During this period no single political or cultural event polarised the military SF field in the way the Vietnam War had in the 1970s. However, the subgenre was still heavily influenced, some would say haunted, by the Vietnam War and its legacy. This influence included a continuing effort to deal with the events and attitudes of the 1970s, as well as the reproduction and interrogation of the backlash against those events and attitudes prominent in the United States under the Reagan Administration. The first major theme of 1980s military SF is the Vietnam Syndrome and efforts aimed at Redeeming Vietnam.
Two polarised opinions emerged after the United States’ humbling, even humiliating, defeat in Vietnam. Many Americans – mostly liberals – believed that
44 Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, ‘Editor’s Introduction to: Reagan vs. The Scientists’ in There
Will Be War, Volume IV: Day of the Tyrant, ed. by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1985), p. 220 (p. 220). In addition to the There Will Be War series, Pournelle has ‘involved himself in various other anthologies and shared-world projects celebrating the contribution that politically motivated violence might make to the advancement of the space age.’ Significant among these was Pournelle’s Imperial Stars, a sister series to There Will Be War, which spun off from the latter’s success, and which was even more bellicose. Brian Stableford, Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature (Lanham, MD, and Oxford, UK: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), p. 272.
45 In particular the articles, Chris Hables Gray, ‘”There Will Be War”: Future War Fantasies and
Militaristic Science Fiction in the 1980s’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3 (November 1994), pp. 315-336., and Chad Andrews, ‘Technomilitary Fantasy in the 1980s: Military SF, David Drake, and the Discourse of Instrumentality’, Extrapolation, 56, 2 (2015), pp. 139-168.
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the U.S. had been ‘not only foolish but also morally wrong to engage in that prolonged and bloody conflict’ and that the exercise of American military power was invariably deplorable in intent and impact. Their critics insisted that the U.S. ‘could have prevailed if it had summoned the will to do so’, that it was the absence of American power that invited catastrophe, and that the U.S. ‘must never again back down in fights for freedom.’46 In terms of the popular culture products of these two views, the first acknowledged and dramatized the terrible consequences of war and militarism, while the second sought ‘an escape hatch from the historical cataclysm by revising the script’, reframing the traumas ‘as a basis of national redemption.’47
The term ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ came into use in the 1980s to signify the deep reluctance in American public opinion to support U.S. military intervention abroad. This was supposedly the result of the ‘traumatization’ suffered during the Vietnam War; by the early 1980s the war was seen primarily as an American tragedy. The reimagining, or misremembering, of Vietnam transformed the war into a ‘story of American victimhood’, centred on specifically American sacrifice and suffering, and into the cause of a profound national identity crisis.48 The Syndrome was
‘diagnosed’ by Reagan in a speech given to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention on 18 August 1980, in which he equated it not only with the public reluctance to support military interventions, but to feelings of guilt and doubt over the morality of America’s intentions and actions during the Vietnam War. Arguing that the U.S. had fought for a ‘noble cause’, he also outlined the lesson he had gleaned from Vietnam: if ‘we are forced to fight, we must have the means and the determination to prevail or we will not have what it takes to secure the peace’ and ‘we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let them win.’49 In revisionist scholarship and popular
46 James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 4.
47 Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture
(Boulder, NV: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), p. 102.
48 Christian Appy argues that the Vietnam War ‘shattered the central tenet of American national
identity – the broad faith that the United States is a unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power, but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people, and its way of life.’ Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York: Penguin Group, 2015), pp. xii-xiv.
49 Ronald Reagan, ‘Speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention’, 18 August 1980,
<http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/8.18.80.html> [accessed 2 February 2015]. Even in the late-1970s ex-President Nixon wrote, ‘We had won the war militarily and politically in
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culture, the war was recast as such a ‘noble cause’ during which the U.S. more or less fought itself, and lost. The U.S. loss was viewed as the result of what the Joint Chiefs of Staff called ‘self-imposed restraints’; victory would have been possible if not for the ‘influences of liberals in Congress, the anti-war movement, and the news media, who together stopped the military from unleashing its full powers of destruction.’ By the late 1970s and early 1980s, ‘this was not an esoteric doctrine, but a widely accepted explanation.’50 The noble cause rhetoric sought to revive
nationalist and militarist pride about the United States’ intervention in Vietnam.51
Pathologised in this way, the Vietnam Syndrome was seen to require a cure. While for many Americans ‘No More Vietnams’ embodied a dovish, neo-isolationist lesson – that the U.S. should ‘no longer interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries’ and ‘should not send its young men to fight and die abroad’ – some saw a cure to the Vietnam Syndrome lying in the opposite conclusion. Hawks thought the U.S should continue its internationalist foreign policy; however, should military force be necessary, the military ought not to be restrained, have clear political backing, and ‘have the full resources to wage war for clear, unambiguous victory.’52
If the Syndrome ever contributed to military inaction, it was certainly short-lived, and it never produced a drastic military downsizing or demobilization.53 After
Vietnam, ‘the arms race, huge military procurements, and proxy wars or armed interventions did not at all abate’ and Americans continued to support far-reaching military commitments, notably to NATO, and continued to pursue the containment of communism.54 Within five years of the end of the Vietnam War, American troops were sent into action in Grenada, which was followed by other ‘treatments’ of the
Vietnam. But defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory because we lost the war politically in the United States.’ Richard Nixon, The Real War (New York: Warner, 1980), p. 114., quoted in Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, revised edition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), p. 259. Something reemphasised in Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Avon Books, 1985), p. 97.
50 Gibson, Warrior Dreams, pp. 27-28.
51 Patrick Hagopian has discussed the ‘therapeutic discourse of wounds and healing’ used to
remember the war, the rhetoric which portrayed the war as a scar on American society that could only be healed through national reconciliation. Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing (Amherst, MA: University of Massachesetts Press, 2009), pp. 17, 19.
52 Lisa M. Mundey, American Militarism and Anti-Militarism in Popular Media, 1945-1970
(Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2012), p. 204. David L. Anderson, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 171.
53 Appy, p. 286.
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Syndrome, including the bombing of Libya, and President George W. H. Bush’s invasion of Panama and the Gulf War.55 This misinterpretation and reinvention of
the Vietnam War also led pundits and politicians to advocate and pursue a militarist policy in Central American with little concern of mass protest or substantial public objection.56
Gibson and Redeeming Vietnam
According to James William Gibson, American defeat in Vietnam shattered the United States’ ‘long record of martial victories and the pride those victories created.’57 Vietnam disrupted the American war story – which traditionally featured
an unprovoked attack followed by glorious victory, with ‘temporary victimhood… quickly forgotten in the glow of righteous retribution’ – because it ended in failure. This was not just failure to ‘achieve the war’s stated objectives, but failure to preserve the broad conviction that America was an exceptional force for good in the world.’58 Politically, the defeat in Vietnam meant that the post-World War Two
era of overwhelming American political and military power in global affairs – what
Time and Life magazine publisher Henry Luce had prophesied would be the ‘American Century’ – was over after only thirty years.59 Several other defeats in
the 1970s also hurt the United States, including the overthrow of the Shah in Iran and the Iranian hostage crisis, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, guerrilla war in El Salvador, and the OPEC oil embargo, all of which ‘pointed to a world no longer under American control.’ Culturally, the defeat created a crisis in American national identity. In a nation which had ‘always celebrated war and the warrior’ and
55 Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), p. 315.
However, one widely agreed upon lesson produced by the Syndrome – that the U.S. should not engage in long, inconclusive wars with high American casualties – remained in place for a quarter- century, before being forgotten after 11 September, 2001. From 1975 to 2000 the United States directly and indirectly engaged in dozens of military operations and wars around the world, yet the ‘total number of U.S. troops killed in warfare during that entire twenty-five-year period was under eight hundred.’ Appy, pp. 286-287.
56 Jim Neilson, Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative
(Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 3.
57 James William Gibson, ‘Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Novels of the 1980s’, Cultural
Critique, 19 (Autumn 1991), pp. 179-202 (p. 181)
58 Appy, p. 228.
59 Henry R. Luce, ‘The American Century’, LIFEMagazine, 17 February 1941, pp. 61-66.
Republished as Henry R. Luce, ‘The American Century’, Diplomatic History, 23, 2 (Spring 1999), pp. 159-171.
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in which martial victories had been ‘crucially important both to the national identity and to the personal identity of many Americans’, particularly men, Vietnam disrupted the American self-image. This disruption of cultural identity was intensified by other social transformations, like the civil rights and ethnic nationalist movements and their challenge to white racial dominance, the feminist movement and its challenge to traditional male and female roles, and massive waves of immigration from Mexico, Central America, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Taiwan.60
The 1970s were a time of deep crisis for traditional war mythology, and the cultural reproduction of war and the warrior. However, paradoxically, ‘the old mythology of American martial prowess and moral virtue instead assumed an even greater hold on the popular imagination’ during the 1980s, with the creation of images and narratives of new wars fought and won by American heroes. This period ‘saw the emergence of a highly energized culture of war and the warrior.’61 Gibson believes
that there were ‘two modes of victorious warfare’ created in novels, comic books, film and television, which assumed the validity of the conservative critique of U.S. policy during the Vietnam War. The first mode was the story of the ‘paramilitary’ warrior (examined in Chapter Seven). Paramilitary culture did not, however, redeem the military as an institution. Instead it frequently portrayed the military as ‘fundamentally corrupted by politics, careerism in the officer corps, and institutional rigidity’ and endorsing individual warriors or small elite groups rather than ‘the military’s code of high-technology, capital-intensive warfare.’ The second mode was the technothriller.62 Gibson’s arguments for the ‘regeneration through violence’ of the technothriller – in a way that legitimized the military as an institution – can also be applied to the majority of military SF during the 1980s.63 Although, as Gray writes, technothrillers are ‘more focused on current politics and near future war than the work of militaristic pure-sf writers… the themes are
60 Gibson, Warrior Dreams, pp. 10-11. Gibson, ‘Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Novels of
the 1980s’, pp. 179-202 (pp. 181-182).
61 Gibson, Warrior Dreams, pp. 24, 9. Gibson, ‘Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Novels of the
1980s’, pp. 179-202 (p. 183).
62 Gibson, ‘Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Novels of the 1980s’, pp. 179-202 (pp. 183-184). 63 Gibson, ‘Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Novels of the 1980s’, pp. 179-202 (p. 184).
Term adopted from Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).
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remarkably similar.’64 Among these similarities mentioned by Gibson are:
performing a ‘recuperative’ or healing function, attempting to restore the military to its former, pre-Vietnam War, position of prestige and power; ‘suturing’ the wounds of Vietnam-derived views of war, providing ‘good’ war stories of future battles to replace the ‘bad’ ones from Vietnam; and reassertion of the primacy of ‘heroic male warriors, magic weapons, and horrific enemies as fundamental cultural categories for Americans to conceptualize and experience the world.’65 The appeal of these SF ‘romances for men’ is the same as that of the more traditional action- adventure pulp novels – the glorification of war.66
Redeeming Vietnam and Military SF
While Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War anthologies were unabashedly fostering conservative ideas about the ‘noble cause’ and the liberal ‘betrayal’ in Vietnam, and reframing the American experience as a ‘victory’, Timothy Zahn was publishing novels that recuperated and redeemed post-Vietnam views of war and the soldier. At the same time Lucius Shepard and Karl Hansen produced works that bitterly did the opposite. In all these cases, however, the narratives overwhelmingly emphasised the experience of ‘American’ soldiers – depicted as victims or underdogs, or villains or murderers – rather than the Vietnamese (or their allegorical counterparts).
As in his Falkenberg series, in the There Will Be War anthologies Pournelle conducted a campaign against what he saw as the liberal betrayal of the United States in Vietnam and elsewhere. In the first volume, he writes that the U.S. Army in Vietnam never lost a battle, ‘except with the American news media’; evidenced by the Tet Offensive, ‘one of the most decisive victories in history’, which was portrayed in the news media as a tragedy and defeat. In addition, he mentions that South Vietnam fell to an invasion from the North and was ‘defeated by the Congress of the United States, which deliberately refused to allow the President to enforce the Geneva accords.’67 In the next volume Pournelle re-emphasises that the U.S.
64 Gray, pp. 315-336 (p. 322).
65 Gibson, ‘Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Novels of the 1980s’, pp. 179-202 (pp. 198-200). 66 Gibson, Warrior Dreams, p. 43.
67 Jerry Pournelle, ‘Mercenaries and Military Virtue’, in There Will Be War, ed. by Jerry Pournelle
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was ‘never defeated in the field, instead, it was ‘defeated at home, by an enemy we could not fight.’ The war was not lost because it was unwinnable, but because the nation ‘lost its will’: the United States withdrew, ‘the dominoes fell, and the blood baths began. It is no good telling ourselves anything different.’68 The third volume also stresses this view of victory in the guerrilla war being ‘thrown away’, of victory being portrayed as defeat by the news media, and of South Vietnam being ‘lost to the failure of U.S. will.’69 By the fifth volume, Pournelle was galvanised enough to argue that the U.S. Army had actually won the Vietnam War in 1972, only to be betrayed by ‘the contempt of the media and the intellectuals’, and a disinterested Congress, which led to the ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.70
Zahn’s Blackcollars and Cobras
Timothy Zahn, with a Master of Science from the University of Illinois (1975), had his first story appear in Analog in September 1979. Zahn published two relevant military SF series’ during the 1980s, the couplet comprising The Blackcollar (1983) and Blackcollar: The Backlash Mission (1986), and the trilogy comprising Cobra
(1985), Cobra Strike (1986), and Cobra Bargain (1988).71 Zahn took the view that
while the Vietnam War may have been wrong, America’s soldiers remained an honourable, patriotic, and capable force, and his works undertake the rehabilitation of the U.S.’s Vietnam forces.72 Both series serve to ‘redeem’ Vietnam-era views of
the soldier, providing heroic male warriors and good war stories, through narratives of ‘post-war’ soldiers refighting their respective conflicts.
In the first series, the blackcollars are elite, martial-arts-trained, nunchaku- and
shuriken-armed, drug-enhanced guerrilla warriors whose ‘wartime exploits were
68 Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, ‘Editor’s Introduction to: `Caster’, in There Will Be War, Volume
II: Men of War, ed. by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1984), pp. 101-106 (p. 101).
69 Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, ‘Editor’s Introduction to: The Miracle-Workers’, in There Will
Be War, Volume III: Blood and Iron, ed. by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1984), pp. 176-180 (pp. 177, 179).
70 Jerry Pournelle, ‘Introduction: Warriors and Statesmen’, in There Will Be War, Volume V:
Warrior, ed. by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr(New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1986), pp. 9-13 (p. 12).
71Blackcollar (2006) collects the The Blackcollar and Blackcollar: The Backlash Mission. The
Cobra Trilogy (2009) collects Cobra, Cobra Strike, and Cobra Bargain.
72 Stephen Prince, ‘Introduction: Movies and the 1980s’, in American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes
and Variations, ed. by Stephen Prince (New Brunswick and New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 1-21 (p. 15).
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legendary’ during the unsuccessful war of the Terran Democratic Empire against the Ryqril.73 The blackcollars received heavy combat training, ‘psychor’ mental
conditioning, and a special drug routine, including a drug code-named ‘Backlash’ for enhanced speed and reflexes.74 Forty years after the Ryqril invasion of Earth, the blackcollars of Plinry begin to take action aimed at redeeming their failure and restoring the independence of humanity. After the war they had suffered ‘ridicule and disrespect’, from a populace who understood neither their abilities nor their limitations, all while they had been ‘dying in degrees from the inside out as their hope of doing something meaningful faded with the years.’ Now they welcome the ‘chance to live as blackcollars again, the chance for one last shot at the collies and their Ryqril overlords.’75 Likewise, the blackcollars of Denver, encountered in The Backlash Mission, suffer the contempt of the civilian population after the war: unlike those of Plinry, however, they accept that the ‘war is over... and we lost’,
and decided to survive, by any means available. They make a living as hired-hands for organised crime organisations – a fact some of them, such as Kanai, were