Why Are We in Vietnam? Read online

  Praise for Norman Mailer

  “Norman Mailer loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”

  —The New York Times

  “A writer of the greatest and most reckless talents.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”

  —Life

  “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book….There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”

  —The Cincinnati Post

  Why Are We in Vietnam? is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1967 by Norman Mailer

  Foreword copyright © 2017 by Maggie McKinley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by G.P. Putnam & Sons in 1967.

  ISBN 9780399591754

  Ebook ISBN 9780399591761

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: © Scott Dickerson/Design Pics

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Preface

  Intro Beep 1

  Chap One

  Intro Beep 2

  Chap Two

  Intro Beep 3

  Chap Three

  Intro Beep 4

  Chap Four

  Intro Beep 5

  Chap Five

  Intro Beep 6

  Chap Six

  Intro Beep 7

  Chap Seven

  Intro Beep 8

  Chap Eight

  Intro Beep 9

  Chap Nine

  Intro Beep 10

  Chap Ten

  Chap Eleven

  Terminal Intro Beep and Out

  Dedication

  By Norman Mailer

  About the Author

  Foreword

  Readers expecting to find a “traditional” war story in Why Are We in Vietnam? will quickly discover that they are in for quite a different experience. The novel is not, in fact, set in Vietnam, but instead follows narrator Ranald “D.J.” Jethroe, his father, Rusty, and his friend Tex as they embark on a guided hunting trip in Alaska. Vietnam is mentioned only on the very last page, when D.J.—back at home in Texas two years following the trip—reveals that he and Tex are leaving for the war the following morning. Sitting at his farewell dinner on the eve of his departure, D.J. has been transported back to that Alaskan adventure, and his reminiscence and the novel itself end simultaneously with three simple words: “Vietnam, hot damn.”

  D.J.’s seemingly flippant final remark here is deceptively complex, serving as a kind of decryption key that invites the reader to decode the novel’s deeper allegory. Specifically, the last line cements what the reader might already have intuited: the narrative is a metaphor for a number of political, ideological, and cultural problems plaguing America, not least of which are the hawkish American attitudes responsible for America’s presence in Vietnam. Indeed, Mailer himself admitted as much in a 1967 letter to Walter Minton at Putnam, wherein he instructed that the publisher convey in a press release that “Norman Mailer is saying, ‘This perhaps is what we Americans are like, and this may be one of the reasons we’re engaged in such a war.’ ”1

  Yet to say that either Mailer’s assertions or the last line of the novel suddenly unlock all of the book’s secrets would be to oversimplify the work as a whole. Why Are We in Vietnam? is a difficult book. It is rife with puzzles and obscurities, often eliciting contradictory effects that may be polarizing to some readers: the book is by turns funny and serious, poignant and offensive, ugly and beautiful, opaque and illuminating. The novel rejects the comfort of traditional linear narrative, as D.J.’s testimony moves back and forth between first-person and third-person perspective, as he shifts between time and place throughout his periodic “Intro Beeps” and moves in and out of two different identities—a privileged white teenager from Texas and his alter ego, a black man living in Harlem. D.J. himself readily admits his unreliability, confronting readers early on with his potential duplicity. “The fact of the matter is that you’re up tight with a mystery, me, and this mystery can’t be solved because I’m the center of it and I don’t comprehend, not necessarily, I could be traducing myself,” he says.

  In addition to this capriciousness, D.J. offers up his insights in a cryptic and often profane “hipster” jargon, which does not always lend itself to easy interpretation. Indeed, despite garnering a significant amount of critical praise, not to mention a National Book Award nomination, the novel elicited a collection of negative reviews that cited such language as a barrier. A particularly scathing review in Time, for example, called the book “a wildly turgid monologhorrhea,” whose “doggedly filthy language” is merely “grade-B graffiti.”2 The language can, in fact, be jarring, though its purpose is more substantial than mere “graffiti” present for shock value. One might compare the initial effect of reading the novel to the experience of opening up Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange or William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, wherein the language is at first foreign, shocking, and absurd, appearing to obfuscate the narrative while actually underscoring its themes. The similarity to Burroughs may well have been intentional—we are told that the author is a favorite of D.J.’s (much to his mother’s horror), and Mailer himself had previously praised Burroughs’s talent at the obscenity trial for Naked Lunch in 1962. As Mailer said then, Burroughs employs “a stringent, mordant vocabulary…a species of gallows humor which is a defeated man’s last pride, the pride that he has, at least, not lost his bitterness.” Similarly, the obscene language in Why Are We in Vietnam? can be read as both comedic and serious, inciting laughter just as it functions as part of a larger critique. Interestingly, even Mailer claimed he “hate[d] to add all that obscenity” but had to include it because it “is the only metaphor to express the situation that produces Vietnam.”3

  Mailer made it quite clear that he believed Vietnam was “a bad war.” As he would write in The Armies of the Night, his Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon:

  All wars were bad which undertook daily operations which burned and bombed large numbers of women and children; all wars were bad which relocated whole populations….Certainly all wars were bad which took some of the bravest young men of a nation and sent them into combat with outrageous superiority and outrageous argument: such conditions of combat had to excite a secret passion for hunting other humans. Certainly any war was a bad war which required an inability to reason as the price of retaining one’s patriotism.4

  It is D.J. who is able to reveal the nature of the situation leading to this “bad war,” precisely becau
se of his bitterness, his sense of humor, his multiple perspectives, and his willingness to target obscene behavior with obscene language. In fact, the narrative chaos that results from D.J.’s speech patterns led Robert Solotaroff, an early Mailer scholar, to describe D.J. as “a human amplifier for the madness of America.”5

  In the novel’s extended metaphor, such madness may be interpreted in a variety of ways, but is arguably rooted most deeply in corrupt capitalism, corporate elitism, American imperialism, and aggressive hyper-masculinity—all characteristics displayed by the men on the Alaskan hunting trip. D.J. alone can see the trip for what it is: “ego status embroilments between numbers, guides and executives,” which represent a microcosm of a larger national ego. D.J. himself is susceptible to the same fixation on ego and status, yet by his own admission he is also “uptight with the notion of dread,” aware that on his Alaskan adventure he has set foot in an unknown and unpredictable land, and is humbled by this. As he says, there’s a “fucking nervous system running through the earth and air of this whole State of Alaska…the air, man, the air is the medium and the medium is the message, that Alaska air is real message—it says don’t bullshit, buster.” In being able to see through the “bullshit,” D.J. is privy to the various phenomena that combine to create the toxic cocktail of pride, aggressiveness, and ignorance that contributed to America’s quagmire in Vietnam.

  Rusty Jethroe, D.J.’s father, becomes the embodiment of these problems. Rusty is “the cream of corporation corporateness,” as D.J. tells us, and his role in the upper echelons of the corporate world “means he’s a voice.” The dangerous implications of Rusty’s influence are made particularly evident when we are told that he heads up Central Consolidated Chemical and Plastic, a reference to his contributions to the falsity and corruption afflicting the country’s power sectors. Throughout his life, Mailer repeatedly emphasized his disdain for plastic, which he viewed as a toxic, unnatural substance that promoted the deadening and spiritual emptiness of America. As he wrote in Commentary in 1963, “The entrance of the Devil into aesthetics is visible in a new airline terminal, a luxury hotel, a housing project, or a civic center. Their flat surfaces speak of power without vision, their plastic materials suggest flesh without the unimaginable details of blood.”6

  Rusty, in exemplifying this very kind of “power without vision,” comes to represent the attitudes criticized by antiwar protesters. Throughout the narrative, Rusty and his “yes men” (humorously deemed “Medium Asshole Pete” and “Medium Asshole Bill” by D.J., as they pale in comparison to “High-Grade Asshole” Rusty) trample recklessly through an unknown land, each endeavoring to prove himself as the alpha male—an honor conferred, in their minds, by the ability to successfully shoot the biggest game with the most impressive weapon. Rusty in particular is intent upon killing a grizzly, despite his guide’s insistence that the grizzly hunting season is long over, for only a “Griz” will allow Rusty to return home triumphant, having preserved his fragile sense of masculine power. Without a bear, D.J. tells us, “Rusty and his status…can now take a double pine box funeral.” Rusty’s obsession leads him on a dangerous detour from the guided trails, whereupon he subsequently takes credit for a bear kill that should belong to his son. Throughout all of this, Rusty’s quest to embody a familiar brand of “machismo” is represented as only pathetic and misguided; he is a bully, marked by insecurity and desperation. In this way, Rusty’s behavior can be seen as a thinly veiled allusion to Lyndon Johnson’s bellicose nature, often viewed to be a transparent disguise for his own insecurities. Mailer himself referred to Johnson as a man with “no vision” and “the vanity of a modern dictator”; in Mailer’s estimation, he was a “bully with an Airforce” who sent American soldiers to Vietnam to distract from problems at home and to compensate for his own shortcomings.7

  By contrast, some of the most revelatory moments in the novel occur when D.J. and Tex decide to venture out into the wilderness without their weapons, temporarily surrendering their egos. In making themselves vulnerable in this way, they are rewarded with the opportunity to witness terrifying and awe-inspiring elements of the natural world: they watch a grizzly kill and eat his prey; they experience the pure silence around them; they see the “sunlight rising up straight from the snow in lines of razzle reflection.” Lying next to each other in the tent that night, altered by their formative experience in the wild, they each feel a distinct sense of lust for the other, but intuit that the only response to such desire is violence; they will never be lovers, but only “killer brothers.” Amid the frequencies they hear buzzing about them in the silence of the Alaskan wilderness, they also hear a voice of “the deep beast”—whether it is the “lord of light” or the “prince of darkness” they can’t be sure—saying to them, “Fulfill my will, go forth and kill.” Reconciled to this, they return to camp, where they hear the echoes of their fathers’ voices, “filled with the same specific mix of mixed old shit.” The cultural norms to which the existing patriarchy hold so tightly—which say that aggression and bombast are the keys to success and power—are too strong, pulling them back to “reality” and eventually, to war.

  Those familiar with Mailer’s reputation at the time of the novel’s publication may find his implicit gendered commentary here somewhat surprising. Mailer’s celebrity—and often, his notoriety—often revolved around the public’s perception of him as a man who epitomized what might best be defined as “machismo.” To be sure, Mailer’s embodiment of a “tough guy” pose, deliberately performative though it may have been at times, was problematic in many respects, in that it reinforced a culturally embedded notion of gender that to this day remains stifling and dangerous. However, his preoccupation with a specific kind of courage and honor propel his criticisms of masculinity in the novel. “Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain,” Mailer wrote in Cannibals and Christians. “And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.”8 The brand of insensitive, power-driven, violent manhood exhibited in Why Are We in Vietnam? is not honorable. Though high on the social “food chain,” Rusty represents a nadir of American masculinity: he is solipsistic, unrepentant, and concerned only with maintaining his identity as a conqueror, regardless of the arena. It is this kind of behavior that, in part, provides an answer to the question posed in the novel’s title.

  Of course, one of the lasting values of the novel—if also one of its challenges—is that its relevance and significance extend beyond a specific criticism of the Vietnam War. The ideologies interrogated in the novel have continued to persistently define American politics and policy in the decades since the book’s release. Indeed, fifty years after the novel’s first publication, its subject matter seems to take on a new immediacy: the hazards of corporate influence on American politics and international affairs, the widespread influence of American imperialist principles, and the impacts of a culturally enforced (and for some, dangerously invisible) toxic masculinity remain dominant themes of our twenty-first-century conversation. In fact, later in his own career, Mailer would find himself returning to similar criticisms. In his 2003 compilation of incisive commentary on America’s presence in Iraq entitled Why Are We at War? (the title a clearly drawn parallel to his earlier book), he worries that the newly invigorated notion of American exceptionalism, increasingly reliant on corporate capitalism and the notion of superiority as opposed to liberty, is turning America into a nation of “cultural barbarians.” As he laments, “We don’t always pay attention to what we are trampling.”9

  In more recent years, American political, economic, and military engagement overseas has continued to be driven by a notion of American exceptionalism that too often confuses violence with valor, aggression with greatness, and arrogance with benevolence. Drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which invited many comparisons to Vietnam, left us with questions similar to those Mailer had been asking since 1967. To what extent does the nation continue to wittingly or unwittingly “t
rample” cultures that it purports to assist? To what extent do we allow our corporate interests to drive our foreign entanglements? At what point are we no longer being of service and merely attempting to maintain some semblance of national pride and status, buying into a sort of gambler’s fallacy by hoping that if we just stay long enough, we will finally “win”? These are complicated questions with no easy answers. However, Mailer once said that the success of a democracy “depends on the intelligence of the people” and that such intelligence can be defined as the “readiness to look into the face of difficult questions and not search for quick answers.”10 We might see Why Are We in Vietnam? as a renewed call to ruminate on these difficult questions, in the interest of fostering rather than dampening empathy, vision, and reason.

  —MAGGIE MCKINLEY, Harper College

  NOTES

  1. Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 370.

  2. “Hot Damn,” Time, September 8, 1967.

  3. “Anything Goes: Taboos in Twilight,” Newsweek, November 13, 1967.

  4. The Armies of the Night (NY: Signet, 1968), 208.

  5. Robert Solotaroff, Down Mailer’s Way (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 180.

  6. The Presidential Papers (NY: Bantam Books, 1964), 194.

  7. Cannibals and Christians (1966; NY: Pinnacle Books, 1981), 111; 119.

  8. Ibid., 242.

  9. Why Are We at War? (NY: Random House, 2003), 24.

  10. Norman Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer, The Big Empty (NY: Nation Books, 2006), 97–98.