In Country (Themes)

Themes

War and Peace

Because the novel is set eleven years after America's withdrawal from Vietnam, and it focuses on a protagonist who does not have direct experience of the conflict but knows it through her uncle and the father she never knew, it is able to examine the emotional and psychological effects of war from a unique perspective. While a war is being fought, and for the years following it, attention is given mainly to the theoretical debates about why it was fought. This holds especially true of the Vietnam War, where disagreements about America's responsibilities and America's guilt overshadowed any interest in the veterans who did the actual fighting, making them pawns in a struggle between two determined ideologies.

In Country ignores the reasons for and against the war and has Emmett supporting both sides, first by joining the Army and then by joining the antiwar hippies. He is not a very vocal supporter of either. The novel is less concerned with the causes of war than its effects. Emmett's trauma is obvious: it is the result of killing and having friends killed all around, which have a lingering psychological effect, regardless of popular movies and stories that show tough characters shrugging off death in an instant. The war will always be with Emmett, and the fact that Vietnam veterans returned home to controversy instead of public praise makes it even harder for Emmett to live with what has been done.

For Sam, the very fact that she did not experience the war is frustrating; the thing that has affected her life most profoundly is lost to history, where she cannot touch it. In the end of Part Two, Emmett tells her, "The main thing you learn from history is that you can't learn from history," but this does not help the fact that Sam is still affected by the war. In the end, though, when she sees her own name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and realizes that she is not just touched by Vietnam but is part of it, she can finally know some peace.

Identity

It is natural for someone like Sam, who never had the chance to know one of her parents, to wonder about the effect that missing person had on her personality. Genetically, a person is made up of the DNA of both parents, and in a traditional family both parents' personalities blend into their child's. In Sam's case, the only thing she has from her father is his genes, and she feels a lack of identity. Emmett has some elements in common with her father — he is an older male, and he fought in Vietnam — but he also represents her mother's side of Sam's identity and, because she has to take care of him, he does not represent a very good father figure. Tom Hudson can be seen as a father figure, and Sam's infatuation with him can be seen as a traditional Freudian pattern of turning a loss into a sex drive, but his impotence, while it does not bother Sam, makes him keep his distance from her.

The only other person in the book who is like Sam is her friend Dawn, but by getting pregnant young and planning to marry a local boy Dawn is too much like Sam's mother to fulfill the missing part of her identity. The only person who can complete Sam's identity is her father, Dwayne, who died when he was just about her age. She looks for him in many different places: books about Vietnam; in his photograph; in the stories of the veterans who returned; in the memories of his parents and her mother; in the letters he sent home; and in the war journal he kept. When she finally finds his name on the Memorial, she also finds, to her surprise, her own name, and she realizes that she is not alone but is part of a community.

Order and Disorder

"I work on staying together, one day at a time," Emmett tells Sam in the novel's climatic scene. "There's no room for anything else. It takes all of my energy." One of the striking things about In Country is that it presents a society that is not the one traditionally talked about in books, but that is nonetheless recognizable and is run by its own rules of order. A traditional view of small-town American culture might present the home of Sam's mother as being typical: a basic family unit (father, mother, and child), with the father working and the mother raising the baby and keeping herself distracted with crafts and the news. Another household that is similarly traditional is that of Lonnie's parents, Martha and Bud. In this novel, both of these ordinary households seem repressive.

In the fictional world Sam lives in, the most stable family unit is Sam and Emmett, a niece and her nephew, with her boyfriend coming over sometimes to watch television and spend the night. Other examples include Tom, who lives by himself over his garage; Jim and Sue Ann, who are separated (she moved 250 miles away to Lexington) but are still on good terms; and Dawn and Ken, who hope to create a family. The characters in this book who have the hardest time coping are undoubtedly the ones who were in the war, indicating that training young men for destruction is a negative factor in their creating order in their lives when they return home.

Topics for Further Study

• Research the controversy that surrounded the building of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in 1982: Which groups objected to it? What was the basis of their objections? What compromise measures were taken to satisfy those who did not like the memorial as it was originally planned?
• When considering military options in the past two decades, in Haiti or Bosnia or Iraq for example, strategists have frequently expressed their concern about involving the country in "another Vietnam." How did that war change the U.S. government approaches military policy? Is this change a new, permanent way of viewing warfare, or will it fade as memories of the Vietnam War fade?
• In the novel, Sam reflects that Quang Ngai, where her father died, is near My Lai. Research the My Lai Massacre that happened in 1968. Explain how what happened there, and the Army's reaction to it might, have affected the way that Americans treated returning veterans.
• Contact the nearest Veteran's Administration and try to arrange for a Vietnam veteran to come to your school, or at least to be interviewed. Prepare a list of questions, based upon things that you learned from reading In Country, that you think Americans of your generation ought to know about the experience of being in Vietnam.