Social Memory and War Narratives

Transmitted Trauma among Children of Vietnam War Veterans

C. Weber

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137501516
• eBook ISBN: 9781137496652
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historiographie

The Vietnam War has had many long-reaching, traumatic effects, not just on the veterans of the war, but on their children as well. In this book, Weber examines the concept of the war as a social monad, a confusing array of personal stories and public histories that disrupt traditional ways of knowing the social world for the second generation.

C H A P T E R F I V E

Narrative Disruptions of the Dominant Fiction

Engaging with the Ghost of Traumatic History

Gordon reminds us that “we are part of the story, for better or worse: the ghost must speak to me in some way sometimes similar to, sometimes distinct from how it may be speaking to others” (1997, 24). As we discovered in chapter four, intergenerational narratives of trauma rely on the fixed form of the Father to reimagine the negative public representations of the Vietnam Veteran and Vietnam War that permeates the social imaginary. As will become clear in this chapter, some of the interviewees refuse to reimagine the Vietnam Veteran and Vietnam War, instead questioning the fixed form of the Father. The variability of the ways in which children of Vietnam Veterans (COVV) work through their relationship with their fathers as they address public representations of the Vietnam Veteran and Vietnam War in society demonstrates the dynamism at work within the social monad. That COVV rely on these societal images as they navigate their relationships with their fathers alerts us to the way historically traumatic events are inscribed into the intersubjective dynamics of individuals’ daily life. Being part of the story of the Vietnam War, these interviewees raise questions about images of the Father and the Vietnam Veteran in American society. Focusing on their narrative negotiations of these categories enables me to analyze issues surrounding masculine subjectivity and its reified position of power in the dominant fiction. What emerges from this analysis is that the deeper belief structures of American society—in this case, hegemonic gendered identity structures that constitute the dominant fiction—are not as solid and impenetrable as represented in the dominant fiction. The interviewees in this section negotiate crystallized aspects of the Vietnam Veteran and the Father, enabling an analysis of the way these fixed social forms intersect with the more fluid and in-formation aspects of lived experience. The interviewees recognize the presence of these social forms but life experiences alter their meanings and effects on their lives. The presence of the ghost of the Vietnam War enters their narratives in variable ways that lead to shifting questions about what it means to be part of a shared public memory where stories overlap and change as they are read against one another. Reading these narratives through the lens of the traumatic event of the Vietnam War upbraids the stories that the dominant fiction tells us about the Father and the Vietnam Veteran.

Although Bissell commented that “at every meal Vietnam sat down, invisibly, with our families” (2004, 57), this does not mean that the war sat down in the same way for all my interviewees. Speaking to them through their fathers and through public discourses, the ghost of the Vietnam War is not received and engaged with in the same way by interviewees. This can make the analysis a bit unsettling but it reminds us how, although trauma and history are part of all of the lives of my interviewees (and other COVV), it does not look or feel the same. The social monad may have a static shape but the complex relationships working within it are fluid and shifting, undermining any single formula for tracing the motions of social life. My interviewees tell me stories of the Vietnam War, Vietnam Veteran, and Father that change and shift under the weight of their intersubjective relationship with their fathers. As these stories overlap they change. Here I tell their stories, drawing them together in order to build a greater understanding of how deeply interconnected and intensely particular the relationship between the individual and the social is. Through these narratives, we can rethink the presence of such overwrought social categories as the Father and the Vietnam Veteran that produce the gaps that exist between social belief structures and intersubjective relationships. In this chapter, I dig deeper into COVV’s narratives to understand the contradictory and conflicting ways the Vietnam War moves through individuals, breaking down our conceptions of the chronological ordering of time and history.

The ossified images of the Father and Vietnam Veteran, which grounded the narratives in chapter four, continue to move through these interviewees’ narratives. The images shift, though, demonstrating the work involved in developing narratives in and around structured forms of social life. Many of the interviewees had a variety of experiences with their fathers that prevented them from holding on to an untainted belief in the black and white imagery embedded in societal ideas and structures. Reading their narratives, then, requires an attention to the haunting nature of the structure of feeling as a tool for understanding how COVV navigate the rocky terrain existing between the Father and the Vietnam Veteran in the context of their experiences with their fathers. Their intersubjective relationships with their fathers—the deeply emotional affective impulses that generate intimate relationships—capture the struggles in working between definitive categorizations of lived experience and the dynamics of the unstable motions continually at work throughout our seemingly mundane life experiences, all of which define and shape the social monad of the Vietnam War. As Raymond Williams explains,

We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a “structure”: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. (1977, 132)

The structure of feeling as discussed by Williams, and which I developed in chapter two, opens up a recognition of the living and interrelating continuity at work between the persistent presence of the historically traumatic event of the Vietnam War and the practical consciousness of a present life being lived in all its layered complexity. While all my interviewees live a complex life in which they must navigate between ideological structures and contradicting life experiences, the interviewees’ narratives in this section more explicitly rely on contingent modes of understanding the way the Vietnam Veteran pokes through their conceptions of the Father, capturing the way social experience is actively lived and felt through, against, and within our conceptions of fixed social forms.

From going through family tragedies such as the death of a sibling and mother, to watching their father deteriorate before their eyes from alcoholism, these interviewees must restructure the systems of belief that permeate society to develop a coherent narrative of their fathers; that is, they must negotiate between the unformed present and the unassailable past that holds the trauma of the Vietnam War. The disillusionment, disappointment, and irresolution they experience in their lives with their fathers are mediated by his status as a Vietnam Veteran. In particular, having this historically traumatic event as a focal point from which they can engage with their father’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities allows these interviewees to retrieve a sense of meaning in the structures dominating social life. The dominant fiction is a far-reaching story of belief that permeates the way these men and women understand masculine subjectivity. As we saw in chapter four, the father’s presence in the family—in its traditional form—is a strong guiding structure in my interviewees’ narratives. The patterns of belief in the ways in which the masculine subject—the Father—is the purveyor of social life continually returned in these men and women’s narratives even as they struggled against the constraints imposed by those ideals. Structuring my analysis around the point where my interviewees’ discussions of their fathers touch on the aspects of the Father, the Vietnam Veteran, and the hero allows me to interrogate how these crystallized structures work as interlocking identity categories defining the masculine subject’s position in the dominant fiction of America. In this chapter, I reinforce the way these structures animate individual social presence, even though most people can never live up to the ideological structures that so deeply ground us into the social world. It is at once frustrating and yet quite understandable that the Father and family have maintained a relatively static existence in the social imaginary even as so many variations of patterns emerge from the lived experiences of those unable or unwilling to fit into the ideals. Whether or not one wants to see oneself in the ideals constituting social forms, they seep into the individuals’ narratives as they struggle to either affirm or negate their presence in their lives. As Gordon assesses,

A structure of feeling is not the subjective or the personal as we have conventionally understood them as a self-contained other of the sociological object. A structure of feeling is precisely that conception, or sensuous knowledge, of a historical materialism characterized by the tangle of the subjective and the objective, experience and belief, feeling and thought, the immediate and the general, the personal and the social. (1997, 200)

Objective and subjective experience are not mutually exclusive; they are tangled into a sensuous knowledge that cannot be easily categorized or inserted into binaristic structures of social analysis. Through this analysis of my interviewees’ narratives, we can read the way the Vietnam War marks my interviewees’ relationships with their fathers (and life experiences), making it impossible to disentangle their subjective experiences from historical objectivism. Because the Vietnam War has such a peculiar and extensive presence, it is more easily discernible in the subjective experiences of my interviewees. The articulation of the trauma for the second generation is laden with the layers of a previously inscribed history that is itself constituted in and through a dominant fiction that relies heavily upon patriarchal structures of masculinity and family. This, in turn, is inflected onto these men and women’s narratives as they seek explanations for the significance of this historical event in their lives. The traumatic implications and realities of this event are a vital component of their narratives and create a point of reference for my interviewees’ discussions. The traumatic consequences of the ghost of Vietnam sitting down with these interviewees include the dislocation of aspects of the ideals surrounding the Father and Vietnam Veteran as they simultaneously disturb the masculine subject’s manifest destiny, supplementing and suspending the lack-in-being that constitutes the fragility of his social position in the dominant fiction. This is a critical point and one that requires our attention if we are to understand historically traumatic events beyond the perimeters of traumatic repetition.

(Re)Structuring Feeling:Incomplete Erasures and Narrative Inscriptions of the Heroic Father

[My father] was in the hospital when they gave [the Purple Heart] to him. And just this sense of huge loss. And it was much more than his leg. So much more than his leg. Just like a loss of a dream—kind of. [ . . . ] And I think his hopefulness, in a sense, [that] he could go over and make a difference and come back and be wounded and knowing that he didn’t feel like he made much of a difference at all. (Renee)

The narratives of Samantha, Renee, and Danny emerge from their inability to maintain strict lines between their lives and the meanings of heroism and the Father that the dominant fiction inscribes on phallic masculinity. Yet, they rely on them in ways that enable a reworking of the meanings of those categorical structures that deeply affect social conceptions of the traumatic event of the Vietnam War. In this section, I explore the confrontation that develops between structured patterns of belief constituting the hero and the Father within the dominant fiction of America and the residue of the traumatic break that occurred in these structures due to the Vietnam War. What emerges from these interviewees’ discussions of their father is a reconceptualization of what it means to be a hero and father with physical and emotional strength. The structure of feeling provides a guidepost by which to analyze the way lived experience intersects and cuts through fixed social forms of understanding. The result is a tension between the easily discerned structures of society and their more in-formation counterparts in my interviewees’ narratives. This creates a struggle that invites our recognition of, re-invoking Williams’s words, thought as felt and feeling as thought. The palimpsest provides a metaphorical frame of sight through which we can discern the layers of inscripted past(s) that never entirely disappear from our sense of self in the world. We see (in a variety of experiential ways) the shadowy remnants of a past that insists on its presence in the lives of individuals such as my interviewees. Converging with a not-quite-present reality, the historically traumatic event becomes part of that yet-to-be-understood present that the interviewees struggle to articulate in their narratives.

The Vietnam Veteran has never been conceived as a hero within the perimeters of socially prescribed views of war and heroism. Public discourse’s frequent default to the troubled hero and marginalized masculine subject leaves present conceptions of the Vietnam Veteran marred by the image of a socially castrated and defective masculine subject. True to the Vietnam Veteran Narrative, O’Brien poignantly tells us how he felt the Vietnam War had stripped him of his values and dreams.

This little field [in Vietnam], I thought, had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My belief in myself as a man of some small dignity and courage. . . . I’d seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud. Over the years, that coldness had never entirely disappeared. . . . For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror. (1990, 184–5)

Revisiting Vietnam with his daughter, they went to the place—a small field in Vietnam—where he watched his friend die. As he explained, he lost much more than his friend: he lost his beliefs about what it meant to be a man. This break experienced by the narrator of the Vietnam Veteran Narrative is managed in the different ways my interviewees recognize and integrate that break into their own narratives. While the interviewees in chapter four wanted to connect their fathers to the traditional imagery of a heroic Father (within which the Vietnam Veteran had to be socially reimagined), Renee and the other interviewees in this section made no such attempt in their narratives. Renee (discussed above in chapter three and in more detail below) understands that her father’s losses, like O’Brien’s, were immense and that heroism is not just a symbol of guts and glory. Vietnam was where her father lost much more than [the use of] his leg. She discusses how her father had gone into the Marines to fight in Vietnam because he wanted to do something important and meaningful but his wounded leg crushed his hopes for having a career in the Marines. He could not go to candidate school because of his disabled leg and she reflects on how sad it made her feel that her father’s dreams were lost in Vietnam. Her sensitivity to that loss reminds her of the costs of war on individual people, complicating traditional understandings of heroism. As is discussed below, this sensitivity left her with a desire to prevent her father from being associated with negative public representations of the Vietnam Veteran even though she was unwilling to do this by idealizing who he is or what that service did to him as a person. She “gives notice, not, for example, to the cold influence of a given and discernible ideology or class structure upon individual thinking, but rather to the proceeding looming present” (Gordon, 1997, 198). That looming present evokes the recognition of how strong a person Renee’s father became (to her) in light of the losses he experienced in Vietnam. Renee reflects on and questions the costs of war through her recognition of her father’s losses, rather than through a denial of their presence. As such, her narrative can be read as an articulation of presence that negotiates the noble hero within her father’s individual life trajectory. Her articulation of the intersubjective relationship she has with her father dislodges the cold ideology of crystallized belief structures, revealing how a hero is far more complicated than the impervious John Wayne image that was such an influence on the Vietnam Veteran and the social imaginary. Although Bissell commented that “heroes are uncomplicated,” throughout this section (and chapter) we see how the reality of living with a war veteran upbraids such static societal images of an uncomplicated belief structure.

Troubling such images and narrating an alternative story of the heroic Father is a significant task that underlies these interviewees’ narratives. However, the societal image of the Vietnam Veteran and history of the Vietnam War never entirely fade. Samantha, Renee, and Danny initiate us into how the past, in the context of present intersubjective relations, intercedes on their relationships with their fathers. In their narratives, the Vietnam Veteran is a complex social category that continually reminds us of the incomplete and irresolute nature of intersubjective relationships. The dominant fiction of the heroic Father is always present but never simply or purely incorporated into their narratives. Samantha, Renee, and Danny help me begin this analytical journey through the tracings of broken and fragmented inscriptions of social life, descending into the tumult of beliefs surrounding the masculine subject as imagined through the heroic Father. The Vietnam Veteran is a precarious category that necessitates the interviewees’ exploration of the stress and strain that ideal categories of social existence place on our intersubjective relationships. Under this strain something emerges that is not a pure upholding of hegemonic structures nor is it an entirely new way of understanding the social world. Instead, it is a recognition of sensuous knowledge, “a different kind of materialism, neither idealistic nor alienated, but an active practice” (Gordon, 1997, 205) that underscores how lived experience relies on and departs from past trauma to open up a complex reading of social life.

Samantha and Renee: Articulating Presence

Samantha and Renee generated distinctive narratives of their father that could not sustain the ideals of the heroic warrior, even as they constructed their discussions around the deep care and admiration that they held for their father. As discussed in chapter three, these two sisters had very different ways of articulating their relationships with their father and his experiences in Vietnam. Although they shared the central facts of their father’s war experiences, each woman had her own unique way of managing that knowledge. In particular, Samantha’s narrative revolved around her deep pride and admiration for her father. She did not veer from that image even as she took a very critical stance regarding her father’s ways of dealing with his memories of war. Renee’s narrative was structured around the deep emotional conn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   The Traffic in Memories
• One   Exploring Trauma and Memory through the Social Monad
• Two   Conceptualizing the Vietnam Veteran Narrative as a Narrative of Trauma
• Three   Exploring the Social Monad through the Crisis of Articulation
• Four   The Vietnam Veteran Father: Reconfiguring Hegemonic Discourses of Masculine Subjectivity
• Five   Narrative Disruptions of the Dominant Fiction
• Thoughts and Conclusions   Stretching toward and beyond the Horizon
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index