Sex and war are the oldest of metaphorical bedfellows. Since World War II, writers of war literature have become increasingly explicit in using the language and imagery of sexuality to define their emotional and moral relationships to war. In the final chapter of The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell celebrates Thomas Pynchon's portrayal of the masochistic desire with which veterans will relive their combat experiences. Fussell argues that in Gravity's Rainbow, “for almost the first time the ritual of military memory is freed from all puritan lexical constraint and allowed to take place with a full appropriate obscenity” through Pynchon's use of “the style of classic English pornographic fiction” (328, 330). The literature of the Vietnam War was and is being written during a period marked in Fussell's words by “the virtual disappearance … of the concept of prohibitive obscenity, a concept which has acted as a censor on earlier memories of ‘war’” (334).

For women writing about the Vietnam War, [including Bobbie Ann Mason with her novel, In Country,] this sexualizing of the experience of war has offered an apparent entrée into the male domain of combat. Sex offers itself as a potential common ground of experience for women writers and their female characters seeking an imaginative identification with soldiers. But the use of sex as a metaphor for war, especially to encode its “full appropriate obscenity,” most often demands the objectification of women, as the female becomes the subjective battlefield on which the “ritual of military memory” is enacted. This subjective battlefield may become literalized through the violence of rape or it can construct the female in more nostalgic, although still oppositional, terms.

Michael Herr's Dispatches has been especially influential in establishing the language of Vietnam War literature, a language suffused with sexual entendre. Herr invokes sexual metaphors directly to express to the reader the inexpressible feeling of what it's like to be in battle. “Under fire … the space you'd seen a second ago between subject and object wasn't there anymore, it banged shut in a fast wash of adrenalin” (66). Sex is an obvious and powerful metaphor for this overwhelming feeling of subjectivity. After a firefight, Herr writes:

… you couldn't recall any of it, except to know that it was like something you had felt once before. It remained obscure for a long time, but after enough times the memory took shape and substance and finally revealed itself one afternoon during the breaking off of a firefight. It was the feeling you'd had when you were much, much younger and undressing a girl for the first time.

(144)

It is worth noting that the objective distance between self and other which Herr claims collapses under fire is reconstituted in memory. The objectification of the emotional experience of combat is absolute in the second passage. It is unquestionably the awe-inspiring experience of a male self (Herr and the reader collapsed in the use of the second person—“you”) witnessing the unveiling of the mysterious female other. The female and war, sex and death are linked as objects of the desire to get as close as one can to the unknown and unknowable. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous writes, “Men say there are two unrepresentable things, death and the feminine sex” (255).

Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country is a novel explicitly about a woman trying to comprehend an experience which “men say” she by definition of her gender cannot understand. Her Uncle Emmett, a Vietnam veteran, tells her “women weren't over there. … So they can't really understand” (107), hermetically sealing the war from her interrogation. Sam Hughes is a war baby, conceived during the one month of marriage before her father, Dwayne, was sent to Vietnam and born a month after he returned in a body bag. The Vietnam War is her literal inheritance, and at the age of eighteen she comes forth to claim it. At her high school graduation the commencement speaker turns Sam's mind to the war with his talk of “keeping the country strong.” But Sam's attempts to learn about the war are continually frustrated by people who won't talk and history books that can't tell her what she wants to know—what it was like to be there. The Vietnam War is like the blank piece of paper she actually receives in lieu of a diploma—until she can fill in the imaginative space occupied by her father and the war, her education will remain incomplete.

Because Sam cannot actually experience the Vietnam War directly, her investigation is by necessity at the level of metaphor and simile. As Judith Stiehm has noted, “For many Americans, especially women, combat is not so much an abstract idea as it is fiction” (Huston, “Tales of War” 274). Fiction tells us what combat is like—and the first thing Vietnam fiction usually tells us is that it's not like books or, more often, the movies. The power and pervasiveness of sexual metaphors lie not only in their invocation of emotional intensity, of experience beyond words, but in their oppositional quality. The status of sexual discourse as controlled, suppressed, censored, and obscene expresses both the horror and desire of an experience (whether sex or combat) which overturns romantic preconceptions (whether of moonlit summer evenings or John Wayne landing at Iwo Jima).

But the quest of Sam Hughes to learn what Vietnam was like challenges the universality assumed by both Herr and Fussell of fictions constructed through sexual metaphor. Suppose Sam Hughes turned, as many do, to Michael Herr to find out what combat was like and discovered it was the feeling she had “undressing a girl for the first time.” War literature becomes a male plot which reconstitutes war as the domain of male activity enacted upon female passivity. As Nancy Huston has stated, “War imitates narrative imitates war” (“Tales of War” 273). Again and again, when Sam asks about the war she is told, “Don't think about it,” “It doesn't concern you,” “Hush”—enforcing upon her the passive female role of war narrative.

At one point Sam attempts to enact the most traditional female role in the fiction of war as sex—sleeping with a soldier. The mutual sexual attraction between Sam and the veteran Tom seems to offer Sam an intimacy which could break down the barriers to understanding that others insist stand in her way. Leaving the veterans' dance with Tom, “she felt she was doing something intensely daring, like following the soldier on point” (124). Her imagination keeps invoking comparisons with Vietnam—orange lights are like napalm, the patchwork quilt on Tom's bed stands in contrast to a soldier's poncho. Sam's imagination is continually able to animate her surroundings with likenesses of Vietnam, but she has no basis for judging their appropriateness. A relationship with Tom might be able to give her that standard of judgment. This is not to say that Sam's interest in Tom is intellectual; her desire is fueled by her developing sense of her own sexuality as well.

But when Tom proves to be impotent, a psychological wound secretly carried from Vietnam, sex becomes yet another symbol of the way in which the experience of war seems to irrevocably divide men and women. Impotence, like the war, is something Sam can't talk about; Tom's embarrassment tongue-ties her, in the same way the veterans' silence seems to her to reflect their feeling that Vietnam was “something personal and embarrassing” (67). But as is typical of Mason's treatment of the relationship between women and war, and of gender difference in general, the hardening of this division becomes further motivation to seek unity. Whereas Sam was originally drawn to Tom in her desire to understand the war, she now feels an even greater need to achieve such understanding in the hope that it will allow her to get closer, through sex or language, to Tom.

The most obvious source for Mason's Tom is Hemingway's Jake Barnes. As Sandra Gilbert has argued, the modernist literature that emerged from World War I describes again and again the wounded, symbolically if not literally emasculated man who returns from the war to confront women empowered, set free by the social dislocations wrought by the Great War. Male rage against the war turns against the female who apparently reaps its benefits. Hemingway's Brett Ashley becomes in Gilbert's words “a kind of monstrous anti-fertility goddess to whose powers the impotent bodies of men had ceaselessly been offered up” (444). While many feminist critics have challenged Gilbert's contention that women actually did feel empowered by the destruction of men and masculinity in the war, her reading of The Sun Also Rises is a useful counterpoint to understanding Mason's purposes in rewriting this plot (see Marcus 295–296).

Although Sam feels frustrated to the point of tears when confronted with Tom's impotence and especially his silence, it is true that the Vietnam War is in one sense a source of empowerment for her. It is the death of her father that gives her life the qualities she prizes most highly. Sam's grandmother says to her,

“I keep thinking about Dwayne and how everybody's life is different without him. If he had lived, he'd have a house down the road with Irene, and you would have grown up there, Sam, and I'd have knowed you a lot better, sugar. And you'd have some brothers and sisters.”

Sam shudders at the idea of growing up on a farm, doing chores, never getting to go to town.

(13)

Sam clutches at the idea that her father might have resisted such a traditional role, as her Uncle Emmett has done, but at her grandparents' farm she pictures her father there, “discussing blue mold and whether to take risks on wheat prices” just like her grandfather. The legacy demands in turn that her mother “wouldn't have gone to Lexington” and that Sam herself would by now be “jiggling a baby on her knee” (195). It is probably only her father's death that allows her to break with traditions she sees as stultifying.

But if Sam's life was affected by her father's death, apparently for the good, that does not make her responsible or vampiric. Mason avoids the extreme logic of the oppositions Gilbert describes between men and women, combat and home, impotence and power, which inevitably define the female as the enemy. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake's impotence is the ground zero of the novel's construction, an irreducible, unavoidable, biological fact that structures all of the novel's events and relationships. Manhood for Hemingway has a singular, apparently biological and thus “natural” definition. In In Country, Tom's impotence is not presented as a problem absolutely beyond solution. Tom describes for Sam the little salt-water pump that could be implanted allowing him to simulate an erection. And while cost and fear seem likely to stand in the way of such a move, the possibility of healing his wound remains. For Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley's desire is salt rubbed into his wound. For Tom, Sam's desire, while it cannot heal him directly (“I thought” he tells her, “it would be different with you. …”), might just motivate him to seek new possibilities (128).

While rejecting the possibility that women may learn about war through a simple enactment of its sexual metaphor, Mason further interrogates the connection between sex, combat, and the female by digging at the roots of gender constructions—the apparently irreducible, even biological point of difference: men fight wars and women have babies. When Sam's friend Dawn becomes pregnant, questions of gender and sexuality are thrown into crisis for Sam. Sex with her boyfriend becomes an image of invasion: “A billion wiggle-tailed creatures with Lonnie Malone's name on them shot through her” (104). Tom's impotency seems for a moment positive in comparison: “Maybe it was just as well that Tom couldn't make it with Sam. Sex ruined people's lives” (158). But out of this very female fear of unwanted or uncontrollable pregnancy, Sam moves a step closer toward feeling the emotional truth of a soldier in the jungle: “Since Dawn got pregnant, Sam had been feeling that if she didn't watch her step, her whole life could be ruined by some mischance, some stupid surprise, like sniper fire” (184). In Dispatches, Herr says that what he really needed in Vietnam was “some generous spontaneous gift for accepting surprises” (12).

In her treatment of the metaphorical relationship between child-bearing and going to war, Mason demonstrates the ambiguities and ambivalence of gender difference as a series of collapsing and reforming social constructions. When Dawn becomes pregnant, she is faced with a choice not unlike that which sent Sam's father off to war eighteen years before. Girls don't go to war and boys don't get pregnant, but each event constitutes a rite of passage in which children become adults by conforming to culturally prescribed roles, be it as soldier or wife and mother. At this level, however, while childbearing and combat are both liminal experiences which involve the crossing of boundaries, these boundaries are still mutually exclusive, enforcing the basic gender distinction that women nurture and men kill (see Elshtain 222–223). When Sam urges Dawn to have an abortion, this difference too collapses. Out in the swamp Sam thinks, “Soldiers murdered babies. But women did too. They ripped their unborn babies out of themselves and flushed them away, squirming and bloody” (215). The more conventional Dawn won't consider abortion; her own mother died soon after Dawn was born, a pregnancy that destroyed her health. Dawn feels compelled to bear this child even at personal sacrifice. Dawn's reaction to the word abortion, “I'll pretend I didn't hear that” (141), parallels Sam's grandmother's reaction when Sam asks her if she could go back in time, would she tell her son not to go to Vietnam. Mamaw exclaims, “Oh, Sam. … People don't have choices like that” (197). For Dawn and Mamaw personal pain does not become the grounds for challenging the social order; having babies and going to war remain natural facts beyond question.

Dawn and Sam call themselves the “baddest girls in Hopewell,” each growing up wild in one-parent households. The deaths of Dawn's mother from childbirth and Sam's father in war are culturally parallel—in ancient Greece these were the only deaths that earned the inscription of one's name on a tombstone. Sam, unlike Dawn, uses her socially marginal position as a “bad girl” to rebel against the cultural constructions of childbirth and war, female and male. Mason makes it abundantly clear that childbearing is as much a cultural as a biological process. Sam's mother, Irene, has two babies seventeen years apart. She was proud of Sam, a “bottle baby,” and of Heather because she is “naturally” breast fed. Fashions change even in mothering. Sam doubly rejects this heritage of gender roles by advocating abortion, and thus rejecting compulsory motherhood, and by her insistent desire to learn what war was like, further rejecting the limits placed on female experience and understanding.

Sam's rebellious sexuality and desire for knowledge of the war merge in the novel's most profoundly ambiguous and troubling image: dead babies. After her first mild flirtation with Tom and learning of Dawn's pregnancy,

… Sam dreamed she and Tom Hudson had a baby. In the evening, the baby had to be pureed in a food processor and kept in the freezer. It was the color of candied sweet potatoes. In the morning, when it thawed out, it was a baby again. In the dream, this was a happy arrangement, and no questions were asked. But then the dream woke her up, its horror rushing through her.

(83)

Here the relationship between war and childbirth takes on the mythic dimension William Broyles describes in “Why Men Love War”:

The love of war stems from the union, deep in the core of our being, between sex and destruction, beauty and horror, love and death. War may be the only way in which most men touch the mythic domains of our soul. It is, for men, at some terrible level the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death.

(61–62)

Sam's dream also unites the oppositions Broyles names: “sex and destruction, beauty and horror, love and death.” The common ground between childbearing and war becomes the terrible mutability of the human body, which can be destroyed and reconstituted in endless cycles of birth and death. Sam herself is the miracle baby who replaced Dwayne, although not a perfect likeness—“Everybody expected a boy, of course, but we loved you just the same,” her grandfather tells her (199). But the idea of literally taking his place, living on the farm, jiggling yet another baby on her knee, repulses her. Her father's combat diary reveals his purpose in war: “Unreal thought. A baby. My own flesh and blood” (204). “It's all for [Irene] and the baby, or else why are we here?” (202). Sam's gestation becomes the social and cultural justification of historical cycles of violence and death.

Sam's peevish jealousy of her mother's new baby further feeds her morbid imagination:

The baby was like a growth that had come loose, Sam thought—like a scab or a wart—and Irene carried it around with her in fascination, unable to part with it. Monkeys carried dead babies around like that. A friend of Emmett's knew a lot of dead-baby jokes, but Sam couldn't remember any she had heard. In Vietnam, mothers had carried their dead babies around with them until they began to rot.

(164)

Here Sam's initial horror at the mutations of the female body in pregnancy gives way to a more profound appreciation of motherhood's truly ambivalent nature. Nancy Chodorow has theorized what most people know from experience—in a society in which mothers are the primary care givers, they will be the child's first source of disappointment as well as nurturance (83–86). And as the extreme case of war makes vivid, mothers have no supernatural power to sustain the lives of their children—a truth Sam's own mother actively denies, snatching the Newsweek cover shot of the morbid Vietnamese madonna from Sam's hands and burning it. Such monstrous truths are further suppressed by the cheap catharsis of dead-baby jokes which are told on the local college radio station along with quadriplegic jokes. Here the horrors of war are diffused and distanced, given expression without ever having to confront their origin or meaning. One wonders if Vietnam did in fact give rise to the popularity of dead-baby jokes.

By going to Cawood's Pond, Sam seeks to confront as directly as she can her relationship to her father's experience. Her trip to the swamp is both a running away from and a running toward her knowledge of her father, of war, and of herself. In Dwayne's notebook, which her grandmother hands her like a diploma, she finds the uncomfortable truth: her father at his most horrible is also the most like herself. The apparently dehumanized soldier who can so casually and dispassionately describe his interest in the rotting corpse of a “dead gook,” its special smell, a friend taking a tooth for luck, is for the first time really her father, an individual who has bequeathed to Sam his own morbid curiosity. By reenacting a soldier's experience, she paradoxically hopes that by trespassing directly on the male domain of combat she will discover that she is different from her father and by extension all men.

Her attempt to “hump the boonies” is doomed to failure as an effort to transcend gender difference, as the sexual suggestion of the term itself implies. Once again, however, the result is paradoxical. Although she is forced to acknowledge that “this nature preserve in a protected corner of Kentucky wasn't like Vietnam at all” (214), when morning comes and she hears footsteps approaching, she is filled with the very real fear of a woman alone in an isolated place—the threat of rape. Even in her fear, Sam recognizes the irony, “What an idiotic thing to happen, she thought—to face the terror of the jungle and then meet a rapist” (217). But although the threat of rape reinforces once again that she is a woman, and therefore not a soldier, these moments of waiting in fear are the closest she will get to knowing what it was like to stand watch against an unknown and unseen enemy. In her comic efforts to fashion a weapon out of a can of smoked oysters, she again proves to be her father's daughter, displaying the same ingenuity Dwayne shows in his comments about how he could use a cigarette as a weapon if surprised by the enemy.

The intruder is not, of course, a rapist but Emmett. The fear, anger, and relief Emmett feels finding Sam all right lead him to tell her one war story, in which only Emmett survives a mine blast and hides from an NVA patrol under the dead bodies of his friends. Sam watches in awe as Emmett breaks down: “Emmett's sorrow was full blown, as though it had grown over the years into something monstrous and fantastic” (224). At the pond, Emmett gives birth to his sorrow; as they leave, “from the back he looked like an old peasant woman hugging a baby” (226). Mason's use of combat and childbirth as reciprocal metaphors reveals the equally ambivalent qualities of both states. If motherhood is not wholly nurturant, combat is not simply destructive. The experience of combat is largely felt as defensive, motivated by the practically maternal feeling of what J. Glenn Gray called in The Warriors “preservative love”—the soldier's desire to protect those immediately around him (83). Emmett's pain defines not only the horror of smelling and tasting death and being too afraid to move, but the guilt of having failed to protect those who continued to protect him even in death.

In the novel's closing scene, the simultaneous existence of difference and sameness is revealed when Sam finds her own name engraved on the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. This reconciliation is earned not by denying the differences of age and gender which separate Sam from the Sam Hughes who died in Vietnam, but by Mason's insistent illustration that self and other, male and female are not static, absolute terms but multiple, interactive constructions which can aid as well as hinder imaginative identification. What Sam finally learns about Vietnam is that “she is just beginning to understand. And she will never really know what happened to all these men in the war” (240). Knowledge becomes a process, not a prize, and when she acknowledges this her emotions are so powerful that “it feels like giving birth to this wall” (240). In this revisionary image the daughter gives birth to the father, the future to the past, the living to the dead—but the relationship between destruction and regeneration is no longer horrific because the fictional spell of its “naturalness”—the assumption that “men will fight wars as long as women have babies”—is broken (Huston, “The Matrix of War” 119).

Works Cited

Broyles, William, Jr. “Why Men Love War.” Esquire, Nov. 1984, 55–65.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1981.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Women and War. New York: Basic, 1987.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Gilbert, Sandra M. “Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War.” Signs 8 (1983): 422–450.

Gray, J. Glenn. The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. New York: Harper, 1970.

Herr, Michael. Dispatches. 1977. New York: Avon, 1978.

Huston, Nancy. “Tales of War and Tears of Women.” Women's Studies International Forum 5 (1982): 271–282.

———. “The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes.” The Female Body in Western Culture. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Marcus, Jane. “Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War.” Afterword. Not So Quiet … Stepdaughter of War. Helen Zenna Smith. New York: Feminist Press, 1989.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. In Country. New York: Harper, 1985.