Reddening the hearts and minds: The frontier myth and American identity in Vietnam War literature.

Abstract

I provide many examples from films and novels to illustrate a pattern resulting from the Vietnam War's threat to the frontier myth. The frontier myth is re-established in Vietnam War literature through a roughly chronological progression taking the American soldier from identification with the cowboy stereotype at the war's outset to an Indian stereotype in the war's aftermath. When the United States lost the Vietnam War, American cultural identity was threatened. The notion of losing a military engagement was not reconcilable with the providential view of history and the frontier myth. Cultural constructions were needed which could situate Vietnam veterans without demolishing these fundamentally important cultural notions. Thus, defeated American veterans are depicted as Native Americans.

Ramifications of the "reddening" of Vietnam War veterans are revealed in Philip Caputo's Indian Country as Christian Starkmann's growth is metaphorically linked with competing images of cowboy-ness and Indian-ness. That novel shows how a specific character celebrates an "othered" status as he recognizes the way he has been situated by the frontier myth and the American experience of the Vietnam War. Textual associations of Native Americans with Vietnam War veterans reveals a long-lasting and perhaps inescapable history of racism, but they also reveal a powerful ability of literary veterans to undergo both metaphorical and actual shifts in identity when they recognize the work of the frontier myth in American culture.

Vietnam War literature reveals much about American identity, culture, history, and myth. I examine novels by Philip Caputo, Tim O'Brien, and Michael Herr to analyze ways war myths and myths of the American frontier are invoked and altered in Vietnam War literature. These novels dispel myths by revealing them to be ineffective in making sense of the narrators' experiences. In the process of debunking these myths, the narrators show that the war did not make sense. As a result, a new type of myth emerges which states that the only sense to be made of the Vietnam War is that it was an anomaly. Thus, Vietnam War literature creates an anti-myth that allows for the continuation of cultural adherence to the frontier myth.