In the short story, “Quan Loi” Larry Burke depicts personal and psychological problems experienced by soldiers and war veterans returned home. What is most revealing for the author’s purposes is the soldier’s reaction to his return from war in light of the expectations adhering to the traditional role. Whatever force their testimony about the War and their own actions within it may have had was deflected by the allowances made for their “condition.” These soldiers’ desperate exploits were given full media coverage and rendered the “violent vet” image empirically valid. Unfortunately, that image was indiscriminately bestowed upon the veterans. Such recognitions intensified the soldiers’ anomie by reinforcing their low social status.
The main message of the author is that the emotional problems are caused by a silence which is crucial for understanding one facet of the soldiers’ role conflict. Like their fathers, upon whose accounts their young imaginations fed, the soldiers were bursting with stories of courage, fear, compassion, sacrifice, and camaraderie. “These components are basic to war, even an otherwise tainted one. The soldier, like certain kinds of handicapped or deformed individuals in American culture, went overlooked and unheard. That self-understanding is (on the level of public awareness at which memorial statues are aimed) clearly a matter of arriving at a single, overarching account of what the war meant to a people. This narrative comprises the history a society tells itself and, most importantly, its future members.
Having physically survived the “invisible enemy” in Vietnam, the soldiers returned to face a different enemy, an alien town and a new society. The problem of alienation and social isolation can be seen as the emotional blindness of soldiers. As predicted by Burke, the soldier’s self-conception underwent drastic alteration to conform to the possibilities inherent in his new role–itself an “artifact” of the war conflict. The experience in Vietnam had been located in a specific, socially constructed world very unlike the world they were reentering. This distinction is one upon which a great deal hinges. This description implies that the specific, socially constructed world of the war zone gave rise to a new world view; that this world view encompassed characteristically war roles to which were attached war identities; and that these identities embraced a distinctive psychological reality. Burke critically portrays that soldiers follow the same behavior patterns as their peers. Burke portrays that this selection indicates that in certain social contexts identity is socially enjoined rather than socially bestowed. Person selection accomplished based on only a superficial knowledge of individuals frequently results in a less than ideal correspondence between institutional requirements and individual aptitude. Nonetheless, the large social agglomerates of the public sphere have at their disposal the requisite mechanisms of social control, including a virtual monopoly of the instruments of violence, to ensure compliance. An appreciation of the particular roles at stake in this instance of role dispossession and role reassignment.
In sum, Burke creates an excellent work that vividly depicts the war and its real impact on soldiers and local people. Not only the content of the recognitions that structure an individual’s identity requires specification but also the social location of those actors sponsoring the recognitions. That is, we need to take such recognitions out of the ether called “society” and pinpoint them in the particular social environment in which they actually operate. Drawing a lesson from the War requires more than performing a belated act of mourning for the past. What happened and how it ought to be regarded is beyond their abilities to bear witness, but the living and the yet unborn will be called on to bear that witness.
References
Burke, Larry. (2002). “Quan Loi”. Vietnam War Generation Journal 2 (1).