Nancy's Project

Oh cease! Must hate and death return?

Cease! Must men kill and die?

-P.B. Shelley-

I remember in the girl’s tears, as she led us through the site of so many deaths, imagining the faces turning to my own glazed eyes, bright only in the curiosity they hold for me. When will she cry? I am crying already. Looking down at my feet, I see the jagged edge of a wrinkled, poorly worn black skirt. Quickly my mind asks, “Why am I wearing this?” I don’t know where to position myself; I can’t remember where I sat, affixed somewhere about my parents and two closest friends. This delicate girl is before us; she must know what she wears, so neatly put together. My eyes, also dull, are latched onto the big black button centered on her chest. “She has done this so many times,” I repeat to myself, in a flustered attempt to justify her composure. How does she cry with such grace, such order? Her time with death has allowed this calmness, this serenity. His face is before my own as I wander, for the second time now, through this earthly representation of death. I will accept nothing of his death (if he is dead); I will let him trample through my days as always. She makes tea for us, graciously. I fabricate idealistic tales of her appreciation to see Americans in her town, learning from their country’s mistakes. Why are these particularized deaths so sad? Everyone about me twists and turns, disturbed greatly by the pictures of women and children dead. In all presentations they seem to be the dead amongst random bodies of men; men stripped of their masculinity whose deaths thus slip by less noticed.

Are we, walking about this winding memorial, setting standards for sorrow?

As I am unable to adequately position death myself, finding a common place to compare the American and Vietnamese perceptions of death grew increasingly difficult. I have decided to focus this search on the issues upon which the perceptions of death held by these once warring states merge together. The common determination of the artists from both states to attempt an understanding of such a broad phenomenon suggests a potential for this pervasive, compassionate element within humans. The overlapping area created by the intersection of the arts of these two colliding worlds is something that has taken hold of my journey, driving it in an eerie and unpredicted way. I have found the boundary between these two cultural perceptions of death, in relation to the Vietnam War, to be fluid, allowing for the influx into one the most essential elements of another. This reality has forced me into an acceptance: in understanding the perceptions of death as associated with any war, an examination of the cultures of the peoples involved is essential; however, in order to coalesce these realities, one needs to look at the manner in which the two cultures intersect with a universal human element in an attempt to deactivate its natural position towards death. I write now as a native to death, stuck in the moment I lost that friend, past and future, using a human element of my own to traverse through something so entirely incomprehensible.

My own journey with death has begun. I had just set the phone down, allowing now my attention to turn towards my computer screen. I had been in this, my first apartment, for only two days. My roommates were yet to join me, and I was anticipating a night at the bars with a few newfound friends. My mother had just called; making sure all was well with the Internet and digital cable. As I sat, my eyes languid, positioned somewhere between various Instant Messages, my cell phone rang, the I.D. reading “Home.” I remember wondering what random thought had occurred to my mother in the mere four minutes since we had last talked. She was in tears-hysterical (Was she? I don’t remember this), “Nancy, come home, come home, Nancy,” she shouted (Why am I saying shouted? Has my mother ever shouted over the phone; what human would shout now?), in a voice assured I was already leaping into my car in the presence of such hysterics. There was an absence of words, but this potential for silence was forgone by the constant sobs of my mother. I had heard her cry before, and stammered a confused “What?” from the other end. “I have some horrible news,” she managed.

All was silent (Was it?). My dog had died, I was sure, Zelda, one of the biggest pleasures of my life, only four years old. I had begged for her, I had chosen her, and I had watched all who met her fall instantly in love with her. Surrounding me are the joking voices, “Nancy, your mom has more pictures in the house of Zelda than of you.” In these memories I am smiling, satisfied with this reality, aware of how purely kind Zelda has always been, how deserved she is of dominating my mother’s mantles. And now she was dead, I knew it, without my mother speaking another word.

The relative of death, suffering, is something still beyond my intellectual and emotional grasp, as it increasingly seems to hold no limits, as it varies for all. In my search for an American and Vietnamese perception of death, I unearthed my own jaded thoughts on the issue. As my mother spoke of death, my initial reaction was to link it to Zelda, my dog, and an animal, calling into question my own ability to address seriously the loss of human life. The most tragic and moving moments in much of the art I examined comes from the death and prolonged suffering of animals.

In his poem, “Just for Laughs,” W.D. Ehrhart enhances many elements of this relationship. The poet’s art probes at the human ability to relate more to animals than to humans in the arena of death. In “Just for Laughs,” Ehrhart provides a childhood incident in which an implied “he” and a few of his male friends kill a pregnant snake. He begins the poem with:

When I was ten, I thought that I

would live forever, I could kill

whatever I pleased

I was all that mattered (73).

He then continues into the death of the snake. He then ends the poem writing, “Years later, I volunteered for war/ still oblivious to what I’d done/ or what I was about to do, or why” (73). Through this, Ehrhart expresses the lack of development his perception of self encountered between when he was a child, preparing to kill the snake, and years later, when he was readying for war. In this manner, Ehrhart probes at the lack of intimacy a human feels with his ability to kill, as he manages to expresses this with a casual, youthful sense of acceptance. By showing the nature of the ten-year-old boy to be the equivalent of his nature years later, as he readies himself for war, the killing of the pregnant snake serves as a parallel for the killing of men in the war. As a poet, the necessary usage of the imagery of the snake’s brutal death to serve as the imagery of the reality of human death in war probes at a human inability to comprehend human death. The effectiveness of this poem comes from the amount of sympathy and disgust it evokes from the reader. These emotions develop through the relation of the brutal death of the pregnant snake; something the poet’s artistic liberties suggest humans are quite capable of comprehending.

In the movie The Deer Hunter, the death of deer plays a crucial role in illustrating the psychological development of Michael, the movie’s main character. Prior to his involvement in the Vietnam War, Michael approaches the hunting of deer in a ritualistic fashion, suggesting an understanding of a deer’s death as an honorable sacrifice. Following his time in Vietnam, his experience with hunting takes on a new nature. As he is alone on a hunt, he is faced with an easy opportunity for a kill. Instead of killing the deer, Michael is seen shooting towards the sky intentionally missing the deer, and choosing to spare its life. Michael had been capable of killing humans throughout the war, as is shown in the movie from the very first time he is seen in Vietnam. Furthermore, Michael is often shown killing men on an individual level. This ability, when contrasted with his later inability to kill the deer, suggests that his very inability to comprehend the death of humans provided him with the needed mentality to kill them. The positioning of Michael’s experience in Vietnam, as placed between these two jarring episodes of deer hunting, highlights the importance of his development, from being capable of killing a deer, to capable of killing humans, to incapable of killing a deer. For Michael, there is no longer a ritualistic realm in which death can be justified or even understood. Michael’s acquired inability to kill highlights the vastness of the gap between human intellectual capacity and a comprehension of human death.

In Kien Nguyen’s childhood memoir, The Unwanted, the death of his puppy is used to an exaggerated extent, probing at similar ideas. Although Kien’s life is saturated with horrific occurrences, the death of his puppy serves as one of the most haunting moments in the text. The dog, Lulu, is not only a puppy, but moreover, a crippled, female puppy, unable to use one of her four paws. Lulu’s innocence thus exists in four arenas: first as an animal, second as young, third as a female, and fourth as crippled. This image evokes an extreme notion of weakness and thus a presumed sense of innocence unmatched in humans. As Kien approaches her dead body, this presence of innocence is overtly expressed as he writes, “Her deformed paw was pulled across her snout, as though she had tried to protect herself from the assault” (119). Lulu’s extreme innocence fits within the boundaries in which humans are able to comprehend a definite wrongness of death. Nguyen’s recognition for the need for fitting within these boundaries to assuredly evoke such emotions from his readers, leads to the suspicion that human sympathy for the death of a human, not capable of embodying such extreme innocence, is something to not be assumed. This intercultural usage of the death of animals to attempt to convey the effects of either human death or immense human suffering asserts the presence of a human inability to immediately comprehend and thus empathize with human death.

Giving in strongly to the perhaps too human element of my nature, I allow the death of Zelda to sadden me. I knew what it meant. I knew that when I came home she wouldn’t trip me at the door, wobbling about in the confusion that evolved from her overwhelming excitement. I knew that she wouldn’t be there to approve the guys I bring home; I knew that my brothers would have to again do that. (I could understand what was being lost) And yet my mother continued as my awkward silence seemed to move her to more words. “I don’t know what to say. Mrs. Shelleby called. Ben died. He died today.” Silence. My brother was dead, my oldest, closest brother. He was part of me, everything to me, by far my closest family member. Silence. (Or was she there?) No guilt, no anger, nothing. (This lasted endless seconds.) I am tired of this episodic experience with death.

The power and emphasis placed on the death of family members plays an overwhelming role in the literature of the Vietnamese, which can be understood as having a direct correlation with the cultural emphasis placed on the family throughout the history of Vietnam. The loss of family serves as an important element in the cataloguing of death as present in the country’s literature, as an increased emphasis is given to the loss of family members, as well as the suffering it causes.

Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind is encased in the issue of the death of close family members. However, as opposed to the norm of Vietnamese texts revolving around this issue, Paradise of the Blind does not champion the sympathy of the death of a family member over one’s own suffering. As a result, this text is banned from its own country. The end of the novel and the death of the aunt of Hang (the main character) provide an impetus for the censorship of this novel. As opposed to remembering and honoring the death of her aunt, Hang chooses to abandon her, as well as her aunt’s past, sell her house, and leave to study in another country. In this decision, Hang chooses to sacrifice what is customarily an important aspect of one’s life, honoring the dead of one’s family, to escape political and social restrictions. The fact that this novel is banned from the author’s country shows the rarity of the issues Huong exposes. Although there are multiple reasons for the title of the book, one suggests that the “blind” are in fact those incapable of overcoming their attachments to a restricting past, and are thus tied down by the honoring of their dead ancestors, and that Vietnam, as it exists for Hang, is a “paradise” only for them. At the close of the novel, Hang says to her dead aunt:

Forgive me, my aunt: I’m going to sell this house and leave all this behind. We can honor the wishes of the

dead with a few flowers on a grave somewhere. I can’t squander my life tending to these faded flowers, these

shadows, the legacy of past crimes (258).

In this manner, Huong develops the notion that a society attempting to compensate for the immense pain of losing a family member with an exaggerated honoring of that person’s life and wishes is one that doesn’t allow for individual development; suggestively the greatest gift life has to offer. One of the overall themes of the novel is that in order for a nation to grow, it often needs to escape its past and its present, and look forward. A subtext to this dominant theme is that in order for an individual to grow, one often needs to escape one’s past and embrace life, not the incomprehensible death.

The journey I took through Vietnamese literature, of which Paradise of the Blind provided a complete antithesis, highlighted the overwhelming concern a family (immediate and extended) had to honor the death of all of its members. American playwright David Rabe provides a perspective on American notions of the role of family members that jars against this argument. In his play Sticks and Bones, Rabe probes at the idea that Americans expect members of their immediate family to at least somewhat honor the family name. When David returns from the war, injured, blind, and seemingly unaware of his surroundings, he appears to force his family into a confrontation with the potential evil of humans, as he is unable to escape his own experiences with death. However, his continual obsession with a Vietnamese girl is what in fact induces his family’s arguably inexcusable behavior, as it moves them into a stage of awkward embarrassment. Too consumed with self-concern, the family turns on David, as his brother Rick states, “I’d kill myself if I were you, Dave. You’re in too much misery. I’d cut my wrists. Honestly speaking, brother to brother, you should have done it long ago” (173). The insertion of the phrase “brother to brother” highlights the low value that is assigned to the role of family, as it is ironically placed beside a man encouraging his biological brother to kill himself.

As opposed to Paradise of the Blind in which Huong critiques Vietnamese culture for placing an overemphasis on the importance of family, Rabe critiques American society for underemphasizing the value of family, as well as the need for individualized sympathy of those closest to you. In these two controversial texts, postwar Vietnamese society is thus portrayed as too focused on honoring the dead, as postwar American society is seen as too focused on moving their own lives forward.

***

Over Christmas break I find myself wandering through a bookstore, attempting to acquire a taste for the Vietnam War, something I only knew through Bob Dylan and my mother’s hippie tales. I have already walked circles around the war section, unable to find where the books on Vietnam are placed. I see two people (a couple perhaps) sharing a book on conflicts in the Middle East. I am frustrated; where is the Vietnam section? An old man is holding a World War Two book with one hand, using the other to lean against the bookshelf. I presume his body too frail to stand on its own. He is so intently reading this book. As I have always had an innate compassion for old men, I watch him closely. He is so involved in his book that I am assured he is unable to notice me. I walk closer. I look into his eyes, covered with thin, square glasses and notice that he is crying. Small tears just barely dust his cheeks, but still, this man, old, aged, unable to stand alone is here, in Borders, amidst the busy Christmas crowd, crying. Feeling somewhat guilty for my presumed, unjustified sympathy, I turn my attention back to the books. Finally, the Vietnam section, I find it, somewhat isolated from the other wars (or am I only remembering this as a writer, wanting it to be this symbolic?). No one is there as I kneel down before the books, wondering how many men have cried here.

***

When I finally acquired Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, I was in Clearwater, Florida on a vacation with two friends. My self-esteem as a student of literature had dwindled that day, as I discovered that my inability to find this text previously was attached to my own assumption that the text was a novel, not an autobiography. As reparation to the author, I decided to skip the alcohol-absorbed activity of the night and read. I raced through the book, not allowing my pen to touch the pages even once. I was moved by the book and yet unsure as to why. I knew it wasn’t Kovic’s genius as an author that moved me, and thus I repeatedly questioned why I was so touched by this book. Now, months later, as I have read more texts on the Vietnam War, I realize that Kovic’s immense honesty has made his text so readable and so entirely moving, as it allows him to directly take on the American myth of masculinity and its relation to both war and death. Through this, Kovic admits to his own absorption by this myth.

Returning from the war paralyzed, but still alive, Kovic’s self-pity comes mainly from his impotence, saying:

Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne and Howdy Doody, for Castiglia and Sparky the barber. Nobody

ever told me I was going to come back from this war without a penis. But I am back and my head is screaming now and I don’t know what to do (112).

In his reference to John Wayne, Kovic underlines the fact that in America the notion of going to war is taught as a masculine task to be assumed by real men. Furthermore, by saying that “nobody” ever told him that he was “going to come back from this war without a penis,” he suggests that he was in fact led to believe that he would come back to war with more of a penis, implying he would be more of a man. In his somewhat lengthy tirades on his inability to perform the sexual acts of a man, Kovic admits to his own submission to the American myth of masculinity, highlighting the immense role it plays in American culture. The direct correlation that Kovic shows between the American notion of masculinity and the idea of heroism in war suggests that society provides men with a sense of worth stemming from killing that can serve to counterweigh a man’s natural inclination to refrain from killing. In this light, society is seen as making a killer.

Similarly, in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket , he works with the idea that society creates killers. Twice in the film, the dual nature of man is highlighted directly. The juxtaposition of the two emblems on the soldier’s garb, the peace sign and the words “Born to Kill,” serves as an overt symbol for the dual nature of man. In this light, humans are seen as capable of not achieving two separate natures, but rather, as having both present at the same time. However, as the movie tells of the making of a soldier in the expected manner (e.g. basic training), Kubrick here suggests a latent, but perhaps more powerful societal formation of one capable of killing. This idea is taken further, as Kubrick closes the movie with the marines at Hue singing the “Mickey Mouse Club,” a childhood song. This image, amidst war, suggests that innately these individuals are more inclined to their peaceful nature, as opposed to their “born to kill” nature. Kubrick thus places blame on a society that teaches killing as a facet of masculinity, thus providing an impetus for men to forgo their inclination for peace and adopt lives of killers. Kubrick takes this a step further by making a female sniper the example of the ideal marine, as made explicit by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Through this image, Kubrick undermines the notion of an American assumed coupling between a masculine element and a capability for violence.

American author Tim O’Brien deals directly with the role the teaching of masculinity plays in the social formation of a soldier. O’Brien’s short story “On the Rainy River” questions the true essence of masculinity that lies hidden by an American façade that suggests a real man is one capable of killing. When drafted for the Vietnam War, the narrator of the story states, “I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naïve, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” (40). The lead character proceeds to drive north towards Canada, where he can potentially be safe from the draft. Once he reaches the border of Canada, the narrator questions his own value as a man, eventually deciding to leave for the war in order to retain some sense of his manhood. However, twenty years later, the time in which the story is told, he admits that going to war was in fact cowardly (63). In this light, O’Brien recognizes the temptation society places on individuals to adhere to the defined notion of masculinity and courage, as opposed to assessing their own perception of what it means to be a man. Poignantly, O’Brien refers to this pervasive societal element of America as “some irrational and powerful force” (51).

***

(I am thinking of that old man, wondering perhaps, if he is justified in his tears that fall upon the texts of World War Two. Something miraculous swarms about the lives saved, the evil stopped in Nazi Germany. Yet here in Vietnam, the enemy prevailed, exposing an unrecognizable face. In Vietnam, at a war memorial in the North, I am told that no Southern soldiers are buried there, but rather the ground holds only the lost lives of the North. The victory was their miracle; they can mourn.)

***

And my brother is still living, quite well in fact, having found a new profession as a lawyer. My mother’s words moved on, as she told me about the death of my closest male childhood friend. (Am I old enough to put those years in the vault of my past?) I cannot induce your tears in the retelling of his death, Ben’s, the kid at whose house I spent the night at when girls were just starting to like boys. He died just months ago, and since then (I am ready to say forever), my perception of death is filtered through his. I cannot see death without seeing his face. For me, his face is plastered upon all those lost, on those the world loses now. I suppose in the journey of art, in the journey of life, in this journey overseas, I was looking for the filters of society, of culture, of those who suffered greatly during and following the Vietnam War. I do this aware of my own inability to accept Ben as dead, to accept him as he is. Do you know how much brighter the days are when I allow him to breath, to watch late night horror movies at my side? I have learned in all these winding tales that there is a sublime, incomprehensible element of death that cannot be avoided. In all art, in all the consoling words given and received, death is only expressed through something else, through a memory, political commentary, honor, and a hope of something to come. My sympathy has grown for any death. All loss has become one moment of my life.

Bao Ninh, in his novel The Sorrow of War expresses a soldier’s own inability to comprehend the pain and loss that surrounds him. Towards the end of the text, the novel’s protagonist, Kien, states, “There would be a miracle, he had written. A miracle that would allow people to emerge unchanged from the war,” suggesting a human tendency to not accept death, to not move from its presence an altered entity, void of human passions (226). Ninh thus suggests that in order for one to accept the death that abounds during any war, one must see the war as reaching miraculous levels, as achieving something so great that all its tragedies are rendered acceptable. Through this development, Ninh argues that all attempts at understanding death are futile, that if somehow completed they would deprive one of his humanity.

Somewhat unexpectedly, I found a text that expressed what my own confusion hindered me from finding: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five . The famous “so it goes” of the text, following every encounter with death, serves as an outline for this paper, this intertwining of so many journeys. My experience with this paper has allowed me to realize the importance of these words. In creating a phrase so loose, vague, aimless, so lacking, Vonnegut shows that there exists no reasonable attitude one can have towards death. “So it goes” teaches us not to accept, as I once assumed, but rather to see beyond acceptance; to merely view the death of humans, the death of one of us, as incomprehensible, as something as far from our comprehension as a world without time, a world with four dimensions. Sitting in Vietnam, watching a hazy screen of CNN tell me how many days I have before my country brings this world yet another war, I wonder, why do we feel a need to comprehend death? In art, must our search continue? Vonnegut asserts that death is incomprehensible yet writes about it just the same. We must keep questioning, making, creating. We must keep writing. We must ponder the nature of death, for as humans we continue to usher it into our own lives, and the lives of those surrounding.

I follow the girl, moved not so much by the monument, not by her tales…but rathe, by her own bruised identity, her individual encounter with death. As I feel a tear wander about my sun-stained cheek, I question its authenticity; I question why I am crying. I cannot feel her loss; her soft, sad words cannot pull me from my own fixation. How am I to begin an understanding of the massacre that ravaged her life when dead Ben is still here, walking with me? Her face is sullen, reserved, and unsure. There is something eerie in the graceful steps of this wounded girl leading our ragged, hungry group about the place of so much death. I wish now for the softness of her voice to take hold of me, to lead me somewhere else. Her voice, so soothing, celebrates nothing.

If we could comprehend this, I could for once celebrate Ben’s life.

If we could comprehend this, the guns, the bombs, the weapons unknown would join together in silence.

Works Cited

The Deer Hunter. Dir. Michael Cimino. Perf. Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken. EMI, 1978.

Ehrhart, W.D. “Just for Laughs.” Beautiful Wreckage. 1999. Eng 495 EB Hst 400.NVietnam Capstone. Comp. Allan M. Winkler and Richard D. Erlich. Oxford, 2003.

Full Metal Jacket. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Matthew Moodie, Lee Ermy, and Vincent D’Onofrio. Warner Brothers, 1987.

Huong, Duong Thu. Paradise of the Blind. Trans. Than Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Kovic, Ron. Born on the Fourth of July. New York: Pocket, 1976.

Nguyen, Kien. The Unwanted . Boston: Little, 2001.

Ninh, Bao. The Sorrow of War. Trans. Phan Thanh Hao. New York: Riverhead, 1991.

O’Brien, Tim. “On the Rainy River.” The Things They Carried. Pgs. 39-61. New York: Broadway, 1990.

Rabe, David. Sticks and Bones. (1969): 91-175. The Vietnam Plays: Volume One. New York: Grove, 1993.

Shelley, P.B. “Hellas.” Pgs. 794-797. The Longman Anthology of Britsh Literature, 2nd Edition. Ed.David Damrosch. New York: Longman, 2003.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delta, 1969.