Enlarging the Vietnam Canon: Sigrid Nunez’s For Rouenna

Much critical discussion about American writing of the Vietnamese war has centered on issues attending the emergence of a Vietnam canon—frequently alleged to be the product of some unholy collusion between the literary academy and the popular-culture media. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, as someone who has studied the literature in question for nearly three decades at the intersections of professional criticism and the popular-culture marketplace, I continue to see any such symbiosis as a positive development. In the literary dimension, it has energized American writing with a body of texts distinguished by their ongoing attempts to combine an intense experiential authority with the conscious embrace of new strategies of imaginative invention, thus navigating between quotidian neo-realisms and the endless play of the postmodern text. Just as important, in the larger attempt to connect representations of the war and national understanding, it has become the basis of a sustained inquiry into the forms and processes of cultural mythmaking across a vast range of genres and modes.

On these terms, one must welcome a text that markedly enlarges the possibilities of our understanding of the war through the complex interweavings of literary art and popular-culture myth. Such a work is For Rouenna (2001), Sigrid Nunez's novel about the relationship between the nameless narrator, an imagined writer of emergent literary recognition, and the titular character, a somewhat older U.S. Army nurse-veteran of the Vietnamese war. Although slightly different in age, the two women have spent portions of their childhood and adolescent years as contemporaries in a Staten Island housing project. On the basis of literary notices and publicity, Rouenna has now contacted the novelist and initiated a friendship with her, exchanging visits and sharing meals, with the intention of asking her to collaborate in writing a memoir of Rouenna's horrific experiences in the medical evacuation centers and casualty wards of Vietnam. The narrator diplomatically begs off. The subject is not mentioned again. After a brief separation, Rouenna takes her own life. It is an expert, eyes-open, even professional suicide calculated down to an exact dosage of her mother's last husband's heart medicine. The narrator goes on with her life and career. As the narrative progresses, she finds herself at work on For Rouenna. It has somehow become a novel she is writing and a story she cannot not tell.

As a literary text, For Rouenna thus portrays itself from the outset as a work distinctly about writing, about authorship and authority, about how the story of anybody or anything ever really gets told. Accordingly, it addresses complex questions of narration and memory, history and myth, literary representation and moral complicity, developed in analogous works about the American experience of the Vietnamese war by figures as diverse as Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson, Frances Fitzgerald, Tim O'Brien, Larry Heinemann, Bobbie Ann Mason, Stewart O'Nan, and others. Its great theme, to borrow a familiar title from Tim O'Brien, often reckoned the narrative laureate of the war, is "How to Tell a True War Story." At the same time, to extend the figure, one might alternatively entitle it "The Lives of the Dead."

Meanwhile, as a narrative specifically about military nursing, it also proves a complex and insightful addition to writing about American women's experience of the Vietnamese war on a subject—even in moments when its importance has been acknowledged—too often invested with a notoriously schizoid history of literary and popular-culture representations. Nurses become the victims of what Carol Acton has called the gender politics of "traumatic intimacy" in every sense: consigned to what a male writer-veteran within Nunez's novel dismisses as some bizarre textual "footnote" to "the great Vietnam epic," and then carefully re-pigeonholed—as part of a tradition of sexual caricature extending from the nineteenth-century origins of the nursing profession—as sisters and sinners, saviors and sluts. And nowhere has this tradition been more evident than in the works of nurse-veterans themselves, with controversial volumes such as Linda van Deventer's Home Before Morning and Winnie Smith's American Daughter Gone to War eliciting a host of counter-testimonies in memoir and fiction, drama, poetry, and oral history. In works ranging from the revisionary romanticism of Patricia Walsh's Forever the Sad Hearts to the earnest moralizing of Nurses in Vietnam: The Forgotten Veterans, such texts have literally acted out their own marginalizations. Meanwhile, on the broader terrain of popular-culture images, what might be termed the "China Beach" syndrome has found an answer in the campaign eventuating in the Vietnam Veterans' Women's Memorial. Indeed, the symbolic geography could not be more exacting. Consciously revisionary, conservative, resoundingly traditional, the women's statue of two female soldiers attending to a casualty stands at a remove beyond the Frederick Hart statue of three exhausted infantrymen, itself a veterans' addition standing at a remove from the main memorial. And thus the newest monument in the Vietnam grouping lingers on the periphery, like the nursing figures represented, a revision of a revision, in its doubled removal from the dark grave of the names.

As suggested above, the unique achievement of Nunez's text lies in its extraordinary quality of mythic synthesis on a host of literary and popular-culture themes. Most extraordinary, however, is the way in which it does so without literary or popular-culture grandstanding. To put this another way, in a world of postmodern aesthetic and political pieties about class, gender, race, and ethnicity, For Rouenna is a working narrative that deals with people—beginning with the narrator and Rouenna and extending outward into the world of contemporary mass culture—who spend the better parts of their lives working with such issues every day. The putative author is a working-class woman, building a literary career, upwardly mobile in her lodgings, her relationships, and her social opportunities, in every sense making the New York scene. She now lives in Manhattan, she takes guilty pleasure in observing, as opposed to Rouenna's teeming ethnic warren two subway stops across the river in Brooklyn. She is coming off a New York relationship with G., a hypercritical urbanite with whom she has lived for several years while he has picked at her neuroses. She gets the visiting writer stint at a prestigious college, and the odd invitation to the social event in the Hamptons, at one of which, late in the novel, she is not surprisingly thrown together with G. At every point, nonetheless, who she is carries the class baggage of who she has been and where she has come from. Indeed, her relationship with Rouenna in the book is crucially paralleled by another—re-initiated, on the basis of the literary publicity that has attracted figures from her past—with a former high school classmate, Luther, a black man with whom she takes up a correspondence and visits in prison, and whose story, it would appear as this novel ends, beckons as the subject of the story the narrator will next be impelled to piece together with hers and Rouenna's, somehow for the sake of them all.

Back home in the projects, the place where all the stories first came together, Rouenna's father has been a violent, sexual drunk, angry, volatile, unpredictable, unable to hold a job—as it turns out, probably a sufferer from World War II combat shock. Her mother has been aimless and dispirited, spending whole days in bed. In one horrific scene the enraged husband drags her out of bed. She pisses herself with fear. He wipes it up with her hair. Rouenna, meanwhile, has lived her version of the nightmare, literally bursting into the narrator's own consciousness one hot summer's day on the crowded project playground. Indeed, it is only at some length that the narrator, having now put so much of it behind, pieces together the terrible scene—albeit one, her mother suggests later, she may or may not have actually witnessed—in which the titular character has appeared to her. She is Rouenna Zycinksi, a girl called Roro. On "a blazing afternoon," with "the Big Playground . . . as crowded as it ever gets," she has burst through the milling humanity, a naked, adolescent girl, chased by an enraged, half-naked father, brandishing and swinging his leather belt. She has been screaming, a "terrified naked child." He has been shouting. "Cunt! You goddamn cunt!" he yells. "I'll kill you, you little cunt!" "And so the word," as the narrator marks the moment, "—the ugliest word in the English language—enters my vocabulary. Or at least in memory word and story are linked." Now, after her nursing career, Rouenna—the narrator muses, has the name been some semi-literate version of Rowena?—has drifted back into the aimless life of the new working class, moving from cheap apartment to cheap apartment, drifting through a few relationships, bouncing from dead-end job to dead-end job, waitressing, working in stores. Now she strikes the narrator as vulgar, still full of immigrant crudity. She is the unregenerate urban prole, the opposite of the narrator's style in every respect. She is a woman in her fifties, obese. She is still somebody who sees drinking, smoking, fucking, and eating as body functions. She was who she was, has done what she has done, and has become who she has become. She makes that claim. Vietnam seems not to have improved her. Told of the competition leading to the selection of the Maya Lin design for the National Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, she is appalled that they have let "a gook" win it. At another moment, more salutary, she mocks the narrator's trendy outfits in basic New York black. All she needs, Rouenna tells her, is an AK-47 and Ho Chi Minh sandals.

Rouenna's story as a U.S. Army nurse in the combat zone is predictably sordid, full of the wall-to-wall, blood-spattered horrors of the evacuation hospitals of Vietnam and of the desperate off-duty pleasures. The nurses, twenty-one-year-old nurturers and angels of death, have been the true grunts of the Vietnam body pipeline, the trauma queens, eye-deep and elbow-deep in hell if anyone ever was, every bit as numb and traumatized as the faceless, limbless, burned, lacerated, mangled, gutted boys to whom they minister: the brain-dead "gorks," the burned-up "crispy critters," the "expectants" waiting to die, or sometimes the ones just wanting to die badly enough, given the quick, silent overdose.

As with G.I.s in the field, the horror has been compounded by the helplessness. "Nothing had prepared her," the narrator summarizes. "Nothing could have prepared her. Not the gunshot and stabbing victims she had seen while a student nurse at the hospital in Newark. Not the war wounded convalescing in the wards at Fort Ord, where she was stationed after her eight weeks of officers' basic training at Fort Sam Houston. It was not just that she had never seen bodies so mangled (torn limb from limb was not just an expression in Nam). It was that she lacked the experience to treat them."

Nor could she have known how incredibly young so many of them would be. "Have you ever noticed in those movies," she remarks tellingly about Vietnam on film, "how the actors are always too old for their roles?" The narrator says she has: "Just because you were old enough to be a soldier didn't mean you were old enough to play one." Rouenna goes on: "Think of your high school yearbook, that's closer to the age most troopers really were. Some of them weren't even shaving yet. Then you have to see them the way I saw them, lying in all that pain, all that blood, and they looked even younger. I swear, some of the dead ones looked about ten." And then there have been the Vietnamese, on both sides, teenagers too; and beyond, "everywhere you looked you saw children—indisputably children—with the same terrible wounds and lopped limbs as the injured combatants."

As if in reflexive parody, many off-duty nurses, by Rouenna's account, including herself, have likewise been the booze-swilling, pill-popping, dope-smoking, bed-hopping whores of Vietnam legend, with promiscuity their mad outlet from the other madness. Indeed, if anything, we discover, their escapist orgies of booze, drugs, and sex—most often with doctors and other senior officers—have been even more sordid and repellent than we may have imagined. Rouenna remembers one sweaty night of fucking with a doctor when, caressing his thighs, she finds them completely covered with bumpy pustules from shooting up. "'Damn mosquitoes,'" he says. To Rouenna's credit, at least as far as she is concerned, she has been an equal opportunity sex object and sex seeker, with her own discriminating code. Her best memory of the whole war may be of a helicopter door-gunner named "Grub"—that's all she remembers about him—except "the fact that we had sex about a hundred times."

Then there has been the other nurse, Helga Paulina di Venere, a.k.a. Pretty Polly. Blonde, beautiful, pneumatic—"like Ann-Margaret and Gina Lollobrigida mushed together," according to "one overexcited PFC"—she has been a Playboy centerfold in fatigues. Not surprisingly, she is every G.I.'s walking wet dream, such a complete sex joke that even the nurses call her "cunt"; unfortunately, she is also possessed of an unrelenting sexual integrity. Rouenna should hate her. Instead they find a deep friendship in the attempt to become fellow survivors. Driven to outrage by the mayhem wrought upon the bodies of the boys she works with in the hospitals and the relentless assaults upon her own sexual person, Pretty Polly does not make it. She cracks one day at the PX, where she finds out they have apparently every consumer good available to an American anywhere except tampons. The consequence is not at all like Hot Lips after the shower scene from M*A*S*H. Pretty Polly goes out and has sex with somebody and gets pregnant on purpose, picking up the nurse-corps equivalent of the G.I. million-dollar wound and earning from a moralistic army a dishonorable discharge. Under military law such an offense is not unlike a G.I.'s shooting himself in the hand or foot. Under the rules of war, they could execute him. Since she is a woman, instead, as with Hester Prynne they brand her with official shame. She couldn't care less. It is one of the only ways she can get sent home.

Rouenna remembers the day she went over the edge. She has been accumulating war apocrypha, the military equivalent of urban legends: the whores with the razor blades between their legs; the snipers waiting to pick you off as you got aboard the airplane taking you home; the navy nurse who hanged herself after she found out that the anesthesiologist supposed to marry her had a wife back in the world; the dead grunt who wakes up in a body bag and comes out saying, "Hey, what the fuck?" A few days later, she is reporting for emergency duty and runs past a pile of bodies on a helipad. "At the bottom of the pile" a hand seems to be wiggling its fingers. The hand and the fingers turn out to be attached to a blown-off arm thrown in among the corpses. A doctor informs her that she has been "seeing things." Later, at the officers' club, while she pours down Scotch and soda, she keeps seeing it. "The hand won't stop waving." The doctor, now off-duty as well and boozing away, sneaks up behind her and drops down his own hand "spiderlike in front of her face." "Buy you a drink?" "You son of a bitch," she screams. He is a ranking officer. She could get in trouble for disrespect. He is "laughing too hard" to care.

"Later that night, one of the corpsmen came to find her. 'With all due respect when we got to it? That arm wasn't even attached. Had to be your imagination.' He'd brought some weed, help ease her mind. Then they fucked, rank be damned."

"She got over it," the narrator goes on. "You couldn't brood over this sort of thing and still do your job." Or is she telling it the way Rouenna told it? About seeing things. Or about how the corpsman lied "to squelch all doubt." "Seeing things, hearing things, imagining that things had happened other than they really had—it was all part of the strain."

Beginning with the waving fingers of the hand on the blown-away arm in the pile of bodies and ending up with the drinking and the doctor and the getting stoned with the corpsman and fucking, it is Rouenna's story in a nutshell. It is the story of Rouenna Zycinski, lieutenant, U.S. Army Nurse Corps, who has gone crazy serving in the Republic of Vietnam.

After the war, Rouenna's story takes on all the familiar signatures of what we would now call a PTSD narrative. Even in her brief attempts to continue nursing, she begins a long career of vocational itineracy. She gets uncontrollably angry at officious hospital supervisors with their petty civilian protocols. She continually practices insubordination. Even the patients have been an irritant, "wimps," she calls them. It is as if she had found her father's genetic inability to hold a job. "Don't get me wrong," she tells the narrator in one of their first meetings. "I was a good nurse—I did my job. I just didn't last very long." The narrator continues: "Then it came out." "When did you quit?" "After I got out of the army." Like the G.I. in all the stories that turn on the same incomplete sentence, she moves through a series of aimless employments, "waitressing, bartending, grooming pets. All jobs to get by, to pay the rent." Her latest work seems to her liking. Now enormously fat, she has been working as a salesperson in a discount dress store for plus-size women on 34th Street in the place she calls "snotty Manhattan." She is quietly proud of a recent promotion to manager.

Rouenna has had a good part of the rest of the standard PTSD history as well: desultory relationships, barhopping, anonymous fucking. She's had a Vietnam vet boyfriend, Chuck, picked up on a VA ward and trailing the usual collection of ills. Later he is diagnosed as a victim of Agent Orange. She has spent a modest domestic interlude as the mistress of an old Italian guy who owns the restaurant where she has waitressed. His name is Aldo. They have both had a little modest happiness. He dies. Getting older and fatter, she starts getting turned down by guys in bars. One night she picks up a man at a street fair. She takes him home and he beats her. She gives up sex. Now she eats. When she and the narrator go for a drive in the country, they are a lovely pair. "Fatso," the kids call out to them. "Lesbo."

PTSD. "They should have stuck to calling it combat fatigue," she says. "PTSD sounds like some kind of bug juice." It wasn't her diagnosis. "Rouenna was firm. 'One thing I can say for sure; I never had no PTSD.'" For Rouenna, PTSD is something for weirdos and losers. She turns down interviews, refuses to participate in the studies. She stays away from the big, belated welcome-home ceremonies and reunions. She sees too many guys using the war as an excuse, she says. She feels common-sense anger at the stupid inauthenticities of war movies. The narrator encourages her to see The English Patient. What Rouenna sees are all the stupid little details the movie people manage to get so completely wrong. If the guy is burned so badly, how did the nurse turn him? If he is suffering that badly and sure to die anyhow, why didn't she kill him right away?

Rouenna has flashbacks. She has brought home a tape someone has given her, a going-away present, of Armed Forces Radio Vietnam greatest hits. She also still has, of all things, a party dress from Vietnam. An enlisted medic named Luciano (since he has wound up in Vietnam, everyone, naturally, calls him "Unlucky Luciano") has had some fashion experience. He has put it to use, getting up pretty off-duty clothes for the nurses. One day she puts on the old dress and plays the old tape. Suddenly, it's not even Vietnam. It's before, 1962 again, with Shelley Fabares singing "Johnny Angel." Only by now in the narrative we already know about another Johnny Angel. Johnny Angel has been the nickname of an ungodly handsome young driver who has worked in the medical unit. One day, on a medcap, a mission where the doctors and nurses go out to treat local civilians, Johnny Angel gets his brains sniped all over Pretty Polly.

Thus the novel weaves itself out of the multi-stranded play of narration and memory that is so consistent a theme of major American writing about the Vietnamese war. Concurrently, it could not be more of a book about the horror of what Michael Herr has called America's heart of darkness trip. It is a PTSD narrative. It is a book about Vietnam as a class war and a race war. It is surely, in particular, a novel about Vietnam as a gender war, and by extension, in the narrator's relationship with Rouenna, a novel of the imprisoning violence, physical and emotional, that remains a daily fact of life for women, ranging from rapes and beatings to career pigeonholings and the cultural tyrannies of aging and body image. It is about the invisibility of people other people choose not to see. It is about silence. "Stories," the narrator insists, do not "happen only to people who can tell them."

The difference here, and frequently the source of For Rouenna's most important meanings, is the book's refusal to reduce any of this to literary conceit or popular-culture clichE9, but rather to seek out those meanings in a working, historical, human dimension. To put this more simply, people to whom stories happen and people who can tell stories can sometimes work together. For this is a book, finally, about relationship, about an interpenetration of consciousness and experience between two distinctly unlikely companions. They both happen to be women. One is an aging, obese eccentric cum nonentity who once served in Vietnam as a member of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. The other is a novelist whose closest brush with Vietnam was a writing-program student affair with a visiting lecturer, a sad, old, drunk, addicted, former Vietnam journalist right out of Graham Greene. "Vietnam is the biggest thing that ever happened to me," he has told her. Oddly, she remembers at one point, Rouenna has said the same thing in exactly the same words. "Both of them described how happy they had been in Vietnam, and how for all the horrors and dangers of the war, no sooner had they left than they wanted only to go back again." It is the mystery for the narrator of what Michael Herr calls "the dreadful nostalgia." At every level, the stories are that big, and that complicated.

At the same time, this does not mean that lives and stories cannot be connected. Accordingly, a novel of Vietnam that begins here in every sense, both experiential and literary, as decidedly outside the frame, by the end finds its frame in a new order of shared history and community. Apace, we begin to hear Vietnam war stories like we have never heard before, in ways we have never heard them told before, and by people we never expected to hear them from. They turn out to be some of the most human Vietnam war stories we will ever know.

Near the end of the novel, for instance, the narrator now remembers Rouenna oddly saying how she'll tell "two more stories." Did she mean, "These are the last two stories about Vietnam that you'll ever hear from me—for such they turned out to be." We will never know. The first turns out to be one that the narrator has already heard, about a nurse in Cu Chi known to Rouenna who has become the ultimate Vietnam sex object, raped during a VC rocket attack by a G.I. assailant who has seized upon the confusion to take her from behind. Rouenna has apparently found the story important enough to tell again in all its loathsome detail. "Turn your head, you're dead," the rapist mutters. The nurse complies. The second, newly stunning the narrator with surprise and horror, is—believe it or not—another arm story, making some kind of grisly pair with the going-crazy story she has told earlier. This time she has actually gone out to a big drum of amputated body parts to find an arm for a guy who has had one blown off and is dying of shrapnel wounds. He keeps begging for someone to find his arm. It does not seem too much to Rouenna for a dying boy to ask. She goes and gets an arm for him. It's not his arm, but he dies cradling it, thinking it is. "He looks up at me like I was some kind of angel. Is that my arm? he says, just like a little boy. And I tell him a white lie, Rouenna's hundredth little white lie. I say yes, honey, yes, yes, and I gently lay down the arm—it went through my mind how it was like bringing a baby to a new mother—and he hugs that arm tight to himself and he starts to sob. He was sobbing, but at least he was calm now, and a few minutes later he died. He died cuddling that arm."

As quickly and strangely, the narrator now finds herself telling two more stories of her own. They are both astonishingly relevant to the larger narrative, albeit in ways no one, including herself, might have once predicted. The first story has to do with her looking up an ex-fiancE9 she has mentioned earlier, "someone I used to know long ago on Staten Island," a cop, and asking him, as a special favor, to run an FBI check on Pretty Polly. The next day he has the information: "Helga Paulina di Venere of Minneapolis, Minnesota, died of breast cancer in 'eighty-nine. Worked on and off as a public school nurse. Never married but she had one kid, male. At the time she died, she was living with her brother." The other story is about her invitation to a June wedding in East Hampton where she runs into G. Out of the blue she asks a question she knows will bring on the usual neurotic fire drill: "Has he ever tortured or killed some helpless animal just for fun?"

If we ever had any doubts, we now see completely the reason for the initial. He is a character from a bad, stylish New York novel about relationships, with his browbeating and fashionable phony psychobabble.

Fortunately, it has been supplanted by a better New York novel about relationships that has also turned out to be one of the most important novels ever written about the Vietnamese war and American memory. The novel is the story of the narrator's relationship with Rouenna. She began as Roro, the naked, terrified, running, screaming girl from the projects. She has wound up as Rouenna Zycinski, Vietnam veteran, PTSD survivor, another silent statistic that somebody has forgotten to keep count of, another immigrant name, in this case one that won't ever get on the wall in Washington, although even if it were up there with the rest, what would it mean? How would it be written on the citation? Rouenna Zycinski, lieutenant, U.S. Army Nurse Corps, died of wounds received thirty-five years earlier in the Republic of Vietnam while caring for the wounded and the dying? How did you become a nurse? the narrator has asked. Why did you have to do it in a way that involved service in the Army? "Well, back then a girl didn't have many choices," Rouenna has replied.

What she made of her choices, she feels now, increasingly, as she talks it out with the narrator, has been at least something. She has made something of a life, enough for a life, maybe enough even for a lifetime. Rouenna's words near the end begin to spill themselves out. It is as if she now understood the story:

The words spill out to embrace the narrator: "'Oh, I just wish that you could have been there, too. . . . If only we could have been there together." What she cannot know is that they have been. The narrator knows this. She also knows what it has cost.

"My god, I am so unhappy." This has been the price, she admits, of seeing through someone else's eyes and writing the story of a life that would have otherwise amounted to seven words. "Work, work, work, work, work, off, off." Nor has the companionship, such as it was, seemed to have nourished all that many happy verbal memories. "Fatso, Lesbo." "Cunt!" The ugliest word in the English language, she has called it.

Then there has been that other bad word, the one that has presided over the novel like a curse: Vietnam.

And now, it seems, there may be more bad, ugly, nightmare words calling out for her to work with them, and within them the importunings of another story waiting to get told. And she will have to decide once again if she has the strength and the skill to do these things. The words this time will be the ones they use for black men in prison in America; the story will be about what causes them to be sent there and the kinds of things that go on in there. She has gotten a letter. It is a long letter, of many, many pages, from Luther, in the pen, upstate. He is another one of the people who knew her when she was younger and, on the basis of her literary celebrity, have tried to renew acquaintance with her. The letter is about Staten Island, this time during high school, what they did once together, how maybe he saved her life when he kept her from getting in a car with Jimmy Adonis, how their lives have turned out since. He says she owes him. It sounds like a kind of dare. Is he going to ask her to tell his story? Will she turn him down, as she did Rouenna? Will she again, just by making a decent effort at human contact, be unable not to write the story, knowing well what it may cost her in art and life? How much of her will have to go into seeing the world through the eyes of another of the invisible, voiceless ones that nobody wants to see or hear about, an urban black man who has seen and done terrible enough things to warrant his having spent the better part of his life in prison, and who needs somebody to put his experience into words? Will she write a new novel? Will she call it, For Luther? We don't know. She takes a break. At the very least she'll take her time and read carefully. Luther always writes thick letters, she says. She will find out eventually, she supposes, what Luther wants. She will read the rest of the letter in the morning, on the bus, while she rides up to the prison. The novel ends where it has begun, with a working writer, attending patiently to another story that may require of her the hard, human work of writing.