‘no More Boom Boom For Mamma-san’: Representations Of The Feminine In Literature Of The Vietnam War.

No more boom boom for that mamma-san the Marine said, that same, tired remark you heard every time the dead turned out to be women. It was so routine, I don t even think he even realised he said it

Herr, Michael. Despatches.[1]

Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it. It s always a woman. Usually, it s an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics. She ll explain that as a rule she hates war stories, she can t understand why people want to wallow in all in the blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad. Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What should I do, she ll say, is put it all behind me I ll picture Rat Kiley s face, his grief, and I ll think, You dumb cooze.

O Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried.[2]

The above quotes, taken from war literature that claim to truthfully represent the experience, from experience, of the Vietnam War, are indicative of the general manner in which women are portrayed in the literature of the war. Women are distinguished by their respective nationalities and are treated at once both in markedly different terms and fundamentally similar ones. Much like the dead Vietnamese woman, stripped and positioned with her legs open, in the extract from Herr s novel, the women in American literature from the Vietnam war are often absent (the dead Vietnamese woman is only present in the form of a photograph rather than having a physical presence within the plot), exist as objects for sexual objectification or abuse by the male soldiers and/or conduits through which the male soldiers assert and reassert their masculinity.

Geoffrey Smith notes of the Cold War era that directly preceded Vietnam, that the apparent nexus between the communist menace, disease, and illicit sexuality was strengthened by the concerted drive after the Second World War to re-establish conventional definitions of masculinity and femininity- especially the dominance of heterosexuality and what was to become known as the nuclear family . [3] This crisis in masculinity provides an important context for Vietnam, as the war in Vietnam, for America and its men, provided an opportunity to reassert heteronormative gender roles. One of the most obvious ways in which this desire to reassert masculinity manifests itself in the war and in the literature is through the treatment of women. Further, perhaps the most important way in which women feature in the literature of the war is as victims of rape and gang-rape by American soldiers.

As one of the very few explicit treatments of rape by American soldiers in American literature, Daniel Lang s Casualties of War has much to say about the act of rape in the Vietnam War, especially concerning the treatment of Vietnamese women and the crisis of masculinity that lies behind the desire to rape. [4] Lang s novel, originally a journalistic report for The New Yorker in 1969, tells the story of five US soldiers who kidnap a Vietnamese girl from a local village before a reconnaissance mission, take it in turns to rape her and then murder her. The novel, extrapolated from the firsthand account of PFC Robert M. Storeby, under the alias of PFC Sven Eriksson, is interesting not only in the manner in which the soldiers treat the women, but also the manner in which rape is seen as both a weapon of war and as a manner of violently asserting one s own heterosexual masculine dominance.

Prior to the raid, Sergeant Meserve tells his troops that they are going to get [a] woman for the purpose of boom-boom, or sexual intercourse, and at the end of the five days we would kill her . [5] The reasons he lists for doing so include a little R&R and that it would be good for the morale of the squad (p.11). Here, prior even to the capture of the woman, Meserve discusses her as a military tool, much like the brothels set up by the government in Vietnam, the sole purpose exist of which are to act as vessels to serve and reinforce the masculinity of the army and its men.

The selection of their victim is also indicative of a Genghis Khan mentality, in which the enemy s women are property of the conquering army. The rape of an enemy s women is an affirmation of victory, ownership and one s own masculinity. As Susan Brownmiller states in Against Our Will Men, Women and Rape, the body of a raped woman becomes a ceremonial battlefield, a parade ground for the victor s trooping of the colors. The act that is played out upon her is a message passed between men- vivid proof of victory for one and loss and defeat for the other .[6] The men of the squad do not consider, or perhaps choose to ignore, the humanity of these women, and instead see them as their property and a booty of war (p.231). This concept of booty of war is illustrated further not only by the fact that the men choose the prettiest of girls in the village, but also by the fact that they choose her because she has a gold tooth. Quite literally, the squad, in much the same manner as the myth of the heroic rapist that Brownmiller describes, have plundered the village for its riches, which they deem to be rightfully theirs, and leave without hesitation.

Further, the female body becomes a battleground and conduit through which men determine and characterise their own gendered identity. The body of the raped girl in Casualties of War exists not only as a statement of masculine superiority over one s enemy, as Brownmiller notes, as rape by a conquerer is compelling evidence of the conquered s status of masculine impotence (p.230), but also over one another. The act of raping the girl in Casualties of War acts as a homosocial bonding experience for the squad ( good for morale ), but also as a manner of asserting the brutish nature of one s masculinity. Eriksson, by choosing not to participate in the rape of Phan Thi Mao, not only calls into question his own masculine status, but also his own sexuality. In refusing to rape the girl, Eriksson opens himself up an attack on [his] manliness with Meserve calling him a queer and a chicken (p.32). As a further repercussion of the Cold War era politics, and the homogeneous concept of the nuclear family, homosexuality was feared and reviled by the American public, let alone banned by the American military. This reaction by Meserve to Eriksson s morality is indicative of a Cold War attitudes in which dualistic imagery put a new premium on hard masculine toughness and rendered anything less than that soft, timid, feminine, and as such a real or potential threat to the security of the nation .[7]

Conversely, to commit such a crime, at least in the eyes of Meserve, was to assert both one s own masculinity and the masculine dominance of his nation. After Meserve leaves the hootch , he is described, in a particularly, all-American, cowboy-esque fashion as shirtless and being a picture of swaggering irresistibility , whilst, after the fourth consecutive rape, Mao is described as weak and conquered (p.35). Here, Lang makes explicit the soldiers connections between the victory of the war and dominance, both sexual and otherwise, of its people. Whilst, as Brownmiller notes, the juxtaposition of fragile, small-boned Vietnamese women against tall, strong American men created an exaggerated masculine-feminine dynamic that lent itself readily to rape (p.100), the rape of women, in both Casualties of War and Despatches, also relates to, and implies, a desperate desire, itself still routed in a desire to affirm masculinity, to attain any form of feeling that feels like victory.

The depiction of rape in Despatches, unlike the one in Casualties of War, is much more ambiguous and implied, and is only mentioned once. Although it could be argued that this passage does not refer to rape at all, the suggestive positioning of her legs as raised stiffly in the air and the removal of her pyjamas suggest, if not rape, then a post-mortem humiliation that is itself inherently sexual. The soldiers calling each other rascal and joking about the picture draw attention not only to the light-hearted nature with which this ritual sexual humiliation was treated, but also the homo-social aspect of sexual violence amongst the soldiers (p.202). Further, the very act of photographing and distributing this image is itself a form of rape in itself. Although the soldiers are not physically raping the girl, the very act of taking the photograph and distributing it are acts of rape, and serve the same communal purposes amongst the soldiers. The sexual humiliation and objectification of this girl are both tools which bond and bind these men together, and earn them masculine statuses ( rascal ), but also, through Herr s placement of the image at the end of a long line of war trophies, demonstrate the manner in which objectification and sexual humiliation act as hollow signifiers of victory. Although similar to the Genghis-Khan-pillaging and raping of villages that Lang demonstrates in Casualties of War, there is an important distinction between the belief in a conquerer s right to the conquered s women and the seemingly hollow acts of machismo that Herr describes. Whilst Meserve s treatment of the girl was brutal, the photographs and necklaces made of ears, whilst undeniably borne of the same brutality, are somewhat naiver and more hopeful in tone, for whilst Meserve and the squads rape and murder of the girl suggests a firm belief in their victory, the photos and mementoes of victory that the soldiers carry and share act as kinds of amateur propaganda and temporary boosts of morale and masculinity. Even the joke no more boom-boom for mamma-san is described as the same, tired remark that has lost all sense of meaning through repetition ad infinitum.

It is here that the sexual objectification, abuse and humiliation of the woman becomes an act through which the soldiers construct a concept of masculinity. This redefinition of their masculine identity adheres to Butler s concept of gender as a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform . [8] In a collection of literature that is dominated by male accounts, and a war that seemingly focused upon a re-conceptualisation and reaffirmation of tradition gender norms, the role of Vietnamese women, at least in part, is as a vessel through which masculinity is defined. Women, aside from their physical appearances and brutally utilitarian purposes, are denied any sense of individuality- with the exception of Mao in Casualties of War, who is treated as victim and a character in her own right, as opposed to tertiary and subordinate female characters of Despatches and O Briens The Things They Carried.

However, Herr s descri ption of the Vietnamese woman in the photograph also draws attention to another important aspect of gender in the literature of the Vietnam War- the seeming initial inability to distinguish between genders. In Herr s descri ption of the photo, the dead body turned out to be a woman . Although only brief, Herr s wording is extremely suggestive of an American inability, or conscious ignorance, of biological signifiers of gender. Initially, until after closer inspection, the body is an androgynous, Vietnamese combatant, and it is only after her death that she becomes a female and subject to subsequent sexual humiliation and objectification. This suggestion, along with other indicators from Herr s account ( such as the soldier who responds It s easy, you just don t lead em so much when asked how he shoots women and children (p.34)), deepens the understanding of the depiction of Vietnamese women. Perhaps it is the case that the women in the novel are defined primarily not by gender, but by their nationality. Certainly, the first descri ption of Mao in Casualties of War describes her as Vietnamese and peasant before it describes her as a girl (p.10) and Herr describes the girl in the photograph as Viet Cong before he describes her as a girl , suggesting that whilst the American army was struggling to define itself as masculine and gendered before all else, the manner in which it saw its enemy was entirely different.

Brownmiller quotes Sergeant Scott Camil, describing the rape of a girl in Vietnam, saying It wasn t like they were humans They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay (p.113).Further, Brownmiller, prior to this quote, asserts that this sense of homogeneous nationality, of all citizens being a gook or Commie prior to being male or female is an underlying factor in the soldier s desire to rape. As she states, there were no fixed targets, no objectives, no highways to take- it was patrol and repatrol, search and destroy. Anything outside the perimeter of the base camp or the nearest government-controlled village was enemy territory, and all civilians were treated as enemy. It was so easy to rape on a squad level. (p.100). The Vietnamese women of the novels, and the war, then, are exactly that women defined primarily by their status as enemy and threat before they are defined by their status as women.

Perhaps more interestingly, Despatches and The Things They Carried are more notable for the peripheral nature of women, at least ostensibly, within their narratives. Despatches only mentions women, both American and Vietnamese, a handful of times, and although O Brien s imagined readers are women, the narratives that are geographically and temporally rooted in Vietnam are equally void of female presence. This narrative approach to war is evocative of Brownmiller s assertion that war provides men with the perfect psychologic backdrop to give vent to their contempt for women [and] confirms what they long suspect, that women are peripheral, irrelevant to the world that counts, passive spectators to the action in the centre ring . (p.25)

This reduction of women to the peripheries of the story, whilst emphasising masculinity through a disavowal of all feminine influences and input (sexual consent could be considered to fall within the category of feminine input), is also suggestive of a conscious repression of interactions with women. Gina Marie Weaver, writing on the lack of coverage of rape in American literature from Vietnam, suggests that the reduction of women to peripheral characters and the failure to interact with rape as an event in a war in which reports of rape have been widespread and in vast quantities since the war ended, suggests a conscious effort to repress and deliberately forget the horrors of Vietnam in order to allow the collective unconscious of America to heal. She describes the transformation of the image of Vietnam veterans, in the public sphere, from contemptible personalities to tragic heroes of war as indicative of an ideology of forgetting which includes a public redaction of all traces of rape.[9] Herr s novel, published two years after the end of the Vietnam War (and several years after some of the events), would seem to fit this hypothesis, as aside from the very subtle and guarded descri ption already examined, the novel, whilst detailing many other atrocities in detail, does not touch on rape at all. From a guerilla reporter involved on the front line and interacting as one of the soldiers, it is suspicious that Herr makes no mention of rape, and subsequently calls into question, if only a little, not only his integrity but also the book s purpose as both journalism and propaganda.

O Brien s interaction with rape and sexual violence is much more nuanced and is in direct accordance with Weaver s concept of forgetting . In the beginning of The Things They Carry, Jimmy Cross asks O Brien:

Make me out to be a good guy, huh? Brave and handsome and all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever. He hesitated for a second. And do me a favour. Don t mention anything about _____

No, I said I won t [10]

Whilst the redaction of this detail is ambiguous, it hints at an act of literally unspeakable horror whilst also formally playing with the concept of forgetting and of keeping secrets from the public. The play between the text and its meta-textuality, in which O Brien acts as the creator of the text that will deliberately redact certain pieces of information concerning Jimmy Cross is an exact embodiment of the manner in which, one may be permitted to assume, Herr treated the rumours or instances of rape which he witnessed or heard of.

However, O Brien s text is also interesting in both the manner with which it treats the American women as also peripheral to the action, but also intrinsic to the reception of it, and also because it is one of the few pieces of literature that addresses the role of women in Vietnam. Whilst Lorrie Smith has described The Things They Carried as a misogynist narrative of masculine homosocial behaviour , the manner in which women are represented in O Brien s work not only demonstrates a self-conscious and nuanced awareness of gender relations and the societal expectations of gender but demonstrates an attempt to use this knowledge and expectation to subvert and to challenge heterogeneous conceptions of gender binaries and the role of gender in war. [11]

Most obviously, the problematic figure of Mary Ann in Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong challenges and draws attention to the inherent inconsistencies of normative gender distinctions. Whilst Mary Ann arrives at the camp as an archetypal image of femininity, wearing a tight sweater and giving off a come-get-me energy alongside her terrific legs and complexion like strawberry ice cream (p.95), O Brien soon uses her to challenge not only the dominant conception in literature from Vietnam that women were a domesticating influence that was incompatible with the masculine demands of war, but also to challenge the concept that masculinity is inherently tied to men. Replete with the obvious phallic imagery of her holding an M16 and cutting her hair short as she grows to love the environment of war, the figure of Mary Ann challenges conceptions of masculinity and gender by becoming, undeniably, the most grossly masculine figure in the short story. Mary Ann, as Terry Martin and Margaret Stiner note, is not a feminist ideal, but she does challenge the homogeneity of gender representation, even if she also challenges the very humanity on which a more just, equitable and authentic sense of womanhood could be founded . [12] If nothing else, the character of Mary Ann questions not only the strict dichotomy between domesticated women that exist outside of the war and the men that exist within it, but also the flimsy fa ade of masculinity that the men of the war cling to.

The character of Mary Ann is also important in negotiating the misogyny of O Brien the character and the nuanced representation of gender expressed by O Brien the author. In Mary Ann, as well as Rat Kiley, O Brien dispels the idea that the war is a zone purely for men, and even goes so far as to have Rat Kiley observe You got these binders on about women. How gentle and peaceful they are. Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist attitude. (p.107). Through women, Pamela Smiley notes, O Brien de-genders war, constructs an ideal (feminine) reader, and redefines American masculinity. Smiley, goes further with her analysis of women, and argues that O Brien constructs women as intrinsic to the war, both as receivers of stories and as receptors of masculinity. Further, due to O Brien s insistence that [it] wasn t a war story. It was a love story , Smiley argues that the reason women are deliberately kept peripheral to the plot, on the whole, is to be found through a Gothic interpretation of the text. As in Gothic literature, the hero of the text discovers that the victimised women he has been ostracising for the duration of the text are not actually peripheral to his life, but the very centre of it. In the end, the misogyny of O Brien results in an absolute surrender to the very same feminine influence of the dumb cooze that he has been rebuffing, mocking and insulting throughout the text. This conclusion, whilst perhaps overlooking the problematic representation of Mary Ann, does also tie in nicely with the idea of deliberately ignoring the influence of women that occurs within Despatches and Casualties of War (although Lang s work does demonstrate the healing and peaceful qualities, devoid of misogyny, that Eriksson s wife possesses).

As such, the portrayal of women in The Things They Carried is the most nuanced, and perhaps accurate, of the three primary texts. Although Casualties of War is to be commended not only for the frankness of its prose and retelling (by both Lang and Eriksson) but also for its bold choice of subject matter, the representation of rape and women stems from an entirely masculine perspective. Women, aside from a few peripheral characters, never feature heavily in the narrative other than as spectres of guilt or transient, passing references, and as such, serve only as manners through which to examine masculinity. Likewise, the women in Dispatches, though even fewer in number physically and in reference, serve as spectres of home or trophies of war, and as such, equally, act as conduits, even if they are not raped or abused, through which masculinity is examined, judged and codified. However, the women in O Brien s depiction of the Vietnam are often physically and intrinsically part of the narratives, and if they are not, they are the intended subjects for the retelling. For O Brien, women are intrinsically, if not equally, a part of the war, whether Vietnamese or American, and this sense of inclusion makes his work a far more thorough and nuanced examination of Vietnam and its effects than the phallocentric approaches that the rest of American literature seems to take to the conflict.