Soldier Without a Cause? Troubles in Understanding the Vietnam War

When comparing any Vietnam War stories, differing perspectives about the Vietnam War are easily found due to Hollywood’s involvement in the production of the tale and the problem of relative truth. Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket and Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried both address, how ever so slightly, Hollywood’s perspective of the war versus soldiers’ perspective of the war. However, it cannot be denied that, being a Hollywood production, Full Metal Jacket still maintains some false elements of war. By using O’Brien’s arguments about relative truth in wartime experience found throughout The Things They Carried, it could be suggested that Full Metal Jacket is more accurate than many other film portrayals of the Vietnam War. O’Brien particularly challenges the Hollywood perspective of the war in his novel.

O’Brien implies that Hollywood films glamorize war in his story about Kiowa witnessing Lavender’s death, which depicts the misconceptions the young soldiers had about war and death. Kiowa’s description of Lavender’s death as “like watching a rock fall…just boom, then down – not like in the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins” is one way that O’Brien shows death in the Vietnam War being far from glamorous.[1] The lack of emotional response to death also shows a lack of glamor. By specifically referencing Kiowa’s inability to feel sad or angry and his desire to continue talking about the plainness of Lavender’s death, O’Brien is effectively describing genuine traumatic experience. When considering Hollywood’s idea of war as seen in film, rarely is there accurate portrayals of traumatic experience and trauma’s lasting effects.

However, Full Metal Jacket may be an exception in Hollywood by showing the harsh realities of being drafted and enduring basic military training even before addressing the experience in Vietnam. In the film, Kubrick implies that being drafted and going through basic training can be a traumatic experience for some young men. While most of the recruits in the film do not begin to present effects of trauma experience until later in the film when they are on the front lines of the war, Private Pyle undergoes a clearly traumatic experience in basic training. The extra harsh treatment from Sargent Hartman and being beaten repeatedly by his fellow recruits is a traumatic experience for Pyle and effectively changed him, much the same as the traumas other soldiers experienced while in Vietnam.

The postmodern notion of relative truth is important to consider when trying to comprehend the Vietnam War. It may be impossible to find absolute truths in the war. Individual experiences provide truths relative to a particular person’s experience. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran, writes individuals’ tales to explain the experience of American soldiers in Vietnam. For anyone having previously read or heard tales from Vietnam veterans, these stories may not seem foreign. O’Brien’s personal approach to the stories and frequent first-person narrative make it easy for readers to experience Vietnam alongside the novel’s characters. The individualistic nature of each tale raises a question about the existence of a collective experience among American soldiers. O’Brien’s makes an important point in the novel that addresses and explains a lack of collective experience or narrative stating that “in any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way.”[2] Another student studying the Vietnam War, Michael Clarke explains this passage claiming that “O’Brien emphasizes the way individual consciousness…shapes events and the memories of events and helps us define what we come to regard as truth.”[3] Because the way each soldier perceived and mentally processed the experience so often differ, it is near impossible to determine a single collective narrative that would be unequivocal truth about the Vietnam War even though many Vietnam veterans have similar experiences. The multiple, contradictory truths could make understanding the American experience in Vietnam difficult, but more likely these multiple truths exemplify the conflicted and convoluted nature of the war.

The first half of Full Metal Jacket initially appears to be a collective experience for the Marine recruits in basic military training. Director Kubrick seems to strengthen the idea of collectivity with scenes focused on all recruits marching in formation and pairs of recruits running the obstacle courses in unison.[4] However, even in an environment forcing conformity each individual has a different experience. With Private Pyle’s psychotic break resulting in his own death and the death of his commanding officer, Sargent Hartman, we can clearly see that every man handled the brutality of basic training differently.

Both texts discuss the problems of sending boys into war instead of men. War certainly turns a boy into a man, but that does not mean it is the best method. In being drafted, boys are not only subject to traditional basic military training but also training meant to rapidly prepare recruits for war. Kubrick addresses the problem of taking boys with no notion or desire for war and quickly turning them into killers. Private Pyle’s assimilation into the wartime mindset of the Marine Corps is too rapid for him to reconcile war with his own individuality, which effectively makes him an unstable and flawed Marine. Perhaps given enough time and resources or proper motivation Pyle might have found a way to serve that complimented his individuality, such as choosing food service specialist as his preferred job rather than infantry. Kubrick later tells us it is “the sorry consequences of extreme military obsession and blindness” that transformed Pyle from innocent and naive boy into murderer.[5] The way Kubrick frames Pyle’s transformation seems to question both the ideology of the Marine Corps and the adequacy of basic military training for those drafted during the Vietnam War. Kubrick’s depiction of their training shows better success in turning boys into killers rather than traditional soldiers. O’Brien also gives us the impression that many soldiers in Vietnam were just boys given guns without understanding the purpose of the war or the ready responsibility of a well-trained traditional soldier.

Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket and O’Brien’s self-named character in The Things They Carried also struggled with ideas of war. The difference these characters have from Private Pyle is only that they possessed the ability to make sense of the Marine Corps teachings. Both Private Joker and O’Brien initially present themselves as pacifists, with Joker choosing journalism over direct combat and O’Brien refusing to look at dead bodies or participate in the hand-shaking ritual. But, just as trauma changed Private Pyle into a murderer in training, the traumatic experiences in the Vietnam War altered Joker and O’Brien. Through Private Falsetto Kubrick provides an explanation for this, “given enough time, training and ideological conditioning, everyone contains the potential for extreme violence, no matter how unsuited or inept.”[6]

Both Kubrick and O’Brien use a single person narrative to explain how young, drafted soldiers experienced the Vietnam War. While an individual’s experience is more likely to be relatable for readers and viewers, they likely took this individualized approach because of the lack of an existing collective experience among all Vietnam veterans. From the lack of collective experience, the most we can determine is that the Vietnam War was complex and misunderstood by the soldiers fighting it. With individual experiences told by veterans and sympathizing filmmakers, like Tim O’Brien and Stanley Kubrick respectively, we can understand why the war was misunderstood and often scorned by soldiers and citizens.

[1] Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction, (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 6.
[2] Ibid, 78.
[3] Michael Tavel Clarke. “’I Feel Close to Myself’: Solipsism and US Imperialism in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.” College Literature 40, no. 2 (2013), 133.
[4] Perel, Zivah. “Pyle and Joker’s Dual Narratives: Individuality and Group Identity in Stanley Kubrick’s Marine Corps.” Literature Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (2008), 224.
[5] Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket, film, performed by Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, (Distributed by Warner Home Video, 1987).
[6] Ibid.

Education as Entertainment

“That reminds me of a song!” is a frequently used phrase in my family. Sometimes the phrase becomes “that reminds me of a movie.” We enjoy relating everyday things and life events to pop culture. Since everyday life for me is school, school, and more school, I will often think of such little things as they relate to my studies.

For example: The early chapters of Von Drehle’s Triangle were significantly focused on feminism as it affected the labor movement. As middle-class women (primarily focused on women’s suffrage) became involved in the labor movement in Triangle, I kept thinking of Disney’s Mary Poppins with Mrs. Banks chanting “Votes for women!” and her song “Sister Suffragette”. I did go to YouTube and listen to the song.

However, another suffrage video that automatically played after it was far more amusing to me as it combines a little education and a little pop culture (even though it wasn’t a “that reminds me of a song!” moment). Maybe the video is really an example of entertainment prompting education and learning (I suggest this because I actually want to learn more about women’s suffrage after watching the video). But I think it shows that education can be entertaining (which may have been a tiny debate in my early 20th century America class this week). Anyway, I hope you find it equally as brilliant and hilarious as I find it.

Entertainment can be educational. Education can be entertaining.

Two Classes, One Subject / Early Thoughts

We are nearing the end of the first full week of the quarter. I’m currently reading David Von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire that Changed America for History 465 (Early 20th century America). Apart from the prologue, there’s been no real mention of the infamous fire at the Triangle Waist Company in 1911 New York City until I had finished chapter four. It seems much more focused on the labor movement, but the first thing I really noticed in the book was the significant amount of feminist activities in the NYC at the time. So far, it appears to me that first-wave feminism fanned the flames of the labor movement in the early 20th century. I suppose it’s not necessarily a surprising fact, but I did find it interesting in comparison to the material read in History 467 (Vietnam, Watergate, and after…or just 1960s-80s). For Hist 467 I read two reviews/articles on Daniel Rodgers’ Age of Fracture and found feminism addressed in conjunction with another social movement, this time second-wave feminism and the Civil Rights movement. The book is not all about feminism. From my interpretation, Age of Fracture focuses on the current splintered nature of society and the blurriness of power, individuality, etc. that followed as a result of significant changes in politics and economics affecting society and vice versa from the 1960s or 70s to present day. But I considered the real focus of the book and attempted to apply some of the ideas.

The macroeconomics found earlier in the 20th century, being focused more on the welfare of the population, seem to have been a catalyst for the initial ideas spurning first-wave feminism (of which my basic interpretation is that women were not legally represented well enough to meet their needs as a significant portion of the population). The focal shift from macro to micro, or all of society to the individual (in both economics and politics) makes the difference between first-wave and second-wave feminism. Second-wave feminism addressed more personal issues concerning social equality, such as sexuality, reproductive rights, and treatment at the workplace. Like first-wave feminism encouraging the labor movement, second-wave feminism also appears to have encouraged or emboldened the Civil Rights movement as the two movements often had similar equality goals whether it be gender or racially based.

It may just be a coincidence that my assigned readings in both classes involved the feminism and I suspect it is unlikely to be a true theme in either class. However, with the correlation between the feminist movements and other major social movements, feminism easily appears to be a defining feature of the 20th century. But my question from these early readings: What makes feminism so powerful?