The Scar That Binds
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The Scar That Binds

American Culture and the Vietnam War

Keith Beattie

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The Scar That Binds

American Culture and the Vietnam War

Keith Beattie

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About This Book

At the height of the Vietnam War, American society was so severely fragmented that it seemed that Americans may never again share common concerns. The media and other commentators represented the impact of the war through a variety of rhetorical devices, most notably the emotionally charged metaphor of "the wound that will not heal." References in various contexts to veterans' attempts to find a "voice," and to bring the war "home" were also common. Gradually, an assured and resilient American self-image and powerful impressions of cultural collectivity transformed the Vietnam war into a device for maintaining national unity. Today, the war is portrayed as a healed wound, the once "silenced" veteran has found a voice, and the American home has accommodated the effects of Vietnam. The scar has healed, binding Americans into a union that denies the divisions, diversities, and differences exposed by the war. In this way, America is now "over" Vietnam.

In The Scar That Binds, Keith Beattie examines the central metaphors of the Vietnam war and their manifestations in American culture and life. Blending history and cultural criticism in a lucid style, this provocative book discusses an ideology of unity that has emerged through widespread rhetorical and cultural references to the war. A critique of this ideology reveals three dominant themes structured in a range of texts: the "wound," "the voice" of the Vietnam veteran, and "home." The analysis of each theme draws on a range of sources, including film, memoir, poetry, written and oral history, journalism, and political speeches. In contrast to studies concerned with representations of the war as a combat experience, The Scar That Binds opens and examines an unexplored critical space through a focus on the effects of the Vietnam War on American culture. The result is a highly original and compelling interpretation of the development of an ideology of unity in our culture.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2000
ISBN
9780814786109

1 The Healed Wound

We can find no scar,
But internal difference
—Emily Dickinson
The healing process mobilises potent symbolic resources, for in attempting to redress the breaches caused by illness, however these are perceived, healers everywhere manipulate symbolic media which identify physical with social order.
—Jean Comaroff
It is inescapable: an object of war is to wound. War is blood, war is body fragments, war is the dismemberment of the body—though not the body’s absence. Mortally wounded bodies are present on the battlefield in a display that attests to the dreadful power of war. Censorship, however, attempts to obscure this fact by concealing the presence of the injured, wounded body. In the case of the Gulf War, Pentagon censorship functioned to deny the essential object of the conflict. In this war there was no shortage of information relating to the deployment of weapons, the nature of these weapons, their capabilities and their cost to the U.S. taxpayer. This information was replete with intricate diagrams and even on-board video cameras to illustrate the effectiveness of the weapons. The so-called Nintendo war1 took the spectator to the point of impact, to the heart of “hard” targets, while steadfastly refusing to expose the “soft” targets of Iraqi bodies. Early in the air war Vietnam veteran General Norman Schwarzkopf was quoted as saying: “I have absolutely no idea what the Iraqi casualties are, and I tell you, if I have anything to say about it, we’re never going to get into the body-count business.”2 The callous disregard for the Iraqi dead and suffering was sublimated through reference to the deservedly criticized body count of the Vietnam War, thus turning the “refusal to count” into “the crowning virtue of a higher morality, of a humanist revulsion against the quantification of death.”3
Military censorship of the wounded body permitted Americans to view the war in the Persian Gulf as a conflict without wounds or blood. Another veteran of Vietnam, Colin Powell, called it a clean win even though it has been estimated that Iraqi dead over six weeks of combat was double that of U.S. casualties during a decade of war in Vietnam.4 The illusion fostered by censorship of a theater of operations devoid of blood legitimated military objectives and guaranteed the unrestricted use of an overdetermined firepower. Thus, along with lines drawn in the sand, censorship of images of the injured body became a matter of military strategy.
Paul Fussell has pointed out how the wounded, dismembered body has long been absent from representations of battle. “In the popular and genteel iconography of war 
 from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history paintings to twentieth-century photographs, the bodies of the dead, if inert, are intact.” Fussell exemplifies this observation by referring to a popular and widely distributed collection of photographs published as Life Goes to War (1977). The dismembered body fails to appear in even the bleakest images in this anthology of photographs from World War II. Although depicted as severely wounded, Allied troops were not “shown suffering what was termed, in the Vietnam War, traumatic amputation: everyone has all his limbs, his hands and feet and digits.”5 In Fussell’s description, as in innumerable accounts of the conflict in the Persian Gulf, the war in Vietnam features as a point of contrast. In one critical respect the war in the Gulf was not another Vietnam, nor was the war in Vietnam a replaying of World War II—the difference lay in the fact that the Vietnam War preserved the fact of war by maintaining the visibility of the injured or disfigured body.
A brief perusal of virtually any collection of photographs of the war in Vietnam reveals a gallery of images of injury and pain. Indeed, some of the most widely circulated images of the war concern the injured body: Buddhist monks immolating themselves; Nick Ut’s photograph of a scarred and badly burned Vietnamese girl, Kim Phuc, running along a road near her napalmed village; Ron Haeberle’s photographs for Life magazine of the dead at My Lai; Eddie Adams’s photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan’s execution of a suspected Viet Cong insurgent during Tet 1968. The sheer visible presence in newspapers, newsmagazines, and televised images of physically and mortally wounded U.S. soldiers served to painfully reinforce the notion that the meaning of this war was wounding and injury.
Wounding further touched the American conscience through the fact that during and after the Vietnam War Americans were unavoidably confronted with physical disability in the form of seventy-five thousand permanently disabled veterans, and in excess of fifty-eight thousand mortally wounded soldiers.6 The overwhelming presence of wounding so impressed itself upon the popular imagination that injury and wounding ascended to dominance as the framework for representing and interpreting the distressing political, economic, social, or psychological consequences of the war in Vietnam for U.S. culture.7
The definitional processes that constructed the impact of the war as a “wound” were extended and reinforced through widespread use of the word “healing” to refer to postwar attempts to confront and overcome the consequences of the war. The New York Times Magazine, for example, referred to the war’s lingering domestic impact as “the wound that will not heal,” and Time magazine used this phrase as a headline on a number of occasions to specify postwar situations within the United States.8 Other journals described the effects of the war as a “trauma” and then proceeded to postulate the fate of “the healing nation.”9 Similarly, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is commonly referred to as the “wall that heals the wounds of war,”10 and a succession of American presidents have spoken of the need to heal the wounds inflicted by America’s involvement in Vietnam. President Johnson expressed the need to “heal” the divisions in American culture, especially those created by the war. Speaking in 1975, President Ford, quoting Lincoln, talked of “bind[ing] up the nation’s wounds” and he entitled his post–Vietnam, post-Watergate memoir A Time to Heal (1979). In a major message to Congress in October 1978, President Carter spoke of the obligation to “forgive” Vietnam-era draft resisters as part of the process of “healing [the] wounds [of war].”11 More recently President Clinton, speaking at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, also quoted Lincoln in a reference to the need to “bind up” the wounds resulting from the war in Vietnam.12
The metaphor of the wound has pervaded not only written and spoken accounts but also visual representations, as in a cartoon by David Levine that depicts President Johnson revealing the scar from his gall-bladder operation in the shape of the map of Vietnam.13 The metaphor—primarily in the form of a wounded veteran—has been central to various films seeking to represent the effects of the war on the U.S. home front. The depth to which the metaphor has penetrated various discourses is evident in the fact that in addition to journalism, political rhetoric, and film, the metaphor is also present in a number of written histories. One historian drew attention to the metaphor by making it the title of his text: The Wound Within: America in the Vietnam Years, 1945–1975 (1974), and other authors have frequently employed the terms “wound” or “trauma” in accounts of the war years.14 For example, Walter Capps, in The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience (1990), makes a number of references to the trauma inflicted by the Vietnam War. Capps asserts that the trauma issued from tragedy, which he describes as “a dramatic event with an ending that was inevitably unhappy because integral elements eluded successful resolution. 
 Viewing [the war in Vietnam] as tragedy, we can identify ways in which we are accommodating trauma.”15
Capps continues to juggle terms by referring to the “trauma we call Vietnam.”16 Capps’s use of the metonym “Vietnam” to refer to the effects of the Vietnam War reflects various uses of the word “Vietnamization” to signify the impact of the war. In The Wound Within, Alexander Kendrick stated that as “the war accentuated the negative in the theses and antitheses of American life, Vietnam became increasingly Americanized [and] America became increasingly Vietnamized.”17 Four years earlier David Halberstam had written of “the Vietnamization of America,” perhaps using the phrase for the first time to refer to situations on the U.S. home front.18 Continued widespread use of “Vietnam” or “Vietnamization” in place of the word “wound” in references to the U.S. domestic scene during and after the war would have resulted in the promulgation of the name of a country, and an experience, many felt best forgotten. A revision and reorientation of terms resulted in the continued preeminence of the paradigm of the “wound” and its corollary “healing” as a method for interpreting the impact of the war.
With reference to this paradigm, it has been argued that a “fundamental therapeutic tool [is] a set of codes” for reordering perceptions disrupted by illness or “wounding.”19 In the following part the metaphoric language responsible for circulating specific codes is critiqued to reveal the cultural complexity of, and the meanings inherent within, the wound/healing mode of interpretation. Mary Douglas has argued that the symbolism of healing (and it is not doing violence to the definitions to say that this applies equally to metaphoric interpretations) “would not be complete without examining the whole context in which symbols are generated and applied.”20 The context in this case is that of post–Vietnam American culture as revealed through the language of its textual products. Context is foregrounded here as a critical concept in historical and cultural research. Texts, however, remain the source of contextual disclosure. A critical reading of the texts within this part reveals the predominance of the discourse of healing and the hegemony of a “healed” subject and culture. Nevertheless, the revelation of hegemony through reading need not abet “healing.” Reading is an act of criticism, not collaboration; the same reading also reveals competing and contradictory approaches to healing. In this way, Douglas’s injunction to consider the context within which healing takes place leads to an awareness of contest. Indeed, the two features identified here—context and contest—inform the critique undertaken in this study.
Within what follows it is revealed that the “wound” represents cultural division characterized as a stereotyped version of difference defined as “impotence.” Contrary to common assumptions, the war in Vietnam did not cause the “wound.” Rather, the war exposed the existence of “wounds” already present within American culture. Healing, in contrast, is cultural unity defined as empowerment. Healing the wounds exposed by the war demanded, as a first step, a forgetting of the war and associated issues (defeat in the war, the country of Vietnam, and guilt related to the war). Such denial was a necessary precondition for the imposition of consensus and unity. To achieve this object, healing has operated across a variety of sites, including those of the individual, the community, and the nation. Each site is far from arbitrary and is a reflection of the concerns of the various texts, yet each intermediary site is expressive of the need to heal the nation. If the nation is healed, so too are the other related cultural sites.

Habeas Corpus and Common Sense

Lakoff and Johnson in their respected text on metaphor state that “human thought processes are largely metaphorical. 
 Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system.”21 A type of essentialism is operating here in which it is assumed that specific patterns of thought are immanent within the human subject. According to the authors of this statement, thought structures language. The position adopted within this study inverts such an essentialist notion and maintains that conceptualization and experience are ordered through language.22 This structuralist perception is extended within Foucault’s suggestion that language and discursive formations are implicated with forms of cultural authority and power.23 Once the debilitating impact of the war in Vietnam is defined as a wound, healing that wound becomes imperative for the health of the culture. In this way the wound metaphor determines, or demands, specific responses and impressions. Metaphors, then, are not passive; they do not merely clarify descriptions.
The ubiquity within language of bodily metaphors positions them as central to cultural processes of meaning and understanding. Douglas suggests that the prevalence of bodily metaphors in daily discourse is a result of the fact that the body provides a convenient repertoire of symbols (or metaphors) for the construction of a functional image of culture and society.24 Indeed, the body as an image of the social, moral, and political order appears in a number of disciplines. Further, metaphors derived from the body inform daily interpretations of experience. It is common to speak of a “body of knowledge” and its central canon, or corpus. The body of evidence often has to be fleshed out. We speak of the body politic, which can be lively or dormant, depending upon the actions of individual members and the rule of the head of state. Certain fluids of the body—blood, sweat, tears, bile, milk—figure in diverse ways within the language. Blood, for example, provides a variety of interpretative expressions. The disastrous stereotypes of “race” are based in part on the metaphors of “pure” and “mixed” blood.25 Ill feeling is bad blood; fear makes the blood run cold; anger makes the blood boil; a miser is bloodless; a vicious attack is bloodthirsty; an unrestrained attack is a bloodbath.
However, there is another side to the use of the body as a way of theorizing, reflecting, and constructing experience. The discursive body is a framework through which cultural conditions are naturalized and acquire the status of immutable truth. Habeas corpus, being in possession of the body, is thus a valuable tool in the process of cultural legitimation. Extending this understanding, Foucault has shown how hegemonic culture helps maintain its dominance through its management of the human body.26 Manipulation of the language of the body is a much more subtle form of control. In the case of the wound and healing metaphors, the language of the body encodes a specific worldview that replicates the conditions of unity beneficial to the maintenance of a hegemonic culture. With the circulation of the wound metaphor, the (injured) flesh becomes the word—the final arbiter of the condition of postwar culture.
This observation is reinforced in David Cooper’s discussion of the work of metaphor. In a commentary on Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, Cooper argues that the various “symbols, clichĂ©s, and fetishes” that Barthes has studied “might be more accurately entitled ‘metaphors’” and applies this perception to the analogous functioning of metaphor by quoting Barthes to the effect that “the very principle of myth is 
 [to] transform history into nature.” Cooper adds that Barthes is here rephrasing the observation that metaphor “predominantly tends to represent the relatively more ‘cultural’ in terms of the more ‘natural,’ such as referring to states as fam...

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