40 pages • 1 hour read
Tobias WolffA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“I’d never been to Europe, but in Mỹ Tho I could almost imagine myself there. And that was the whole point. The French had made the town like this so they could imagine themselves in France. The illusion was just about perfect, except for all the Vietnamese.”
The town is an interesting symbol in the novel, and this is in part why—it functions as a representation of colonial power in the area. There is something fundamentally interesting about taking control of a country only to try to make it look like your own.
“All of [the Vietnamese officers] were political intriguers; they had to be in order to receive promotion and command. Their wages were too low to live on because it was assumed they’d be stealing, so they stole. They were punished for losing men in battle, therefore they avoided battle.”
Wolff frequently returns to notions of truth, and here he questions the way such truths are fulfilled. In this case, the officers are expected to misbehave, so they do, which reinforces the expectation.
“Your version of reality might not tally with the stats or the map or the after-action report, but it was the reality you lived in, that would live on in you through the years ahead, and become the story by which you remembered all that you had seen, and done, and been.”
As with the above, Wolff questions the official view of the war compared to his experience on the ground. The history of war since the era of the photograph has been one of competition for narrative. This instance is one small way in which that manifests for those involved in the battle.
“At Dong Tam I saw something that wasn’t allowed for in the national myth—our capacity for collective despair. People here seemed in the grip of unshakable petulance. It was in the slump of their shoulders and the plodding way they moved. […] Here were pharaoh’s chariots engulfed; his horsemen confused; and all his magnificence dismayed.”
In a sense, the war itself is a battle for a national or cultural myth. Wolff undermines the myth of American military might by focusing on the soldiers, but this connects to the war between communist and capitalist ideology, for which Vietnam was a proxy.
“He was a hard one to figure out, Sergeant Benet. He thought it was amazing that I could get along in Vietnamese, but he spoke about ten different kinds of English, as occasion demanded—Corneryboy, Step’n-fetchit, Hallelujah Baptist, Professor of Cool, Swamp Runner, Earnest Oreo Professional, Badass Sergeant.”
Wolff touches on a notion of language that is key in linguistic thought: the nature of dialect versus language. Benet and Wolff each think differently about the others’ abilities, when both are rightly impressed, even if Benet views his own abilities as being limited, arbitrarily, to “English.”
“And I was moved myself, as in some way I had planned to be. […] [T]his swelling of pride in the beauty of my own land, and the good hearts and high purposes of her people, of whom, after all, I was one.”
Wolff spends much of his time trying to figure out where he belongs, so this is an interesting connection for him to make, especially considering the lengths he goes to obtain the television. Wolff is in Vietnam in large part because he struggled to fit into American society, yet he celebrates an American holiday from across the world, buying into an American national myth and finding pride in it.
“Why did he hate me? He may have felt—I might have made him feel—that I was a tourist here, that my life would not be defined, as his had been, by years of hard labor at sea relieved now and then by a few days of stone drunkenness in the bars of Norfolk and Newport News.”
This speaks to the larger, recurring issue of Wolff’s inability to fit in. He is on a ship because he did not fit into formal educational institutions, but he is an outsider here as well, at least in part because it is clear he does not have to be there if he does not want to. For someone who has no choice, like the other crew members, this is hateworthy.
“It was exactly the kind of thing I would have done, but I hated seeing [my father] do it, as I hated seeing him lie about his past and bilk storekeepers and take advantage of his friends.”
Wolff’s worst impulses are frequently reflected through other figures in the book as he spends this period of his life trying to temper them. One of the more important figures is his father, in whom Wolff sees a part of himself that he does not want to become.
“This set me thinking. Here you had a man who knew all the tricks and knew them well enough to teach them to others. He’d been [to Vietnam] twice and been competent enough to get home. Yet he was afraid [to go back].”
Early in Chapter 1, Wolff suggests a discrepancy between the military promise that one needs only to do things right to make it home alive—a preposterous statement. This follows up on that earlier assertion, as men who are “experts” recognize the fantastic danger they would be in.
“What I tried to do was look well-meaning and slightly apologetic, like a very nice person who has been swept up by forces beyond his control and set down in a place where he knows he doesn’t belong and that he intends to vacate the first chance he gets.”
This mirrors the incident with the ship’s mechanic, and not for entirely different reasons. Unlike the mechanic, however, Wolff’s—and more broadly, America’s—time in Vietnam had a profound impact on the Vietnamese, who might therefore be less than thrilled by their presence.
“In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don’t look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries. You encourage yourself with charms, omens, rites of propitiation.”
This touches back on the idea that doing things the right way will ensure survival. Wolff suggests that what helps people get through an absurd world is faith in the mysterious and the illogical, as this at least speaks to the illogic on display daily.
“Duty had swallowed [Fisher] whole, loneliness, fear, and all. His path was absolutely clear. I almost envied him.”
Fisher and MacLeod serve as extreme counterparts for one another and for Wolff. Wolff claims to envy Fisher, but Fisher is a man consumed by his duty to the point that he has completely lost his individual will. Wolff suggests there is a comfort in that, but there is a cost as well.
“We did not laugh at them […] Their goodwill was too naked and guileless for that. They were like children playing, but more touching because they weren’t children. I was embarrassed by all this determined innocence yet somehow protective of it. Made wistful. Chastened.”
This moment stands in stark contrast to Wolff’s later return to San Francisco—at that point, the city and the people feel fundamentally broken. But what is particularly interesting is that they recognize Wolff as one of them.
“I saw the map, I knew where the shells were going, but I didn’t think of our targets as homes where exhausted and frightened people were praying for their lives. When you’re afraid you will kill anything that might kill you. Now that the enemy had the town, the town was the enemy.”
The Tet Offensive, Wolff writes elsewhere, may not have been a military success for the Viet Cong, but it was an emotional and mental success. They aimed to demonstrate that the Americans were not the benevolent good guys here to save Vietnam; rather, when push came to shove, Americans would not care whom they killed.
“They knew that once they were among the people we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing between them. We would kill them all to get at one. In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them; that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood […] we would kill every last one of them to save our own skins.”
This, and the earlier quote, call back to themes of imperial power and Wolff’s conflict in his place in Vietnam and in the world at large. Wars like Vietnam are often framed as humanitarian, good-will missions, but the response to Tet, when forced to confront this idea, suggests otherwise—as the Viet Cong intended.
“Yet I could see that [Pete Landon’s] greatest pleasure came not from mastery of this situation but from our observation of his mastery. I watched him, and understood why he’d brought us here. He wanted us to see how easily he could take his place among these people, to be one of them and at the same time not one of theme, yet not quite one of us. Something more than either. And his demonstration of mastery required that we be stripped of it, made helpless, reduced to the role of spectators.”
This is a fundamental epiphany for Wolff, who had previously envied and admired Landon. In this moment, Landon demonstrates his separation from Wolff and Wolff’s foolishness in aspiring to Landon’s confidence. Landon is of the ruling class; he uses his charm as a weapon with which to control people like Wolff.
“Is the part about the bowl true? Did I do that? No. Never. I would never deliberately take something precious from a man—the pride of his collection, say, or his own pride—and put it under my foot like that, and twist my foot on it, and break it. No. Not even for his own good.”
Here, Wolff returns to the nature of truth in memoir. It makes for a more satisfying story of comeuppance if Wolff had destroyed the expensive bowl, but reality and narrative are different beasts. Landon views Wolff as part of his narrative; Wolff views Landon as a human being, however, and thus does not take away that which he prizes.
“This was the way out. I could have called the Chinook off […] That’s what I should have done, but I didn’t think of it, and the reason I didn’t think of it was that I wanted Captain Kale’s will to be entirely fulfilled. I wanted his orders followed to the letter, without emendation or abridgement, so that whatever happened got marked to his account, and to his account alone.”
This calls back to the question of individual versus collective will. Despite Kale’s arrogance, in theory, Wolff should have tried to help. Instead, he ensures that any problems fall to Kale; in the aftermath, the Vietnamese villagers’ houses become collateral damage.
“I’d expected something like this [the officers pranking Wolff on his last night], but I didn’t know what a nuisance it would be to sit through. Behind the understanding that all this was a joke, we had another understanding that it was not a joke at all, that in my time here I had succeeded only in staying alive.”
This reinforces Wolff’s strange, uncertain place in Vietnam: simultaneously accepted and kept on the outside.
“I felt morally embarrassed. […] In Vietnam I’d barely noticed it, but here, among people who did not take corruption and brutality for granted, I came to understand that I did, and that this set me apart.”
As a result of his time in Vietnam, where he was both an insider and an outsider, Wolff finds himself in a similar position back home. Rather than being an American among Americans, he is now part of a military culture that civilians do not understand.
“I had come back to Manhattan Beach, I surely understood even then, because there could no longer be any question of judgment between my father and me. He’d lost his claim to the high ground, and so had I. […] It was freedom, and we both grabbed at it.”
This suggests that the largest issue between Wolff and his father had been that of moral competition—both being flawed individuals who viewed the other with suspicion. Now, they are both cognizant of their flaws—in themselves and in one another.
“[Toad] had no choice but to make a good act of contrition and promise to keep the peace […] My father closed the book. […] He wasn’t fooled. He knew exactly what Toad’s promise was worth.”
A fundamental nihilism exists in the book, one that is contrasted with fictional worlds here. Toad can change and be redeemed; Wolff suggests this is not possible in the world to which he and his father belong.
“I took her to the bar where I’d been going, an alleged discotheque frequented by former servicemen and some still in uniform. The moment I saw Jan inside the place, in her white dress and cool, manifest sanity, I saw it for what it was—a hole.”
Wolff returns to the shifting nature of truth and personal perception. Without Jan there, Wolff saw the bar in the same terms as he would have the previous year, either at home or in Vietnam. With her there, though, he is able to recognize how far his understanding is from reality. Shortly after, he tells the story about Kale and recognize how troublesome it is outside of a military perspective.
“How do you tell such a terrible story? Maybe such a story shouldn’t be told at all. Yet finally it will be told.”
Wolff asserts that despite the difficulty in recounting events such as these, the stories will be told; he suggests that the question must be “how” rather than “should.”
“In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years, and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you […] I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.”
Aside from its necessity for Wolff’s recovery from his time in Vietnam, this mirrors his own progress and serves as a kind of justification, if not reasoning, for his experiences. But, more importantly, it is justification for telling the stories and an answer to the “how” from before.
By Tobias Wolff