Chapter 9

Epimilitary Culture:
Vietnamese-American Literature
and the Alternative to Paramilitary
Culture

Todd Madigan

Abstract Throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, American

cultural representations of war were highly militarized. When war was depicted in
popular culture, state-sanctioned armed forces were the central actors. However,
toward the end of the Vietnam War, two new cultural paradigms emerged, and each
of them de-centers the role played by the military. Across the broader American
society, paramilitary culture began to proliferate. In this paradigm, war is portrayed
as distinct-from-but-analogous-to the conventional wars fought by the military. It
features a hyper-masculine male who uses extreme violence against his enemies and
the perceived enemies of society, and this warrior metes out his vigilante justice in
mundane civilian settings. My argument is that at the same time paramilitary culture
was surfacing, another paradigm was emerging within the Vietnamese-American
community, a paradigm I call epimilitary culture. In this cultural form, the warrior is
almost entirely absent, and while war remains central, combat violence is radically
deemphasized. In fact, the idea of war itself is expanded to include not just the armed
forces, but all of the additional aspects and consequences of armed conflict (e.g.,
both the resulting political, economic, environmental, and humanitarian crises, and
the more mundane aspects of civilian life during wartime).

9.1 Introduction

Throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, American cultural

representations of war were highly militarized. When war was depicted on television,
in movies, in literature, or through other media, state-sanctioned armed forces were
the central actors. But toward the end of the Vietnam War, this began to change.
What emerged at that time was a new manner of representing war, one in which the
traditional military was marginalized. In fact, under this new cultural paradigm, the
concept of war itself began to shift. In what has since become known as paramili-
tary culture, representations of war retain the centrality of violent conflict, but this

T. Madigan (B)
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 200 King Street Apt. 4H, Greensboro, NC 27406, US

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 169
B. West and T. Crosbie (eds.), Militarization and the Global Rise of Paramilitary Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5588-3_9
170 T. Madigan

violent conflict is now engaged in primarily by solitary men in contexts that range
far from traditional battlefields. However, at the same time paramilitary culture was
making its appearance, another representation of war was also coming into being.
This second cultural form, epimilitary culture, characterizes war as something far
more expansive than the pitched battles of military units. In fact, it pushes combat
entirely to the side and instead focuses on all the corollaries of these clashes between
armed forces, including the political, economic, environmental, and humanitarian
devastation that accrue in wartime, as well as the more quotidian elements of civilian
and family life that persists even in the midst of traditional warfare. In both paramili-
tary and epimilitary cultural representations, formal military institutions are shunted
to a subordinate status.
While paramilitary culture has been the dominant American cultural response to
the Vietnam War, a response that has now become the principal paradigm of war in
the USA, epimilitary culture also issued from the war. But epimilitary culture was
the Vietnamese-American response to the war and has been largely overshadowed in
popular culture and overlooked by scholarship of the war-and-culture nexus. In both
the paramilitary and epimilitary cultural forms, war is re-conceived by decentering
the role played by the traditional military. However, the relative lack of popular and
scholarly attention paid to Vietnamese-American cultural productions1 has given
the impression that paramilitary culture is the only real alternative to militarized
conceptions of war and that the “warrior” is the only viable war-related archetype.
These impressions have obscured paramilitary culture’s contingent nature and left it
nebulously defined for lack of a contrasting concept.
The present chapter remedies these omissions by elucidating the notion of epimil-
itary culture and, in the process, sharpens our understanding of paramilitary culture.
After some initial remarks about the demilitarization of war in popular culture, I
provide a summary account of paramilitary culture from its emergence in the late
stages of the Vietnam War to its present manifestations. I follow this by arguing
that the literature of Vietnamese-Americans ought to be considered as exemplifying
epimilitary culture, and having established the outlines of this cultural form, I proceed
to contrast it with paramilitary culture through an empirical analysis of a wide range
of Vietnamese-American literary works. In doing so, I demonstrate the differences
between the essential traits of the central characters in paramilitary and epimilitary
cultural representations, the differing nature of violence depicted in each, and their
contrasting manner of narrative resolution.

9.2 The Demilitarization of War in Popular Culture

In the twenty-first century, many working within the purview of the militarization
thesis continue to see societal violence—both literal violence and that depicted in

1 Other potential sources of epimilitary culture beyond that of the Vietnamese-American are surely
likely but remain beyond the scope of this particular chapter.
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 171

fictive popular culture—as a reflection of the state-sanctioned violence of regular

military forces. Tom Digby ties the “cultural ideal of ‘man the warrior’” (Digby,
2014: 52) directly to the traditional military, even when—as exemplified by the
twenty-first century US armed forces—that military has shifted to “the use of drones
and other remote control weaponry” (Digby, 2014: 53). Similarly, writing of the
USA’s prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the opening decades of the twenty-
first century, Marianna King asserts that these “Continuous wars … have amplified
the warrior-ideal as the model for boys and men” (King, 2021: 215), an ideal that she
links to the extreme violence of rampage school shooters who identify with “warrior
heroes” (King, 2021: 218). In both these cases, notions of the warrior are tied directly
to the activities of the institutional military.
In contrast to this vein of the militarization thesis, the concept of paramilitary
culture has proven to be a more nuanced paradigm for theorizing the relationship
between war and popular culture, a paradigm that loosens the traditional military’s
alleged grip on society’s notions of war and the warrior. In Warrior Dreams (1994),
Gibson provides the seminal articulation of this paradigm, describing its development
in the USA over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. This new cultural form is reified
through narratives depicting what Gibson calls the “New War” and its corresponding
new warrior ideal:
The New War culture was not so much military as paramilitary. The new warrior hero was
only occasionally portrayed as a member of a conventional military or law enforcement
unit; typically, he fought alone or with a small, elite group of fellow warriors. Moreover,
by separating the warrior from his traditional state-sanctioned occupations—policeman or
soldier—the New War culture presented the warrior role as the ideal identity for all men.
(Gibson, 1994: 9, italics in original)

In his explication of paramilitary culture, Gibson provides a rich analysis of the

novel manner in which notions of war—and social conflict more broadly—have been
constructed in the USA during the late twentieth century, and one of the most striking
attributes of this new way of understanding and representing violent conflict is its
decentering of the military. This minimization of the armed services runs counter to
the central role the military had played in American popular culture since the Civil
War (Gibson, 1994: 18). Instead, paramilitary culture positions its new warriors
outside traditional institutions and chains of command or at the very least—when
they are part of government institutions—portrays them as acting against what they
see as overly restrictive bureaucratic regulations and ineffectual social norms in
their relentless quest for justice. Depictions of this new warrior in popular culture
include Clint Eastwood’s Detective Callahan in the Dirty Harry films, Bruce Willis’s
John McClain in the Die Hard films, Mel Gibson’s characters in both the Lethal
Weapon and Mad Max films, the protagonists of the Punisher and Vigilante comic
series, and Jack Ryan in Tom Clancy’s techno-thriller novels. However, it is Sylvester
Stallone’s titular role in the Rambo films that provides the epitome of this new
warrior ethos (Gibson, 1994: 5). This preeminence is in part because, as Gibson
argues, “paramilitary culture can be understood only when it is placed in relation to
the Vietnam War” (Gibson, 1994: 10), for not only was the new warrior born from
172 T. Madigan

America’s culturally traumatic experience in Vietnam,2 but he has also in some sense
become stranded there in a revisionist historical fantasy, compulsively fighting and
re-fighting “the battles of Vietnam a thousand times, each time winning decisively”
(Gibson, 1994: 11).
One of the consequences of Gibson’s work is the opening up of the concept of
war for reconceptualization. This theorizing points to the possibility of conceiving
of war as something other than the material, event-based notion of kinetic military
conflict. For example, Gibson describes how paramilitary culture is illustrated in
the Death Wish films through the character played by Charles Bronson, a mild-
mannered, middle-aged architect whose wife and daughter are brutally victimized.
As a result of this experience, Bronson’s character “finds new meaning in life through
an endless war of revenge against street punks” (Gibson, 1994: 5, italics added). In
another example, the film Year of the Dragon, Mickey Rourke plays a police detective
and Vietnam veteran. Exasperated by both Asian-organized crime and the police
department politics that seem to abet the criminals, Rourke’s character declares:
“This is a fucking war and I’m not going to lose it, not this one. Not over politics.
It’s always fucking politics. This is Vietnam all over again” (Gibson, 1994: 33–34,
italics added). He then proceeds to “simply ignore the rules and wage war against
crime according to his own standards” (Gibson, 1994: 34, italics added). In both
Death Wish and Year of the Dragon, the New War and its warriors are divorced from
traditional warfare and the institutional military: They are firmly in the realm of
paramilitary culture.
Since the publication of Gibson’s Warrior Dreams in 1994, narratives based in
paramilitary culture have remained just as prominent as they were during the two
decades following the Vietnam War. For example, while Robert Ludlum wrote his
first Bourne novel in 1980—and followed those with two more by 1990—the books
went on to be serialized by subsequent writers, the 15th in the series being published
in 2020. In these books, Jason Bourne is a CIA-trained assassin who now battles
forces of oppression untethered from his former agency. These books spawned five
popular films from 2002 through 2016 starring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne.3 The
original novel also gave rise to a television film in 1988 and a ten-episode television
series in 2019. Another former CIA-trained warrior in the paramilitary mold is Bryan
Mills, the protagonist of the cinematic Taken series (three films from 2008 through
2017). Played by Liam Neeson, Mills must single-handedly save his family members
from a variety of international organized crime syndicates (on a frightfully recurring
basis). In the spirit of Taken’s vigilantism, two Equalizer films—both starring Denzel
Washington as a former US-Marine-turned-vigilante—were released in 2014 and
2018, and these were based on a television series that ran from 1985 to 1989. Then,
in 2020, Equalizer returned to television, this time starring Queen Latifah. And in

2 See “Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory and the Vietnam War” for a detailed examination of
how the war gave rise to cultural trauma in both the Vietnamese-American community and the
broader American society (Eyerman et al., 2017).
3 In The Bourne Legacy (2012), Jeremy Renner plays Aaron Cross, the protagonist of this particular

Bourne installment.
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 173

the fictional world created by the John Wick films, Keanu Reeves plays a solitary
assassin in three films released between 2014 and 2019, the third of which bears the
subtitle, Parabellum, which translates from Latin as “prepare for war.” Indeed, as of
this writing, a fourth and fifth installment of the John Wick films is planned, the first
of which is set to be released in 2022 (D’Alessandro, 2020). These and countless
other paramilitary narratives proliferate in books, films, television shows, and video
games, saturating the broader American culture.4 And they all depict solitary men
who, detached from state-sanctioned military units, wreak terrible violence and death
on those who would otherwise violate the social contract; they wage a forever war
against organized criminals, hitmen, terrorists, and rogue governmental operatives.
Based on this decoupling of the conventional military from the notion of war
in popular culture, I suggest that the paramilitary culture elaborated by Gibson is
but one possible cultural form available to a society in which the military’s social
role is diminishing (cf. Shaw, 1991). In fact, a closer examination of the origins
of paramilitary culture in the USA—namely the culturally traumatic5 experience
of the Vietnam War—reveals the existence of another paradigm for theorizing the
interaction between war and popular culture, what can be thought of as epimilitary
culture. On the one hand, the notion of paramilitary (“para-” denoting “distinct-
from-but-analogous-to” the military) connotes the idea that war is distinct-from-
but-analogous-to the conventional wars fought by the military (e.g., the New War is
fought by violent men using a variety of weapons to kill and maim their enemies; they
are distinct-from-but-analogous-to soldiers in the military). On the other hand, the
notion of epimilitary (“epi-” denoting “in addition to” the military) connotes the idea
that war comprehends not just the armed forces and combat, but all of the additional
aspects and consequences of that conflict (e.g., the resulting political, economic,
environmental, and humanitarian crises, as well as the more mundane aspects of
civilian life during wartime). While paramilitary culture is always represented by
violent conflict, it need not be associated with traditional warfare. Contrariwise,
while epimilitary culture is always associated with traditional warfare, it need not be
represented by violent conflict. In both cases, the role of the traditional military in
war is negligible.

9.3 The Notion of War in Vietnamese-American

Scholarship

As Gibson lays out the genesis of paramilitary culture in the USA, he repeatedly
asserts (in various ways) that “More often than not, New War stories have their
origin in the Vietnam War” (Gibson, 1994: 33). Due to this central role played by the

4 Note that other chapters in this volume describe how paramilitary culture has burgeoned outside
the USA.
5 For an exploration of divergent theories of cultural trauma, see “Theories of Cultural Trauma”

(Madigan, 2020).
174 T. Madigan

Vietnam War, an exploration of the Vietnamese-American representations of that war

provides an ideal opportunity to examine the ways in which another social group has
responded to the same phenomenon. It can illuminate the contingent nature of how
war is socially constructed in popular culture and show that the broader American
New War and its warrior ideal are not determinative of a demilitarized culture, but
instead comprise merely one of its potential expressions. This is an important finding,
one that has been largely overlooked by scholars of both military and paramilitary
cultures. What’s more, a comparison of both the Vietnamese-American and broader
American representations of the Vietnam War can serve to draw the concept of
paramilitary culture in sharper relief.
Although the USA fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the South Vietnamese for
nearly a decade of the long war in Vietnam,6 the experience of the South Viet-
namese—in spite of fielding at its zenith over one million soldiers and boasting
the fourth largest air force in the world (Dumbrell, 2012: 169)—has been almost
completely erased from the broader American narrative of the Vietnam War. This
erasure is all the more notable for the fact that vast numbers of Vietnamese people
fled the ascendent communist regime as refugees between 1975 and 1992 in highly
publicized, harrowing escapes. Some of the high estimates regarding the number of
people who fled put the number at two million (Vo, 2006: 115), and in the case of the
USA, by 2000 there were some 1.2 million residents of Vietnamese descent (Campi,
2005), nearly all of whom had come as a direct result of the war (or were born to
those who had). Even Gibson’s Warrior Dreams, with its sustained attention to the
importance of the Vietnam War to understanding contemporary American popular
culture, makes no mention of the Vietnamese who sought refuge in the USA after
the surrender of South Vietnam in 1975.
The novels, comics, films, television series, video games, and other cultural
productions that embody paramilitary culture tend to focus on the warrior side of
the war/warrior binary. That is to say, the one near-constant throughout paramilitary
culture is a hyper-masculine male7 who uses extreme violence against his enemies
in his quest for justice. The context of this struggle can be associated with a conven-
tional war (e.g., the Saigon Commandos book series), but more often than not it

6 The US military had been actively involved in Vietnam since the 1940s, when the country was
still considered a colonial possession of France that was being occupied by the Japanese during
World War II. After the Japanese left at the end of that war and Ho Chi Minh rallied the Vietnamese
under the banner of communism, the USA fought against the Vietnamese communists, first through
the direct funding of the French war effort, then through the active support of the newly formed
Republic of Vietnam (i.e., “South Vietnam”). Finally, in 1965, the USA committed large numbers of
ground troops to South Vietnam with numbers peaking at around 540,000 in 1969 before eventually
withdrawing in early 1973.
7 Exceptions to the new warrior’s being male include Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien films,

Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in the Terminator films, Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider video games
and films (played by Angelina Jolie in 2001 and 2003 and Alicia Vikander in 2018), and Charlize
Theron’s Imperator Furiosa in the Mad Max: Fury Road film. It is notable that in recent decades,
the percentage of women who fit the new warrior ideal seems to have increased in paramilitary
culture, but through the second decade of the twenty-first century, the depictions continue to be
overwhelmingly male.
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 175

has no connection to military conflict between nation states; instead, the new warrior
metes out his justice in cities large and small, at home and abroad, in apartment build-
ings and shopping malls, on commuter trains or commercial airlines, and throughout
office high rises and rustic farms. However, the cultural productions that embody
epimilitary culture tend to focus on the war side of the war/warrior binary. This
means that the salient feature of epimilitary culture is some direct connection to war
(traditionally conceived), and while combat violence can occasionally be depicted,
warriors are almost wholly absent from these narratives.
When Vietnamese-American scholars in the humanities reflect on war, it is clear
that many are articulating a particular conception of war that—like that of the paramil-
itary—differs in several key ways from the notion of war that held sway in Amer-
ican popular culture for the century prior to the Vietnam War. The first of these
differences takes issue with the traditional notion’s reduction of war to a geograph-
ically restricted and temporally limited period of active military combat. Yên Lê
Espiritu, a Vietnamese-American professor of ethnic studies, protests this “event-
based” conception of war, pointing out that “When wars begin and end are not
indisputable historical facts but contested rhetorical positions” (Espiritu, 2016: 18).
Regarding the Vietnam War, she writes the following: “I challenge dominant repre-
sentations of the war as being contained within a specific timeframe, particularly as
being ‘over and done with’” (2016: 18). In fact, claims about the unbounded, ongoing
nature of the Vietnam War constitute a refrain within the Vietnamese-American
community (e.g., Hayslip, 1989; Huynh, 2015; Nguyen, 2015b; Tran, 1978, 2009).
Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American professor of English, American
studies, and ethnicity—as well as the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—
takes issue with the way that the traditional notion of war views its object as defined
primarily by the violent clashes between military forces, largely ignoring the many
other factors that are inextricably bound up in large-scale armed hostilities. He argues
that “To think of war solely as combat, and its main protagonist as the soldier, who
is primarily imagined as male, stunts the understanding of war’s identity” (Nguyen,
2016a: 9). Instead, Nguyen, along with other Vietnamese-American scholars, asserts
that our concept of war should also include the myriad civilians and refugees who are
part and parcel of the phenomenon, as well as the suffering that spreads its tentacles
through subsequent generations of all those involved (Boyle & Lim, 2016; Espiritu,
2014; Nguyen, 2016a). To do otherwise, Katharya Um claims, is to force a “too-early
foreclosure upon the wounds of war” (Katharya Um, cited in Espiritu, 2014: 20).

9.4 New War Stories and True War Stories

As noted above, the concept of paramilitary culture serves as one possible paradigm
for theorizing the interaction between war and popular culture, one that is not
bound solely to considerations of the actions and institutions of the military. Gibson
describes the specific narrative that animates paramilitary culture as the New War.
This narrative burgeoned in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and is made manifest
176 T. Madigan

through “the repetition of key features in thousands of novels, magazines, films, and
advertisements” (Gibson, 1994: 13). Brenda Boyle points to a related finding through
her analysis of what she calls the “canon of Vietnam War narratives” (Boyle, 2016:
176) that were produced in the USA from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.
She describes how these narratives typically focus on individual male soldiers and
“exclude humanizing portrayals of Vietnamese people, whether from the North or
South; exclude female characters except as Vietnamese prostitutes, Viet Cong, or
American nurses; and conclude that American soldiers were victimized physically,
psychologically, morally, or politically” (Boyle, 2016: 176). Gibson notes that these
canonical depictions of victimized fighting men, which can be generalized beyond
the confines of traditional warfare, ultimately celebrate “the victory of good men over
bad through armed combat” (Gibson, 1994: 5). To this Gibson adds that integral to
the paramilitary plot is an eroticized fixation on explicit violence:
the same publishing houses that marketed women’s romance novels on grocery and drugstore
paperback racks rapidly expanded their collections of pulp fiction for men. Most were written
like hard-core pornography, except that inch-by-inch descriptions of penises entering vaginas
were replaced by equally graphic portrayals of bullets, grenade fragments, and knives shred-
ding flesh…. A minimum of 20 but sometimes as many as 120 such graphically described
killings occurred in each 200-to-250-page paperback. (Gibson, 1994: 6–7)

Viet Thanh Nguyen acknowledges that this focus on combat violence is a common
manner of narrating war in the broader American society, but he immediately demurs:
“many people in many places think of soldiers and shooting when they think of war
stories, but that is too narrow a definition” (Nguyen, 2016a: 224). In stating this
objection, Nguyen signals a move away from the traditional notion of war, what
Gibson calls “Old War” stories with their focus on virtuous soldiers fighting as
integrated parts of official military units. And this movement is similar to that of the
New War narrative in that it decenters regular military forces in war-related popular
culture. However, the alternative that Nguyen describes as moving away from the
Old War narrative is nevertheless not a move in the direction of the New War stories
that have taken hold of the broader American representations of war. Instead of
paramilitary culture’s New War stories, Viet Thanh Nguyen describes and advocates
for what he calls “true war stories”:
If American war stories favor frontline vividness, for many Southeast Asians, wherever they
happen to be, true war stories are both vivid and banal, since the war was fought on their
territory, in their cities, on their farms, within their own families. For some readers or viewers,
theses kinds of true war stories are not “good” war stories because they lack the vicarious
thrill found in stories about soldiers killing and being killed. Simply by their content, true war
stories about civilians and banalities are, for some, boring and hence forgettable. (Nguyen,
2016a: 232, italics added)

Because these “true war stories” told by Vietnamese-Americans lack the titillating
brutality of the New War stories of paramilitary culture, they can sometimes scarcely
appear to be war stories at all. Yet, many Vietnamese-American scholars agree that
Vietnamese-American cultural productions, and its literature in particular, “cannot
avoid the war, because the literature is inseparable from the Vietnamese American
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 177

population itself, which exists only because of the war” (Nguyen, 2016a: 199–200;
see also Pelaud, 2011; Espiritu, 2014). It can therefore be surmised that while a great
deal of Vietnamese-American popular culture is properly conceived of as centered
on war, it both (1) decenters the role played by the military (thereby breaking with
the traditional, mid-twentieth century representations of war in American popular
culture) and (2) is not focused on an ultra-violent, hyper-masculine, solitary man
who is perpetually meting out mortal justice to the perceived enemies of his society
(thereby differing from the paramilitary paradigm). While the Vietnam War precipi-
tated paramilitary culture throughout the broader American society, it also gave rise
to epimilitary culture within the Vietnamese-American community.

9.5 Epimilitary Culture in Vietnamese-American

Literature

While a significant amount of Vietnamese-American popular culture can be char-

acterized as dealing in one way or another with war (and therefore suitable for
comparison with paramilitary culture), it is important to note that this categoriza-
tion is nuanced. In her analytical introduction to Vietnamese-American literature,
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud acknowledges the centrality of the Vietnam War to Vietnamese-
American literature even as she problematizes it, arguing that among other draw-
backs, this association of Vietnamese-American literature with the war in Vietnam
“limits the range of cultural expressions available to Vietnamese Americans” (Pelaud,
2011: 132). The issue is complex, and Pelaud does an admirable job in tracing
the dialectic that exists between Vietnamese-American writers and their broader
American readership:
Vietnamese American literature, like all discourses, occurs in dialogue with prior discourses
and is in correspondence with a socially constructed reader. For Vietnamese American liter-
ature, the national crisis triggered by the unfavorable outcome of the Viet Nam War makes
this dialectic even stronger. (Pelaud, 2011: 119)

With these subtleties duly noted, Viet Thanh Nguyen puts this issue regarding
Vietnamese-American literature as explicitly and trenchantly as possible: “At the
center of it all is the war” (2016b: 51). In what follows, I survey a sizable portion of
the field of Vietnamese-American literature in order not only to support the claim that
war is central to it, but also to show that the concept of “war” as used in Vietnamese-
American literature is both more expansive than the “event-based” version of the
concept and entails a marginalization of the institutional military. To do this, I focus
on the novels, short stories, memoirs, poetry, graphic novels, and essays that are
anthologized, collected, analyzed, or otherwise recommended by scholars in the field,
including Janette (2011), Nguyen (2017a), Pelaud (2011), and Tran et al. (1998), as
well as the Vietnamese-American arts associations diaCRITICS and the Diasporic
Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). Through an examination of these works, we
can allow the literature to provide its own testimony regarding these claims.
178 T. Madigan

9.5.1 Vietnamese-American Literature as War Literature

To begin, there are innumerable acknowledgments within Vietnamese-American

literature (and Vietnamese diasporic literature more broadly) of the fact that many of
the characters who populate its pages were conceived and/or born during the war in
Vietnam, as when Little Dog, the protagonist of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,
refers to his mother as “a direct product of the war in Vietnam” (Vuong, 2019:
53). Similarly, in Ru, the character Nguyen An Tinh begins her narrative with the
following annunciation:
I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey,
when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along
with the sound of machine guns. I first saw the light of day in Saigon, where firecrackers,
fragmented into a thousand shreds, colored the ground red like the petals of cherry blossoms
or like the blood of the two million soldiers deployed and scattered throughout the villages
and cities of a Vietnam that had been ripped in two. (Thúy, 2012: 1)8

But this historical contingency applies only to that large but finite number of
individual characters who were literally conceived and/or born during the war when
“war” is understood as an event. A larger group—that comprising all those who fled
Vietnam as a result of the war—can in a slightly different respect also be considered to
owe their present existence to the war. This sort of claim can be glimpsed in passages
such as the one in Catfish and Mandala when the protagonist, reflecting that his
presence in North America is a direct result of the Vietnam War, thinks to himself
that “the war … made no sense except for the one act of sowing me here” (Pham,
1999: 8–9). In “The Boat,” the character Mai notes the war’s presence through its
psychological impact revealed in the face of a child: “The war had that to answer for
too, she’d thought—the stone hard face of a child barely six years old” (Le, 2004b:
235). Similarly, in Blue Dragon, White Tiger, the protagonist Minh sees war “in the
sad looks of the child beggars in the street. It was in the fierce eyes and bony arms
of the poet Long An, in the extravagant lives of the generals in power, in the fear and
suffering he saw everywhere” (Tran, 1983: 47). In East Eats West, Andrew Lam, the
son of a former South Vietnamese military officer, meditates on the idea that
History, for my father and for those men who still wear their army uniforms at every
communal event, has a tendency to run backwards, to memories of the war, to a bitter
and bloody struggle whose end spelled their defeat and exile. And it holds them static in a
lonely nationalistic stance. They live in America but their souls are still fighting an unfinished
war in Vietnam. (Lam, 2010: 65)

While these physical and emotional links to the war are common in Vietnamese-
American literature, there are other descriptions that are more metaphysical in nature,
descriptions of how war works on the spirit. In The Gangster We Are All Looking
For, the protagonist, referring to her mother, notes that “When I was born, she cried

8Kim Thúy fled Vietnam by boat in 1978 at the age of ten and settled as a refugee in Canada, so
her work is “Vietnamese-American” in a broader sense that encompasses all of North America.
Regardless, her novel Ru falls squarely into the epimilitary genre I describe, here.
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 179

to know that it was war I was breathing in, and she could never shake it out of me”
(Thúy, 2004: 87). Later in the novel, she asserts that “War has no beginning and no
end. It crosses oceans like a splintered boat filled with people singing a sad song”
(Thúy, 2004: 87). Similarly, in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Little Dog recalls
in a letter to his mother that when he was five or six years old, “I didn’t know that
the war was still inside you, … that once it enters you it never leaves” (Vuong, 2019:
4). Later, he marvels that “to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially
in Vietnamese, but entirely in war” (Vuong, 2019: 32). And this infusion of war into
the very being of the Vietnamese-American people is sometimes further depicted as
being transmitted into everything they have created in their new home in USA and
coloring their every experience. In The Lotus and the Storm, as Minh walks through
the parking lot of a mall in a Little Saigon district near Washington D.C. some three
decades after the defeat of his native South Vietnam, he sees that “Everything before
me, Little Saigon itself, is part of war’s debris” (Cao, 2014: 20).
With so much of Vietnamese-American literature thus tinctured with war (to say
nothing of the war’s impact on the collective identity represented in that literature),
it is critical to understand that this war is not simply confined to event-based military
conflict. Instead, “true war stories” (i.e., those that comprise Vietnamese-American
literature) cast a wider net, one in which the role of the institutional military is greatly
diminished.9 Viet Thanh Nguyen spells this out when he writes the following:
A true war story should tell not only of the soldier but also what happened to her or him after
war’s end. A true war story should also tell of the civilian, the refugee, the enemy, and, most
importantly, the war machine that encompasses them all. But when war stories deal with the
mundane aspects of war, some may see them as “boring” or simply not even about “war.”
These conventional perceptions divide the heroic soldiers who seem to be the primary agents
of war from the citizens who actually make war happen and who suffer its consequences.
(Nguyen, 2016a: 224)

9.5.2 An Expanded Concept of War and the Decentering

of the Military

A substantial portion of book-length Vietnamese-American literature references the

Vietnam War.10 Even The Book of Salt, which seems prima facie incapable of refer-
ence to the war (since it is set halfway around the world in Paris in the 1920s and
1930s, well before the war began), still manages to have the Vietnamese protago-
nist recall a chance encounter with a man on a bridge, a man whom the reader is
led to believe is actually Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Vietnamese Communist

9 In order to find works by Vietnamese-Americans that center the military, one must usually turn
toward other genres, such as histories or the memoirs of the military leadership of South Vietnam,
such as Nguyen Cao Ky’s How We Lost the Vietnam War (1978), Tran Van Don’s Our Endless War:
Inside Vietnam (1978), or Tran Van Naut’s An Loc: Unfinished War (2009).
10 While many individual Vietnamese-American essays, short stories, and poems make no obvious

reference to the Vietnam War, book-length collections will often include at least a few pieces that
do.
180 T. Madigan

Party, leader of the communist war effort until his death in 1969, and symbol of the
Vietnam War. However, while most of the references to the war are less oblique,
even in these more explicit references the military and its battles are still more often
than not represented at a distance or make only sporadic appearances. In fact, even
in narratives that are in part or in whole set amidst the hostilities between South
Vietnam and the Vietnamese communists, the military is still more often than not
an ancillary presence in a central plot that is otherwise indifferent to the military. To
give but one typical example, in We Should Never Meet, two principle characters—a
nun and a duck farmer named Truc—are driving toward Saigon during the war when
the following scene unfolds:
The skinny two-lane road was growing crowded. Truc eased his foot on the brake and
frowned…. Poking his head out the window, Truc found the problem: three dark green
military tanks encamped on the roadside with matching soldiers, unsmiling, hugging their
guns protectively against their chests. He settled back in his seat. Perfect. They stumbled
upon a checkpoint. These routine inspections could take hours. (Phan, 2004: 67)

Instead of depicting war as primarily about active combat between military forces,
it is more commonly encountered in Vietnamese-American literature as just one
among the many prosaic realities that serve as a backdrop for the more salient reali-
ties of daily life. At the same time, this literature also temporally reformulates war,
identifying it as the ever-present animating force behind fathers languishing in reed-
ucation camps years after the fighting has ended; families’ desperate escapes from
postwar communist Vietnam by boat (including all the horrors they experience in
the process); the deplorable conditions of refugee camps; and the trauma of trying
to begin life again as sudden immigrants unexpectedly thrust into an often hostile
USA. In all of these situations connected to and encompassed by the more expansive
“true war stories,” the military is peripheral, if it is mentioned at all.
Of course, there is much in Vietnamese-American literature that is less traumatic,
and it often takes place in settings that are more pedestrian. There are depictions
of food preparation, homework, petty theft, sex, watching TV, shopping, conversa-
tions with friends, sleeping, gift-giving, domestic arguments, and the whole host
of other humdrum moments that make up a life, whether in the USA, Vietnam, or
elsewhere. And because a vast number of these more-or-less banal episodes occur
within narratives that either start in, flash back to, or otherwise recall the period of
active hostilities between South Vietnam and the Vietnamese communists—thereby
linking each of these episodes together—it makes sense to agree with the assertion
made by Vietnamese-American scholars that these narratives are, in fact, war stories
that nevertheless decenter the role of the military.
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 181

9.6 The Principle Differences Between Paramilitary

and Epimilitary Culture

Having argued that a significant portion of Vietnamese-American literary production

is tied to the Vietnam War, and that the military is decentered in this war-bound
literature, I will now turn toward demonstrating three of the principal differences
between the epimilitary narratives of Vietnamese-American literary production and
the paramilitary narratives of the broader American society. These differences can
be found in (1) the traits of the central characters, (2) the representation of violence,
and (3) the manner of narrative resolution.

9.6.1 Traits of the Central Characters

The first critical distinction between paramilitary and epimilitary narratives can be
seen in the traits of the central characters. In paramilitary cultural productions (as
noted above), the protagonist is, with very few exceptions, an ultra-violent, hyper-
masculine, solitary adult male who is perpetually dispensing mortal justice to his
society’s perceived enemies (Gibson, 1994: 29–32). And to put it plainly, this char-
acter simply does not exist in Vietnamese-American literature. Instead, at the center
of most of this literature are boys (e.g., the mixed-race son of a Vietnamese mother and
American father growing up poor and discriminated against in postwar Vietnam in
The Unwanted; the submissive comic-book-reading 13-year-old who dutifully helps
his parents run their small grocery store in “War Years”), girls (e.g., the young, junk-
food-obsessed girl in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner; the compassionate young refugee
who weaves blankets for her impoverished countrymen back home in Vietnam in The
Little Weaver of Thái Yên Village; the clairvoyant in She Weeps Every Time You’re
Born; the traumatized young refugee with a volatile family life in The Gangster
We Are All Looking For), women (e.g., the young mother who travels back to the
Vietnam of her birth in The Best We Could Do; the entrepreneur in Fallen Leaves; the
researcher and translator in The Sacred Willow; the woman determined to marry her
daughter off to a Viet Kieu11 in Love Like Hate), and the elderly (e.g., the grandfather
who works in a San Francisco sex shop in “Love Leather”; the grandmother in The
Monkey Bridge; the aging professor in “I’d Love You to Want Me”; the old man
attacked and robbed during a home invasion in We Should Never Meet).
On the occasion that young men are central, they are anything but hyper-masculine
or ultra-violent. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the protagonist is an introspec-
tive gay man who as a teenager has a short love affair with an older boy; in The
Book of Salt, he is a gay cook who lives with and serves women; in The Lotus and
the Storm, he is married to a businesswoman who “alone is in charge of our family
finances” (Cao, 2014: 1); in Vietnamerica, he is a video-game-playing illustrator;

11Viet Kieu is the term used by the Vietnamese to designate the “overseas Vietnamese,” that is, the
Vietnamese who fled Vietnam after the end of the war and who now live abroad.
182 T. Madigan

in “The Other Man,” he is a gay refugee newly arrived in San Francisco who is
called “pretty” (Nguyen, 2017b: 24); in Catfish and Mandala, he likes “going to the
movies and reading novels in cafés” (Pham, 1999: 10) and tries to make sense of
his life by riding his bicycle through Vietnam; in “Georgia Red Dirt,” he is a gay
man confronted unexpectedly with the homophobia of his lover’s sister; in Love Like
Hate, he is a manager-trainee at a McDonald’s in Philadelphia.
When the protagonist or another central character is an adult male during the
period of active hostilities in Vietnam, he has frequently eschewed the military alto-
gether. In Blue Dragon, White Tiger, the protagonist has—at the beginning of the
novel, which is set in 1967—left Vietnam, resigned from the South Vietnamese
foreign service, and has joined the opposition to the war in the USA. In the graphic
novel, Vietnamerica, the protagonist’s South Vietnamese father avoided military
service by becoming a teacher and landscape painter. In Dragonfish, the protago-
nist is a white American who was “saved” from the war only because he turned 18
just as the USA ended the draft toward the end of their direct combat role in Vietnam.
In We Should Never Meet, the father of one of the central characters is killed at the
hands of the South Vietnamese for speaking out against the government. This spurred
the father’s sons to join the Viet Cong in their armed struggle against South Vietnam.
However, we never hear anything else about these sons. Instead, the story’s central
character, Truc, is the one adult son who did not take up arms. Rather, he took over
the prosperous family business of raising and selling ducks.
Those characters who actually do serve in the military are often depicted as office
subordinates as opposed to lethal warriors, characters who would feel more at home
in suburbia than in the killing fields. In Dragonfish, here is Hong’s description of her
first husband’s role in the South Vietnamese military in 1974 immediately after their
wedding:
We set up a simple home in the barracks, with two twin beds pushed together and a modest
bathroom and kitchen your father built himself. He worked at his office during the day, but
we spent our evenings together, reading the newspaper or an old novel to each other. (Tran,
2015: 56)

In The Lotus and the Storm, Mai—whose father, Minh, is in the South Viet-
namese military and is a central character of the novel—relates how “Almost every
morning before school, we take his hands and walk him to his jeep” (Cao, 2014: 16).
Indeed, most of the descriptions of Mai’s father’s military service during the war
are administrative. Here is his own account: “I was in charge of the paperwork….
My windowless office was hot” (Cao, 2014: 40). Similarly, the protagonist of The
Sympathizer, who is a communist mole in the South Vietnamese military, spends
the war as a paper-pushing aide-de-camp to a South Vietnamese general: “My office
was down the hallway from the General’s” (Nguyen, 2015a: 12). However, as noted
above, these roles in the armed services are rare, and even when they do appear, they
are marginalized; the vast amount of Vietnamese-American literature is simply not
focused on the military at all.
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 183

9.6.2 Nature of Depicted Violence

The second key difference between the paramilitary and epimilitary narratives
revolves around the depiction of violence. In paramilitary narratives, the principal
action just is violence. And not only is this violence sustained throughout the course
of paramilitary narratives, but each of its episodes of violence becomes a focus. It is
graphic and personal with most of it occurring at close range, easily within the range
of firearms (or, in Rambo’s case, within the range of a bow and exploding arrow).
Yet even this distance is inevitably closed as the brutality spirals toward struggles
involving knives and various blunt objects, drawn-out hand-to-hand combat, and very
often climaxing in strangulation, where the bodies of the foes are pressed closely
against one another. The resulting carnage from these episodic acts of ferocity is
a staple of paramilitary culture. Gibson notes that “The scores of scenes featuring
dismemberment, torture, and shredded bodies oozing fluids are absolutely central”
(Gibson, 1994: 29).
Through all of its intimate combat—what has often been referred to fittingly as
an “orgy of violence”—one of the most salient points about paramilitary culture
is that the violence is actual. This fact might appear too obvious to state, but as I
demonstrate below, this is not always the case in Vietnamese-American literature.
Like paramilitary narratives, epimilitary narratives also include elements of violence.
They are by definition related to the military and war, the latter being a quintessen-
tially violent enterprise. However, in contrast to paramilitary narratives, with its
emphasis on close-range, actual violence, the violence that occurs within epimilitary
narratives is more often than not either distant or notional (or both).
While war is ever-present in epimilitary culture, actual battle is de-emphasized,
and often this de-emphasis takes the form of physical distance (either real or
perceived). In Monkey Bridge, the school-age sisters residing in Saigon agree that
“The war is far away” (Cao, 2014: 5), while in The Lotus and the Storm, a young
mother—also in Saigon—remarks just days before Vietnamese communists’ tanks
roll through the city, “I could almost believe the war was in another country” (Cao,
1997: 94). In The Gangster We Are All Looking For, the protagonist, who is born in
Vietnam, remarks that when she was born, “My father was away, fighting in the war”
(Thúy, 2004: 85), even though he was in fact fighting this war in their own country.
In “The Boat,” the protagonist describes the war as “something always happening
elsewhere” (Le, 2004b: 238). Even when the violence of war is made more concrete
in terms of its specified violence, it is still regularly portrayed as far off. In Blue
Dragon, White Tiger, the narrator relates that when the protagonist, who had been
in the USA for four years, returns to Vietnam in 1967, “the war was no longer an
abstraction to him,” for he now “heard it in the thunder of the distant guns” (Tran,
1983: 47). Similarly, in The Sympathizer, the protagonist notes that “distant booms
rattled the windows” as a result of enemy artillery igniting a fuel depot several miles
away (Nguyen, 2015: 12), and that on his way to the airport in Saigon, “Somewhere
far away, a heavy machine gun fired in uneven, staccato bursts” (Nguyen, 2015a:
29).
184 T. Madigan

In Vietnamese-American narration of violence, even more common than actual

violence that occurs at a distance is violence that is merely notional. This is violence
that is narrated not as happening in the characters’ present, but is instead remem-
bered, recalled in conversation, or simply generalized as atmospheric. This is another
common form of de-emphasizing violence in epimilitary narratives, a trope that is
rare in paramilitary culture. In The Gangster We Are All Looking For, the protagonist
describes how her father occasionally gathered with other Vietnamese refugees who
had settled in the USA: “Sipping bottles of beer, they talked about the war and how
it was their youth and how when it ended it was like waking from a long dream
or nightmare” (Thúy, 2004: 113–114). She also describes how her father “remem-
bered the bodies that floated through the rice paddies during the war. All those badly
buried bodies” (Thúy, 2004: 157), while her mother “had heard a story about a girl
in a neighboring town who was killed during a napalm bombing” (Thúy, 2004: 86).
In the opening of Monkey Bridge, the protagonist, who had worked as an orderly in a
South Vietnamese military hospital during the war, recalls with vivid clarity the death
of a doctor, medics, and operating-room crew when an unexploded grenade lodged
in a patient’s eviscerated stomach detonated on the operating table (Cao, 1997: 2).
In She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, the narrator relates that a character’s “father
had told a story about a group of boy soldiers on the front lines in Cambodia who
had stomped a fellow soldier to death for snoring too loudly” (Barry, 2014: 105). In
Where the Ashes Are, the notion of violence becomes diffuse, like a miasma that has
saturated social life in the city of Da Nang: “From dawn until late at night, Da Nang
was all business. Most distasteful was the atmosphere of war—military vehicles and
uniformed men were always around town, loud and violent and dangerous” (Nguyen,
1994: 17).
But even beyond such recollections, war and violence in Vietnamese-American
literature are also sometimes simply imaginary; it is violence that has never actually
occurred. In “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” a
Vietnamese-American student in a graduate writing workshop in Iowa is regularly
urged by his friends and instructors to write “ethnic lit.” As he walks home with a
friend, they discuss the pros and cons of the genre. He imagines posing for his book
jacket photograph standing in a rice paddy, wearing a traditional Vietnamese conical
hat. Then, his imagination drifts toward the war, although he is not old enough to
remember it: “I pictured my father in the same field, wearing threadbare fatigues”
(Le, 2004a: 9). And as he pictures his father in the midst of the war, someone in a
group of young people fooling around on a front porch shoots him in the back of the
thigh with a small pellet gun. First, he imagines the blood and penetrating wound
caused by the pellet (no such wound existed). Then, he reports, “I imagined turning
around, advancing wordlessly up the porch steps, and drop-kicking the two kids….
I would kill one of them” (Le, 2004a: 10); but in reality, he simply keeps on walking
with only a light sting on his thigh. In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the protagonist, Bui,
is trying to picture his on-again, off-again lover’s father (whom he has never met),
a retired US Marine who had completed two tours of duty in Vietnam. He can hear
her father’s voice booming at him in imagined dialogue, berating him for his lack of
sexual prowess:
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 185

“And you failed to satisfy my beautiful daughter?”

“I was drunk, sir!”
“I was drunk, too, when I fucked your mother twenty years ago!”
“You’re a better man than I am, sir!”
“You’re damn right. I was in the United States Marines!”

Bui then he imagines the following: “I emptied a clip from my AK-47, bent down
to retrieve the loose change from his pocket, doffed my V.C. helmet, and disappeared
into the jungle” (Dinh, 2000a: 55). In a similar vein, the protagonist of “Dead on
Arrival,” the young son of a South Vietnamese police colonel, fantasizes about killing:
“I cannot wait to tuck an M-16 under my arm and pump a clip into the bodies of my
enemies. I can see them falling backward, in slow motion, leaping up a little, from
the force of my bullets” (Dinh, 2000b: 187). And in “Chopped Steak Mountain”
[i.e., “Hamburger Hill”], a ghost who haunts that bloody battlefield fantasizes about
combat: “Every now and then a plane flies over, always an airliner, never a Huey or a
Chinook, and I aim my M-16 at its gleaming fuselage, just in jest, and make popping
sounds with my mouth. Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!” (Dinh, 2000c: 201).
Another variation on this notional decentering of war violence is its depiction as
mere fiction within the narrative. In “Saigon Pull,” the protagonist recalls literally
fabricating combat violence when interviewed by a communist military reporter: “the
b.s. I fed the pretty reporter from Quan Doi Nhan Dan [“The People’s Army”] about
commandeering an ARVN [“Army of the Republic of Viet Nam”] tank and plowing
it into their own bunker—‘You should have heard them scream, miss’” (Dinh, 2000d:
119). In the graphic novel, Vietnamerica, the protagonist’s father—a military-aged
man—is shown in prison being interrogated and beaten by his American guards.
Suddenly, as he is being dragged out to be executed, a voice chimes in (completely
surprising the reader): “Annnd CUT!” (Tran, 2010: n.p.). The next illustration shows
a movie director standing next to the lighting and film crew as he announces “Great
job, everyone! Nailed it on the first take” (Tran, 2010: n.p.). In The Sympathizer, the
protagonist himself is roped into assisting as a technical consultant in the filming of
a Vietnam War movie. In one of the final scenes, after the American Green Berets
killed her son, who was a Viet Cong fighter,
The enraged Mama San seized her son’s AK-47, blasted Shamus [a Green Beret] from hip
to shoulder blades, then fell victim herself to Bellamy [another Green Beret], who, spinning
quickly, unloaded the last of his magazine. So she died in slow motion, bathed with fourteen
lifelike squirts of blood from squibs rigged by Harry [the production designer], who provided
her with two more to bite on. This tastes awful, she said afterward, mouth and chin covered
in the fake blood.… Was I convincing? (Nguyen, 2015a: 170-171)

On the rare occasion that actual violence on the part of a central character is
shown directly in Vietnamese-American literature, its effects are often indeterminate
or ineffectual. In The Lotus and the Storm, one of the main characters, a South
Vietnamese paratrooper, describes his only act of violence in the entire novel in the
following: “For most of the day, I fired a machine gun in the direction of the enemy
with my eyes only half open” (Cao, 2014: 101). Similarly, anemic is the account
from “Saigon Pull,” where a veteran of the North Vietnamese Army recalls “the time
186 T. Madigan

I stepped on an American soldier but did not shoot him, and how it bothered me
for weeks afterward” (Dinh, 2000d: 119). While in paramilitary culture the “Post-
Vietnam mythic heroes are completely enraged when they fight, and the violence
they inflict is shocking” (Gibson, 1994: 29), in Vietnamese-American literature, on
the exceedingly rare instance that a central character kills someone, it looks like the
following: “I raised my gun. I don’t remember what I was aiming for. Suddenly it felt
like I’d been punched in the shoulder, my arm jerking back from the recoil” (Barry,
2014: 145).12
Whereas direct combat violence on the part of central characters is uncommon in
Vietnamese-American literature, acts of refusal to engage in combat violence on the
part of soldiers are easier to find. In his essay, “Child of Two Worlds,” Andrew Lam
describes how:
at the end of the Vietnam War many of us did not die protecting river and land as we, in our
rituals, games, poetry, and songs, had promised ourselves and our ancestors’ spirits…. for
all the promises made, we did the unimaginable: we fled. (Lam, 2005: 4)

In “The Boat,” the protagonist describes the following: “in March 1975, the Amer-
icans were long gone and the Southern regiments in tatters—soldiers deserting, taking
cover as civilians, fleeing into the jungles. Escape on every man’s mind” (Le, 2004b:
257). Similarly, on the last day of the war, Kim Há notes in her memoirs, “Bitterly, I
watched former soldiers who were so afraid that they took off their military uniforms
on the street and ran home in only their underwear” (Há, 1997: 18). A more posi-
tive spin is put on this refusal to fight in the graphic novel, The Best We Could Do:
“communist forces entered Sai Gon without a fight, and no blood was shed. Perhaps
Duong Van Minh’s surrender saved my life” (Bui, 2017: 216). And dramatically,
toward the end of The Sympathizer the protagonist is being tortured in a reeduca-
tion camp, when inexplicably, the commandant responsible for this torture unties the
protagonist’s hand and places a loaded revolver in it. With his hand wrapped around
the protagonist’s, the commandant raises the pistol to his own head and, “pressing
the muzzle between his eyes,” says “You are the only one who can do this for me”
(Nguyen, 2015a: 347). The protagonist hesitates, and the commandant demands,
“Now pull the trigger” (2015a: 347), but the protagonist cannot do it, and the pistol
drops to the floor. It would be difficult to draw a sharper distinction between these
characters who populate epimilitary narratives and those New War warriors who
stalk through paramilitary narratives carrying with them their propensity to “fight
with a savagery lacking in their predecessors” (Gibson, 1994: 29).

12 Interestingly, far more graphic than the occasional attenuated violence doled out by the central
characters of Vietnamese-American literature is that which this literature portrays the Americans
wreaking upon the natural environment during the Vietnam War. As just one example: “The massive
trees along the side of the road were devoid of leaves, killed by defoliants dropped from Amer-
ican planes. Twisting upward, their dried branches silhouetted against the sky looked like bones
from some prehistoric animal. Here and there a few charred, lifeless trunks still stood, oddly and
grotesquely, between bomb craters scattered at random over the flat fields. Each cavity had the
same circumference and gave the appearance of having been meticulously bored into the ground
by patient hands. The winds carried down the distressed cries of wild birds as they circled over the
forest for prey” (Nguyen, 1994: 109).
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 187

9.6.3 Manner of Narrative Resolution

The final crucial distinction between paramilitary and epimilitary cultures is the
manner of their narrative resolutions. As Gibson demonstrates, the antagonists in
narratives of the New War are portrayed as irredeemably evil. They must be stopped,
and to be stopped, they must be killed.13 This provides paramilitary narratives with
the template for only one conclusion, a conclusion that is repeated without fail in
every New War story. However, like the hydra’s heads, for every foe vanquished by
the new warrior, another appears in his place. For this reason, Gibson remarks that
at the conclusion of “most New War stories, … the ‘adult’ male is not reintegrated
into society. He may fight on behalf of society, but he is not part of it. His enemies
are never fully defeated: the New War never ends” (Gibson, 1994: 41). This, of
course, is in part what fuels the easy serialization of many of the New War stories.
There will always be new villains for Batman to battle. When Gibson published his
work in 1994, there had already been three Rambo films. However, Rambo keeps
coming back. In 2008, the character returned for a fourth film, and in 2019—with
actor Sylvester Stallone in his mid-seventies—a fifth was released. Truly, the New
War never ends.
This is in stark contrast to epimilitary narratives, where conclusions are usually
depicted as the protagonist’s coming to terms with their struggles rather than defeating
their foes. There is frequently in this resolution a sense of both liberation and a
determinedness to both accept the past and face the future. Often these moments are
small and intimate, and in many cases they are shared with the protagonist’s family.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For closes with the protagonist remembering
a beautiful moment alone on the beach with her parents. On Earth We’re Briefly
Gorgeous concludes poignantly with an adult son sitting face to face with his mother
as she looks at him with a profound love. In the graphic novel Vietnamerica, the
Vietnamese-American protagonist begins as self-absorbed, distant from his parents,
and uninterested in his family heritage. However, he eventually makes the decision
to embrace that heritage and in doing so comes to appreciate and honor his parents
by joining them on a trip back to Vietnam to meet his extended family. Nowhere in
these resolutions do we see the protagonist exulting in the destruction of his enemies.
Instead, wisdom has been hard won and the fruit is hope for the future.
In Monkey Bridge, the story closes with the young protagonist coming to terms
with her mother’s depression and suicide. Lying in bed on the night before her first
day of college, through the long repressed tears of both loss and acceptance, the
protagonist is finally able to look forward with new eyes to the start of a hopeful
new chapter in her life, thinking resolutely, “I would follow the course of my own
future” (Cao, 1997: 260). Similarly, in Love Like Hate the narrator remarks on the
protagonist’s blossoming independence on the day before her eighteenth birthday:
“From there she could see the future. She was the future” (Dinh, 2010: 238). Even
in a work like The Sympathizer, in which the protagonist suffers greatly at the hands

13Occasionally, the antagonists are in the end eliminated from society through imprisonment, but
only after they have suffered bodily violence at the hands of the protagonist.
188 T. Madigan

of his antagonist, it is through that suffering that he is enlightened and determines to

commit himself, full of hope, “always to sympathize with the undesirables among
the undesirables” (Nguyen, 2015a: 365).
In some cases, there is not only acceptance, but even reconciliation between erst-
while enemies, something verboten in the paramilitary genre. In Quí Du’c Nguyen’s
memoirs, Where the Ashes Are, the author recounts how when he was nine years old
his home was raided by the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive. The Viet Cong seized
Nguyen’s father, bound him, and took him away to a labor camp where he would
remain imprisoned for the next twelve years—long after the Vietnamese communists
had secured their victory over South Vietnam. In the meantime, Nguyen escaped to
the USA where he began his long, arduous struggle as an impoverished teenage
refugee without his parents. Yet even after all that, Nguyen muses at the end of
his account that “Oddly, I never blamed ‘the Communists’ for robbing me of my
homeland. I had once feared them as ruthless enemies, but somehow I could never
hate them” (Nguyen, 1994: 147). In We Should Never Meet, Mai and Huan, a pair
of Vietnamese-Americans who had come to the USA as orphans in 1975, return to
Vietnam for the first time two decades later. They had both grown up in the foster
care system and had lived difficult lives. The trip back to Vietnam is a painful one,
opening up old wounds, but Mai reflects: “‘It’s not our parents’ fault. Or anyone
else’s here. How could I be angry with them, expect them to do right when there
was no such thing? When everything here was wrong?’ Huan nods, understanding.
‘It was a war’” (Phan, 2004: 243).
Perhaps it is The Lotus and the Storm that depicts this tendency toward reconcilia-
tion—and the healing that comes with it—most perspicuously. The novel comprises
a set of interconnected perspectives of a father and his daughter, and the story centers
on their lives in Vietnam during the war and then on a brief period three decades
later when they have settled in the USA. The father (Minh) was an officer in the
South Vietnamese military, and his friend and superior officer, Phong (Minh later
discovers), had been a communist agent. Toward the end of the novel, Phong visits
Minh in the hospital. It has been decades since the two have seen each other, and
working through his anger and sense of betrayal, Minh finally reaches the following
point with Phong sitting by his side:
I knew right then that I was confronted with two irreducible possibilities, each equally strong
but mutually diverging. I could obdurately redouble the weight of our past, or I could release
it…. [Phong] was giving me the power to forgive or not forgive him. I closed my eyes and
nodded. He knew I had seen into his depths. And that in so seeing him, I did not turn away.
Yielding to faith, I gave him the gift of acknowledgment instead. And just like that, almost
simultaneously, I felt it too, as if the gift were equally mine. (Cao, 2014: 241)
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 189

9.7 Conclusion

Paramilitary and epimilitary cultures offer two different paradigms for understanding
the interaction between war and popular culture in the USA. In their current mani-
festations,14 each was born from the conflagration of the Vietnam War during a time
when the social role of the military was diminishing, and each presents a vision in
which the traditional institutions of the armed forces are decoupled from war. But
as I have argued, these paradigms represent two entirely disparate cultural forms.
On the one hand, the concept of paramilitary (“para-” denoting “distinct-from-but-
analogous-to” the military) entails the idea that war is distinct-from-but-analogous-to
the conventional wars fought by the military (e.g., the New War is fought by violent
men using a variety of weapons to kill and maim their enemies; they are distinct-
from-but-analogous-to soldiers in the military). On the other hand, the concept of
epimilitary (“epi-” denoting “in addition to” the military) entails the idea that war
comprehends not just the armed forces and combat, but all of the additional aspects
and consequences of that conflict (e.g., both the resulting political, economic, envi-
ronmental, and humanitarian crises, and the more mundane aspects of civilian life
during wartime). The result of these differing conceptions of war is then matched with
differing conceptions of what it means to experience war. While paramilitary culture
is always represented by violent conflict, it need not be associated with traditional
warfare. Contrariwise, while epimilitary culture is always associated with traditional
warfare, it need not be represented by violent conflict. In both cases, the role of the
traditional military in war is similarly negligible, though what is meant by “war” and
“the experience of war” is quite different.
In his elaboration of paramilitary culture, Gibson emphasizes that it is not simply
an interesting genre within popular culture. Rather, he claims that it has “presented
the warrior role as the ideal identity for all men. Bankers, professors, factory workers,
and postal clerks could all transcend their regular stations in life and prepare for heroic
battle against the enemies of society” (Gibson, 1994: 9, italics in the original). Given
the ultra-violent, antisocial nature of this ideal, given its willingness to move lethal
violence from the battlefield to the realm of daily civilian life, and given its insistence
that its perceived enemies must in all cases be annihilated, its position as a model to
be emulated is problematic to say the least. Although it is beyond the scope of this
chapter, it is still reasonable to wonder whether the epimilitary culture epitomized
by Vietnamese-American literature might provide an alternative model to emulate,
one that is more thoughtful, compassionate, and conducive to both individual and
social flourishing amidst the complex web of triumphs and tragedies that constitute
our lives. Vietnamese-American novelist and scholar Monique Truong observes that
“Emerging out of a social and historical moment of military conflict, Vietnamese
American literature speaks of death and other irreconcilable losses and longs always
for peace—peace of mind” (Truong, 1997: 219), whereas in paramilitary culture, “so

14It is beyond the scope of this project to speculate on whether these cultural forms might have
existed in the past, either in the USA or elsewhere.
190 T. Madigan

great is that hunger for killing that the New War appears to be a war without end”
(Gibson, 1994: 29).

References

Barry, Q. (2014). She weeps each time you’re born. Vintage.

Boyle, B. M. (2016). Naturalizing the war: The stories we tell about the Vietnam war. In B. M. Boyle
& J. Lim (Eds.), Looking back on the Vietnam war (pp. 175–192). Rutgers University Press.
Boyle, B. M., & Lim, J. (2016). Introduction: Looking back on the Vietnam war. In B. M. Boyle &
J. Lim (Eds.), Looking back on the Vietnam war (pp. 1–17). Rutgers University Press.
Bui, T. (2017). The best we could do: An illustrated memoir. Abrams Comicarts.
Campi, A. (2005). “From refugees to Americans.” Immigration policy center. Retrieved from https://
www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/research/RefugeestoAmericans.pdf
Cao, L. (1997). Monkey bridge. Penguin.
Cao, L. (2014). The lotus and the storm. Viking.
D’Alessandro, A. (2020, August 6). Deadline. Retrieved from https://deadline.com/2020/08/john-
wick-5-confirmed-by-lionsgate-sequel-will-be-shot-back-to-back-with-fourth-installment-120
3006611/
Digby, T. (2014). Love and war: How militarism shapes sexuality and romance. Columbia University
Press.
Dinh, L. (2000a). “Uncle Tom’s cabin.” In Fake house. Seven Stories Press.
Dinh, L. (2000b). “Dead on arrival.” In Fake house. Seven Stories Press.
Dinh, L. (2000c). “Chopped steak mountain”. In Fake house. Seven Stories Press.
Dinh, L. (2000d). “Saigon pull.” In Fake house. Seven Stories Press.
Dinh, L. (2010). Love like hate. Seven Stories Press.
Dumbrell, J. (2012). Rethinking the Vietnam war. Palgrave.
Elliot D. V. M. (1999). The sacred willow: Four generations in the life of a Vietnamese family.
Oxford University Press.
Espiritu, Y. L. (2014). Body counts: The Vietnam war and militarized refuge(es). University of
California Press.
Espiritu, Y. L. (2016). “Vietnamese refugees and internet memorials: When does war end and who
gets to decide?” In B. M. Boyle & J. Lim (Eds.), Looking back on the Vietnam war (pp. 18–33).
Rutgers University Press.
Eyerman, R., Madigan, T., & Ring, M. (2017). “Cultural trauma, collective memory and the Vietnam
war.” Croatian Political Science Review. 54(11–31).
Gibson, J. W. (1994). Warrior dreams: Paramilitary culture in Post-Vietnam America. Hill and
Wang.
Há, K. (1997). Stormy escape: A Vietnamese woman’s account of her 1980 flight through Cambodia
and Thailand. McFarland.
Hayslip, L. L. (with Jay Wurts). (1989). When heaven and earth changed places: A Vietnamese
woman’s journey from war to peace. Doubleday.
Huynh, B. (2015, February 1). Cited in Roosevelt, Margot “Little Saigon’s war of words.” Orange
county register. Retrieved from https://groups.google.com/g/caulacbobaochi/c/oLpI0A2ZVoQ?
pli=1
Janette, M. (Ed.). (2011). My Viêt: Vietnamese literature in English, 1962-Present. University of
Hawai’i Press.
King, M. (2021). The Crisis of school violence: A new perspective. Michigan State University Press.
Ky, N. C. (1978). How we lost the Vietnam war. Cooper Square Press.
Lam, A. (2005). “Child of two worlds”. In A. Lam. (Ed.) Perfume dreams, (pp. 3–18). Heyday
Books.
9 Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature … 191

Lam, A. (2010). East eats west: Writing in two hemispheres. Heyday Books.
Lam, A. (2013). “Love leather.” In A. Lam (Ed.) Birds of paradise lost. Red Hen Press.
Le, N. (2004a). “Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” In The boat,
(pp. 3–28) Vintage Books.
Le, N. (2004b). “The Boat”. In The boat, (pp. 230–272). Vintage Books.
Lieu, N. T. (2011). The American dream in Vietnamese. University of Minnesota Press.
Lim, J. (2017a February 10). “Vietnamese and Vietnamese American lit: A primer from Viet
Thanh Nguyen.” Literary Hub. Retrieved from https://lithub.com/vietnamese-and-vietnamese-
american-literature-a-primer-from-viet-thanh-nguyen/
Lim, J. (2017b). The other man. In V. T. Nguyen (Ed.), The refugees (pp. 23–48). Grove Press.
Lim, J. (2017c). War years. In V. T. Nguyen (Ed.), The refugees (pp. 49–72). Grove Press.
Lim, J. (2017d). I’d love you to want me. In V. T. Nguyen (Ed.), The refugees (pp. 99–124). Grove
Press.
Madigan, T. (2020). Theories of cultural Trauma. In C. Davis & H. Meretoja (Eds.), The Routledge
companion to literature and Trauma (pp. 45–53). Routledge.
Nguyen, B. M. (2007). Stealing Buddha’s dinner. Penguin.
Nguyen, K. (2002). The unwanted: A memoir of childhood. Little Brown and Company.
Nguyen, Q. D. (1994). Where the Ashes are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese family. Bison Books.
Nguyen, V. T. (2015a). The sympathizer. Grove Press.
Nguyen, V. T. (2015b, April 25). “Our Vietnam war never ended.” New York Times.
Nguyen, V. T. (2016a). Nothing ever dies: Vietnam and the memory of war. Harvard University
Press.
Nguyen, V. T. (2016b). “What is Vietnamese literature?” . In B. M. Boyle & J. Lim (Eds.), Looking
back on the Vietnam war (pp. 50–63). Rutgers University Press.
Pelaud, I. T. (2011). This is all I choose to tell: History and hybridity in Vietnamese American
literature. Temple University Press.
Pham, A. X. (1999). Catfish and Mandala: A two-wheeled voyage through the landscape and
memory of Vietnam. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Phan, A. (2004). We Should Never Meet. Picador.
Shaw, M. (1991). Post-military society: Militarism, demilitarization, and war at the end of the
twentieth century. Temple University Press.
Spieldenner, A. (2000). “Georgia red dirt.” In M. Janette, (Ed.). My Viêt: Vietnamese literature in
english, 1962-Present, (pp. 187–192) 2011. University of Hawai’i Press.
Thu-Lâm, N. T. (1989). Fallen leaves. Cited In M. Janette, (Ed.). My Viêt: Vietnamese literature in
english, 1962-present, (2011). University of Hawai’i Press.
Thúy, K. (2012). Ru. Random House Canada.
Thúy, lê thi diem. (2004). The gangster we are all looking for. Knopf.
Tran, B., Truong, M. T. D., & Khoi, L. T. (Eds.). (1998). Watermark: Vietnamese American poetry
and prose. Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
Tran, G. B. (2010). Vietnamerica: A family’s journey. Villard.
Tran, K. T. (1977). The little weaver of Thái-Yên village. Children’s Book Press.
Tran, V. D. (1983). Blue dragon, white tiger: A tet story. TriAm Press.
Tran, V. D. (1978). Our endless war. Presidio Press.
Tran, Van Nhut (with Christian Arevian). (2009). An Loc: The unfinished war. Texas Tech University
Press.
Tran, V. (2015). Dragonfish. W. W. Norton.
Truong, M. (1997). Vietnamese American literature. In K.-K. Cheung (Ed.), An interethnic
companion to Asian American literature (pp. 219–246). Cambridge University Press.
Truong, M. (2003). The book of salt. Houghton Mifflin.
Vo, N. M. (2006). The Vietnamese boat people, 1954 and 1975–1992. McFarland and Company.
Vuong, O. (2019). On earth we’re briefly gorgeous. Penguin Press.