The hardest part of writing can be summarized within the first 30 minutes. Within that half hour is the most excruciating thought process when you’re drawing blanks and aimlessly searching for a silver lining, an idea – even if it’s absolute garbage.
I wasn’t exactly a writer, to begin with, so the monotonic undertaking to every essay starts with my compulsive need to draw out a black-and-white conclusion to every question. But as a writer, I obsess over the gradient of answers that I can cherry-pick for my essays without inundating my reader with too much historical background or too little commentary. I have to approach with an angle – not too narrow that it eliminates any nuance in my writing, but not too obtuse that my argument becomes tangential.
From the outset, I wanted to examine the evolution of American politics – mainly focusing on compassion fatigue and the xenophobic rhetoric that the American government and politicians employed circa the 1970s where Vietnamese refugees were callously refused passage after their home country had been decimated by said government’s cataclysmic policies to justify their proxy war.
Granted, it would have been a seamless segue from my oral history project, where I interviewed my father, who had the first-hand experience to the destruction of his homeland.
And then I remembered.
I remembered reading about Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and the American soldier’s perspective. It started more or less as a revisiting of past novels and thus evolved into a potential idea.
From O’Brien’s novel, I approached my current topic from a psychological standpoint regarding the American soldiers’ battle with PTSD from the war trauma inflicted upon them.
Once I got over the first hurdle of stockpiling my evidence, things got easier. I eliminated the documentary and a smattering of secondary sources that were derivative to my focus. I narrowed my research down to the 300,000 Vietnam Veterans still suffering from PTSD today; six times the amount of WWII veterans diagnosed with war trauma.
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.” – Richard Nixon
The more I studied about the Vietnam War from an American soldier’s point of view, the more I understand why the people questioned the efficacy of their government. I began to understand how a war that was centered on morals bred so much disillusionment, especially towards the veterans that returned home to find not only had they irreparably changed, but so did the people around them – towards them.
From the first page, O’Brien imbues a hallucinatory quality and tone to his novel that becomes the core to understanding the level of ambiguity and confusion American soldiers exhibited towards the war. As I continued to analyze the main protagonist, Paul Berlin, and his penchant for daydreaming, I realized that his erratic, psychological breaks from reality were a coping mechanism to process and acclimate himself to the traumas of combat. Furthermore, Berlin’s indistinguishable grasp on reality creates a labyrinth experience for the readers to decipher between reality and fantasy, which allows a glimpse into the convoluted psyche of the American soldier during the war.
Slideshow of American Soldiers during the Vietnam War
In preparation for my in-class presentation, I will be analyzing the character of Paul Berlin and how he copes with war trauma and how O’Brien employs third-person narrative, albeit all of the memories are from Paul Berlin’s frame of reference alone. This method protects the integrity of a vulnerable psyche in such case as Berlin’s fragile mind. With an unprecedented record of PTSD cases, I find it imperative to study and understand the effects of PTSD to generate remedies, or at the very least, cautionary measures.
Nonetheless, understanding is not equated with justification towards the misdeeds that were committed in Vietnam. But to heal from a four-decade wound, it is essential to acknowledge its cause and its symptoms, not vilify its victims.
After all, these men are the reason we may rest easy at night.
Works Cited
Header image, Bruce Almighty 2003
Vietnam War image, courtesy of Google Images
the reason behind the crumbling of a civilization 