their Asian allies. The African Americans observed their differences in treatment when they were on the front lines in Vietnam with when they were in the ghettos of America. The Japanese American soldiers realized that this war could easily be against them. The result was that the Japanese Americans in this study returned to America with a new consciousness, a new seriousness, and a commitment to working with their own community and other minorities.

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."(19) Works by Tim O'Brien, and Michael Herr reflect the "frustration and confusion" that the combatants themselves experienced.(20) The 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.

The Asian and hybrid Asian literature on the war is in many ways less personal and less fragmented. The Vietnam War was a catalyst for seeking and reconsidering one's own national identity and the connection to one's history. They saw the war as a way to find the long way home. It clarified, rather than fragmented, their own existence. Kaiko stayed in Vietnam to write more novels and short stories. Ahn returned to Vietnam to make a movie and eventually to become a voice against the tyranny of the American supported South Korean military governments. Hwang continued to praise the revolution in Asia. Koch writes about the history of Australia, its uneasy liaison between England and Asia, and its new-found source of identity to the east. And the Japanese Americans returned to school, and are now working within their own communities and with other minority groups. They have found, not lost, a new identity.

In sum, the Asian literature is either more political, or more historical. It is not looking for a personal catharsis nor a reason for the war. It is clear to them that the war was not their responsibility and that America was just inheriting the futile task that led the Chinese, French, and Japanese imperialists into Indochina. For all them, the question is not "why" they were there, but how to avoid anymore "Highways to War."

ENDNOTES

1. I am restricting this article to literary works from Japan, Korea, Australia, and Japanese Americans. There has been prodigious studies of works by Vietnamese (both North and South), and by Vietnamese refugees or boat people. I am attempting to analyze the participants and observers who have an Asian background to find what they have learned about the war, and how it can help us understand the war better. The following writers are representative of the critical views of the war. They are by now means the only voices on the Vietnam War. They do not represent the military or pro-American viewpoints. They include, Japanese, Korean, Australian, and Japanese American writers.

2. Caputo, Philip. Rumours of War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.

3. Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

4. '

5. Kaiko, Takeshi. Into A Black Sun.

6. Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Originally published by Oxford: Heinemann, 1955.

7. Ahn, Junghyo. The Silver Stallion. New York: Soho Press, 1990.

8. Ahn, Junghyo. White Badge. NY: Soho Press, 1989.

9. If I Die In A Combat Zone: Box Me Up And Ship Me Home. Delacorte Press, 1973, p. 12.

10. Mason, Robert. Chickenhawk. New York: Viking Press, 1983.

11. Hwang Suk-young. The Shadow of Arms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

12. Koch, Christopher J. The Year of Living Dangerously. N,.Y.: Penguin Press. 1995, 1978.

13. Cited in Peter Pierce, "Australian and American literature of the Vietnam War," in Vietnam Days. Australia and the Impact of Vietnam: A Bold Reassessment of the Myths, History, and Culture of Australia's Longest War. Edited by Peter Pierce, Jeffrey Grey, Jeff Doyle. Middlesex, England, Penguin Books, 1991. P. 239.

14. A review of Murray Bail's Homesickness. New York Times Book Review. November 14, 1999, p. 9.

15. "Occidental tourists: the 'Ugly Australian' in Vietnam War narrative," in Vietman Days. p. 202

16. Koch, Christopher J. Highways to A War. New York: Penguin, 1995.

17. Whelchel, Toshio. From Pearl Harbor to Saigon: Japanese American Soldiers and the Vietnam War. London: Verso, 1999.

18.

19. "Fragmentary Mosaics: Vietnam War 'Histories' and Postmodern Epistemology." Genre, #21 (Winter); 535-52. Cited in Leslie Kennedy Adams, "Fragmentation in American and Vietnamese War Fiction," in America's Wars in Asia: A Cultural approach to History and Memory, edited by Philip West, Steven I. Levine, and Jackie Hiltz. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. p.84.

20. See remarks by Leslie Kennedy Adams, Ibid. p.84.