[In the following essay, Dwyer argues that Samantha's quest to learn Vietnam's history in In Country represents a redefinition of patriotism, history, and the family structure.]

The Vietnam War decentered the American soldier; instead of heroically inhabiting the conflict, he became the Other, an individual far removed from the true meaning of the event. At best, he was misunderstood, at worst, ignored. The non-combatants, those people who are traditionally devalued and defined only in terms of the conflict, struggled in their turn for dominance. The event was devastating and without shape: neither side was sure of its place, or of its role, or of what had happened. Curiously, everyone seemed on the margin and no one in the center. Painful as the Vietnam War was, it facilitated a number of important changes. New historians, whose belief that the truth of major events may be perceived in the words and actions of secondary players and bystanders, went to work.¹ More questions began to be asked about the traditional roles of soldier and non-combatant.² And perhaps most importantly, the average citizen was forced to consider what was meant by the term “patriotism.”

Bobbie Ann Mason's 1985 novel In Country, in its concern with the aftermath of the Vietnam War in a small town in Kentucky, addresses all of these issues. Because Vietnam generated neither heroes nor victories, it readily resists old historical interpretations (at least from an American perspective). Instead, it lends itself to the foregrounding of those soldiers whose individual presence made little difference in Vietnam (but who were nevertheless radically changed by having been there). The soldiers' marginality to the war effort and then in the American society to which they returned is complicated in the novel by the inquisitive presence of a member of another marginal group, a young woman, Sam Hughes, the daughter of a Vietnam veteran killed in action before she was born.

Sam's quest in the novel is to enter into the Vietnam era so that she may better understand its effect on her family—not only on her dead father, but also on her mother and her uncle, Emmett, who is also a veteran of Vietnam. Although Sam recognizes her own place on the sidelines of the history of the Vietnam era (she is both of the wrong generation and the wrong sex), she still suffers some “battle envy.”³ She wants to have had the experiences that have so marked the vets whom she knows. Faulting that, she is willing to understand them at one remove and so, unconsciously, she plays the historian, reading letters and diaries and conducting what amount to be informal interviews of Emmett and his war buddies. What Sam does not understand is that she has armed herself with old historical expectations. She is looking for heroes and villains, strong leaders, clear causes. What she finds is new history—not a chain of command but a web of connections, not a patriarchy, but an extended family without a father figure at its head.

In fact, the central metaphor of In Country is the family—the Hughes family and the American family. By the novel's end, both are reconstituted so that their center of power has shifted to accommodate their least “important” members. In Country begins as a story about unwanted children. They are of three generations, ranging from Sam's friend Dawn's unexpected baby, to Sam (whose mother has moved away and started another family), to the members of Sam's uncle and father's generation—the country's unwelcome Vietnam veterans.

Sam lives in the small town of Hopewell, Kentucky. She is eighteen years old, just about the age her father was when he married her mother and went off to fight and die in Vietnam. She shares a ramshackle house with her mother's brother Emmett, who (like his surviving buddies) has never really fit back into American society. Emmett suffers a variety of physical ills, including acne apparently caused by exposure to agent orange. Sam worries about him and wonders about her own place in this painful chapter of American history. She feels orphaned since her mother Irene, a former hippie and fellow traveller with Emmett, has abandoned the countercultural life for a “normal” middle-class existence.

Sam loves her mother but will not join her in Lexington, accusing her of pretending the painful Vietnam War era never existed. She opts instead to stay with Emmett, who cannot free himself from his memories of Vietnam. If he has had too many intense experiences, Sam thinks that she has had too few. She resents the older generation's attempts to protect her from the unpleasantness of the past. Unwilling to accept her mother's dictum that “It had nothing to do with you” (57), Sam considers the Vietnam experience a part of her history.⁴ She wants to make it real to herself, even as Tom, another one of the vets, warns her: “You don't want to know how real it was” (95).

Sam's attempt to understand her heritage is a search for her parents as well as her country. She feels the need to redefine her relationship with her mother, her dead father, and her uncle Emmett as well as with her mother country/fatherland/Uncle Sam. Mason's decision to make the protagonist of In Country a young woman named Sam is in itself a bid to redefine the idea of the American patriot. Sam's youth and her sex would seem to bar her from a major role in and a clear understanding of the American patriotic drama. But Mason demonstrates that from the sidelines Sam can both understand and clarify for others the experience of the Vietnam era. As she recovers her dead father from cliche and two-dimensional memory, Sam also reorders her relationship with her mother and her uncle and develops a more positive vision of America. As well as being a new historian, she becomes the new incarnation of American patriotism—an alternative to the avuncular, but authoritarian old man dressed in red, white and blue. No longer Uncle Sam, the new spirit of America is transformed into a young woman called Sam, who is irreverent, independent, earnest and questioning.

At one point in the story, Sam jogs past the post office where a recruitment poster of Uncle Sam points a finger at her, and she answers with an exasperated finger gesture of her own. But Sam is not simply irreverent, nor is her journey a jogging exercise. She actually makes the imaginative equivalent of a journey to Vietnam, a voyage “in country,” looking for what most of the people in the United States would like to forget. She intuitively understands that there is more than one way to enter into the experience of Vietnam.⁵

Sam begins her journey by reading histories of the Vietnam War and by talking to Emmett and his friends. But both are very guarded, affording her only glimpses of the horror and the pain. Discovery that Emmett's friend Tom, whom she goes home with after a dance, is impotent because of the war takes her closer. What finally brings the war to the core of Sam's being is her father's field diary. Far from the heroic Sunday School ideal that her grandparents carry in their hearts, Sam's father Dwayne Hughes emerges from his diary unlettered, immature, and scared. His “good boy” image melts away as Sam finds that he smokes, swears, calls his enemies “gooks” and is perfectly willing to kill them:

Aug. 14. Big surprise. Face to face with a V.C. and I won. Easier than I thought. But there wasn't time to think. It was so simple. At last.

(204)

Sam's attempts to get close to the Vietnam experience succeed almost too well. Confused and angry, she decides to “face the wild” and find out what soldiers actually go through by camping out in the very dangerous swamp area of Cawood's Pond not far from her home. She wonders “if the U.S.A. sent her to a foreign country with a rifle and a heavy backpack, could she root around in the jungle, sleep in the mud, and shoot at strangers?” (208). She discovers that she could.

Upon hearing strange footsteps after a night in the swamp, Sam imagines she is being stalked by a rapist. Not only is she willing to defend herself, she feels “a curious pleasure” (217) steal over her. This reaction of fear and aggression, she soon discovers, is not unlike that of a soldier on patrol in enemy territory. The intruder turns out to be Emmett rather than a rapist, but a revealing conversation ensues. Sam allows that she hates her father and the attitudes he has expressed in his field diary; Emmett counters with the painful truth that down deep, everyone in Vietnam felt the same as her father had about the enemy:

“Look here, little girl. [Dwayne] could have been me. All of us, it was the same.”

“He loved it, like Pete. He went over there to get some notches in his machete” [Sam responds].

“Yeah, and if he hadn't got killed, then he'd have had to live with that.”

“It wouldn't have bothered him. He's like Pete.”

“It was the same for all of us. Tom and Pete and Jim and Buddy and all of us. You can't do what we did and then be happy about it.”

(222)

Emmett goes on to speak of his horrible fear and sense of abandonment when he once had to hide beneath the bodies of his dead buddies for nine hours while the enemy prowled the area. “Oh, shit-fire, Sam!” he says. “We were out there trying to survive. It felt good when you got even” (223). He fully understands Sam's “curious pleasure” at the thought of defending herself from a suspected rapist in the swamp: “Now didn't it feel good?” he asks her (223).

Just as important as Sam's acknowledgement that she shares humanity's darker impulses, is Emmett's emergence from his isolation. At Cawood's Pond, Sam steps closer to the heart of darkness while Emmett, in going to find her, begins to separate from it. He is able to find her because he realizes that he and Sam have similar reactions: “When I read the diary,” he says, “I tried to imagine what I would have done, and this is what I would have done” (221). His love for Sam has lifted him out of himself and caused him to realize that what he felt in Vietnam has an equivalent in the civilian world. He blurts out: “I thought you'd get hurt. It was like being left by myself and all my buddies dead. I had to find you” (225).

Being able to share each other's experiences gives Sam and Emmett the ability to find a direction for their lives. Sam's desire to venture out of her hometown had previously had no focus, and Emmett was afraid even to think about moving, for fear he would fall apart. But after acknowledging his closeness to someone who had not actually been in Vietnam with him, Emmett knows where he and Sam (and for that matter, everyone who has been touched by Vietnam) need to go: the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. His sense of interconnection with Sam and her life experiences has set Emmett on his way. Now he may go to his country's home town and commune with the members of his larger family, his American family.

The memorial acts as a catalyst for reconciliation in both of Emmett's families. In building it, America has finally acknowledged its love for those children it had turned its back on. Emmett's rescue of Sam in the swamp has enabled him to put himself in America's place and accept the monument as an analogous rescue attempt for all Vietnam veterans. In going to Washington and bringing along members of two other generations—Dwayne's mother and Sam—Emmett acknowledges not only his own, but also their membership in the American family and in the war experience.

The trip validates Sam's quest to understand what soldiers went through in Vietnam. Although she prides herself on never crying, after seeing her father's name on the memorial, Sam finds herself in tears. Like Emmett crying in the swamp for the dead buddies who sheltered him from the Viet Cong, Sam cries for her father, who—however misguidedly—fought in Vietnam “for [Irene] and the baby, or else why are we here?” (202). She then goes to the alphabetical directory list to see her father's name again and notices that among all the Hugheses who died in Vietnam there is a Sam Hughes—someone with her own name. As she returns to the memorial and touches the name, Sam thinks, “How odd it feels, as though all the names in America have been used to decorate this wall” (245). This observation means to suggest that Sam's experience is not unique, but that every American citizen is connected to the Vietnam experience and has the ability to understand it.

Sam's initiation into the family of American patriots, her participation in the positive as well as the negative aspects of the Vietnam experience comes to her through her mother as well as through her father and uncle. Like America itself, Irene Hughes first supported the war, then opposed it, then tried to forget it by returning to a “normal” life of material comfort. Although she initially seems trendy and uncaring—again like America—Irene turns out to be considerably more complicated and appealing than she first appears. Like her country, Irene is both avoiding old mistakes and striking out in new directions. She has married her present husband not to escape, but because she was pregnant. Rather than turn her back on this child (through abortion or an irregular family life), she has accepted her and loved her. She has also gone back to school and become something of a feminist, urging Sam to do the same. Exulting over Geraldine Ferraro's nomination as Democratic vice-presidential candidate, she explains, “Women can do anything now, Sam, … If they go to college” (167). Ferraro's entry into the male-dominated sphere of high-level politics shows Sam another avenue women may now travel to become patriots. And, indeed, as the story draws to a close, Sam agrees to live with her mother and go to the University of Kentucky. She will go to college so that she can “be anything.”

If Irene has brought her daughter to an appreciation of women's options in America in the 1980s and made her feel less “orphaned” by her country, Sam, as historian, has reciprocated, reconnecting her mother to the war years. In an exchange that recalls Sam's conversation with Emmett in the swamp, Irene talks about the Sixties:

You don't understand how it was back then. Everything's confusing now, looking back, but in a way everything seemed clear back then. Dwayne thought he was doing the right thing, and then Emmett went over there and thought he was doing the right thing, but then Emmett got soured on it and got in the anti-war movement and thought that was right and got involved with those hippies. Most of those guys escaped the draft somehow.

Without blaming her hippie friends who “escaped the draft,” Irene is moved to think of those who did not escape:

It was country boys. When you get to that memorial, you look at the names. You'll see all those country boy names. I bet you anything. Bobby Gene and Freddy Ray and Jimmy Bob Calhoun. I knew a boy named Jimmy Bob Calhoun that got killed over there. You look at those names and tell me if they're not mostly country boy names. Boys who didn't know their ass from their elbow. Oh, God, what a time it was. … It wasn't a happy time, Sam. Don't go making out like it was.

(235–6)

Sam completes her mother's evocation of the hippie days with the gift of a red porcelain cat that she has decorated with sequins and love beads. She buys the present the morning after her night with Tom, whose impotence made the war so real to her. Her thinking of her mother at this point and then getting high on marijuana and decorating the cat is Sam's other foray into the Sixties—her anti-war experience. She gets her mother to open up and talk about the counterculture and presents her with her own “kooky and personal” memorial to those times:

Her mother looked at the cat bank as though it were a tiny UFO that had just zoomed in her door. Her expression turned to recognition, then to joy.

“I love it!” she cried. “Oh, Sam, this is the sweetest thing anybody ever gave me.”

Then she burst into tears, and the punk maharajah cat just smiled, staring. She stared, too, in amazement.

(236)

Neither Irene nor Emmett would have been able to put the past in perspective were it not for Sam's desire to participate in it with them. As a new historian and patriotic figure, this Sam (unlike Uncle Sam) shares the American experience rather than directing it. She is a member of the American family without being the head of it.

In Country evokes a fabric of history that is a web of interconnections; it is viewed as a communal experience rather than a drama with major players, climactic structures, and a massive audience of non-participants. This history may be understood through direct experience, indirect experience, and acts of imagination. These last-mentioned imaginative acts—TV programs like MASH, songs like Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the U.S.A.,” pieces of sculpture like Sam's hippie cat, and the Vietnam memorial—enable the characters to enter and re-enter American history.

At the beginning of In Country, Sam and Emmett are each on a solitary search for a special token that they mistakenly think will help them out of the doldrums. For Emmett it is an egret, a bird he saw in Vietnam that represents the beauty of that country separated from the war. “If you can think about something like birds, you can get outside of yourself, and it doesn't hurt as much,” he explains (226). Sam's quest is for a previously unreleased Beatles song, “Leave my Kitten Alone,” which she understands to be “a fresh message from the past, something to go on” (125). But she and Emmett find that a search for an elusive bird and a song about being left alone are escapist and isolationist—not what they need at all. A bird finally does liberate Emmett, but it is the Vietnam Memorial itself, whose sides stretch “like the wings of an abstract bird, huge and headless” (239) in the ground. The memorial is not the painless escape Emmett was seeking but rather the communal sharing of a pain that can never completely disappear. Its headlessness further underlines it as a symbol of community rather than hierarchy.

Sam's quest alters on the trip to Washington, too. Unable to find the Beatles song in a record store near the capital, she impulsively buys Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. album instead. She takes it to the memorial and is holding it in one hand as she touches her father's name with the other. The album with Springsteen on the cover “facing the flag, as though studying it, trying to find out its meaning” (236) reflects Sam's informal study of America. She, like the singer, participates imaginatively in the Vietnam experience.

Lines from the title song of Born in the U.S.A., a song about a Vietnam vet, provide the epigraph for In Country: “I'm ten years burning down the road / Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go.” By the end of the novel, the three main characters have come together and found somewhere to go. Not only have they become a closer individual family, Sam, Irene, and Emmett have also become a more integral part of the large family of citizens born in the U.S.A. The Vietnam War experience has been enlarged to include non-combatants and in the process has become better understood by all Americans.

Notes

1. See, for example, Philip Caputo's chronicle of his Vietnam experience, A Rumor of War (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1977); Wallace Terry's Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Random House, 1984); and Al Santoli's To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985).

2. Carol J. Adams writes in the chapter on “Feminism, the Great War, and Modern Vegetarianism” in The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 129 that “During the Great War the chasm between the soldier at war and the woman spectator was intentionally widened by soldier-writers who condescendingly dismissed—for lack of experience at the front—any writings by non-combatants. This legacy of condescension and dismissal carried into the Second World War as well.”

3. For one exploration of this phenomenon, see Sharon O'Brien's “Combat Envy and Survivor Guilt”: Willa Cather's “Manly Battle Yarn” in Arms and the Woman ed. Helen M. Cooper et. al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

4. All quotations are cited from In Country (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).

5. Adams also explores this avenue, what she has dubbed “the expanded front,” in The Sexual Politics of Meat, p. 126 ff.