Americans in Vietnam: Travel Writing and the War

Abstract

The relation between war writing and travel is both close and conflicted, and Vietnam can serve as a case study of the two types of narratives. War writing usually focuses on trauma and conflict, demonises the enemy, and celebrates one's comrades. Paul Fussell remarked, however, that his experience in World War II made a traveller out of him; his seminal study, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980) considers travel as a reaction to the confining conditions of war. Given the disillusioning nature of the Vietnam war for Americans and the political conflicts back home, US writing on the war is particularly self-centred. Travel writing, in contrast, focuses more on Vietnam. Paul Theroux was one of the first US travellers to visit Vietnam after the US withdrawal, and his observations about the country in The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975) set the tone for subsequent US writing about Vietnam. US war veterans were among the first to return to Vietnam when private travel to the country became possible, and their travel encounters with the former enemy constitute a revision of their war memories. They were followed by younger Americans and Vietnamese-Americans whose distance from the war gives their travel narratives a much different spirit.