Male Armor by Jon Robert Adams

Author:Jon Robert Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Upholding Masculinity: Homoerotic Desire, Racially Integrated Units, and the Masculine Collective

For some reason, when William Broyles Jr. admits of the Vietnam War that “I miss it because I loved it, loved it in strange and troubling ways” (56), his confession reads much less apologetically than Michael Herr's “I'd loved it there too” (251). Perhaps one reads apology in Herr's statement because it comes near the end of more than 250 pages that are seemingly more about the conflict than Herr's response to it, or because the statement follows shortly upon Herr's admission that in Vietnam he'd “performed half an act” (251). Regardless of its inflection, Herr's desire to group himself with others who loved Vietnam belies his need to establish his “being there” as authentic.

In her analysis of Dispatches, in The Remasculinization of America, Susan Jeffords engages Michael Herr's need to establish his presence in Vietnam and therefore his ability to accurately write about the war. Jeffords categorizes Herr's book as a personal experience narrative, a documentary form that alienates those who did not participate. This classification echoes William Broyles Jr.’s statement that the purpose of Vietnam narratives is “not to enlighten, but exclude” (61), and reflects the common sentiment that “being there” entails combat service. Herr's account, Jeffords claims, tracks his movement from a position of exclusion to a place within what Jeffords terms the “male collective,” where soldiers “successfully [eliminate] hierarchical difference by subordinating it to the broader value system of ‘survival’” (54). The military relies upon the disavowal of difference Jeffords describes to create unit cohesion. Jeffords classifies Herr's position outside as a feminine one and his entry into the collective as his masculinization.2

While Jeffords's demarcation between feminine and masculine subject positions proves useful in analyzing the text, the idea that Herr makes a demonstrable and irretractable move from one gender position to another deserves reconsideration. Jeffords's reading can be easily plotted through the text. Herr admits within the first couple of pages that he was not “ready for this” (5) and shortly thereafter that he “never belonged” (10) in the jungle. Later, Herr recounts “developing a real war metabolism,” one in which “you slow yourself down when your heart tried to punch its way through your chest” (14), which indicates the nascent stages of his movement into the male collective Jeffords theorizes. Herr later claims that “it took me a month to lose that feeling of being a spectator to something that was part game, part show” (168), which seems to describe Jeffords's move from exterior to interior, until one notes that Herr has presaged this statement more than a hundred pages earlier with the memory that “after a year I felt so plugged in” (31). So Herr's traverse from a feminine subject position outside to a masculine one inside at one point takes but a month yet at another requires a year?

I compare these quotations to demonstrate the difficulty of plotting Herr's disjointed text on the developmental model Jeffords posits. But other aspects of Dispatches

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