LITR 5731 Seminar in Multicultural Literature UHCL student sample

My research examines the personal wartime experience of American soldiers recognized as belonging to one or more politically underrepresented class. I employ a working definition of “class” which references not only socioeconomic caste, but also classifications based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The assumption leading the research was that minority classes, including women and homosexuals, face unique challenges as soldiers. The sources I engaged indicate cases of particularly poor equipment and support, and a historical tendency to fill menial or expendable roles. Recognition, equal pay, and promotions (especially into officer ranks) have been less accessible to minorities and women than to white males. Physical and psychological intimidation is a fact of life for many; sexual abuse in particular constitutes a significant threat for women in the service, and homosexuals are expected by policy to be invisible.

By focusing my research on the military, with its rigid hierarchies and strict us/them divisions, I hoped to gain access to an “idealized” social sphere in which to explore class politics in general. Such a focus also allowed me to frame my research with the question of why individuals affected by such conditions would lay down their lives for a country that misunderstands and mistreats them. Interest lies in what the soldiers themselves have to say; therefore, first- and second-hand accounts will be used as much as possible. Emotionalism and personal agenda are noted considerations of such texts, as are possibilities of exaggeration or misunderstanding of strategy, history and politics. Since I will focus less on “pure” history than on personal interpretations of history, however, potential embellishment as consequence of experience may be germane to the research. I also acknowledge the problem of whether adequate representation of general social discourses can be made by individuals or small groups, and the fact that even within small groups there exist divisions of interests and goals.

· a collection of letters of black Civil War soldiers (A Grand Army of Black Men)

· Major Conflict: One Gay Man’s Life in the Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell Military.

This presentation was submitted to the conference as historical research, but it is not history. I chose that designation for lack of anything better; neither does it fit with what I imagine most people consider “literature.” The primary texts are testimonials from or by individuals, United States soldiers, who lived as soldiers belonging to one or multiple “classes.” By class I do not mean only economic class; it is a term I will use throughout to refer to groups whose interests and problematics are politically underrepresented. In American society, this would include not only racial minorities and the poor but also gender and sexual minorities, in the case of this presentation women and homosexuals. This working definition of class also allows us to recognize a person as not belonging to only a race, or gender, or economic caste, but always already informed by all of these systems of classification.

The military, with its rigid hierarchies and strict divisions of us/them, seemed to me as close to an idealized social realm as could possibly exist in which to explore classism generally. Such a realm allowed me to frame my research with a question: why would, or should, human beings fight to the death for an institution that reduces their “human being-ness” to a reified class—that is to say it makes them a class and not a human being? I decided upon testimonial and autobiography as my sources precisely because my research was not interested in history per se, that is a reasoned interpretation of past events, in this case wars. I openly acknowledge the problems with first-person accounts, which tell only a very small part of the broader picture and cannot avoid emotionalism and personal, often political agendas, especially given the confusion of warfare and the sensitivity of class issues. Neither did I expect any simple, easy answers that might coagulate into some kind of definitive “classed soldier experience” applicable to all. The question I ask requires complicated and qualified answers. With that in mind I intentionally sought out accounts that presented individualistic, human-oriented perspectives on class in the military that did not provide simple resolution, though they do cross paths with some frequency.

Out of the many books I read for this presentation I decided to focus upon two that most comprehensively deal with this complexity. They are political, of course; the subject matter cannot avoid politics, but they are the politics of the storytellers only. The first text is Juan Ramirez’s 1999 memoir A Patriot After All, an expansion of his undergrad thesis, which tells of his experiences during and following the Vietnam War. Much of Ramirez’s story, particularly as he comes to his conclusion, describes his ambiguous class status as a Mexican-American, and the confusing and isolating effect that status had on his identity. The second text is Charles Dryden’s 1997 autobiography A-Train. Dryden’s book spans the 1940 launch of the Tuskegee flight program through the end of the Korean War and after, and covers Dryden’s army life before and following Truman’s 1948 order to desegregate the United States armed forces. The narrative focuses much more on Dryden’s love of flying, his military career, and his family than specifically on issues of class. Yet to his frustration class politics strongly inform his experience, and when they surface in Dryden’s story those politics have an extremely disruptive tendency.

Ramirez’s struggle with his ambivalent identity began early, with his family. He writes that his father John, a World War II veteran, “was surprised that his return [from the war with an honorable discharge] did not bring him greater rewards [than menial and factory labor].” John had grown up with his own “conviction, passed down by his mother,” of the American dream: that “whatever obstacles Chicanos face in this country, they at least have a fighting chance to overcome them” (12). When John confronted a reality that defied that conviction, he began to “confuse being Mexican with not being good enough.” Though John “used this barrier to drive and motivate himself to be accepted as an equal,” a motivation that propelled the family into a comfortable middle-class existence, Ramirez writes that John “thought he was a ‘sellout’ who aspired to be and to have what the whites had” (13). Eventually, John’s troubled identity drove him to alcoholism and the family into insolvency (22).

This tension of identity was not projected on Ramirez just through his father. He writes that his mother held the “belief that Mexican people . . . were superior.” Yet she would order the young Ramirez to avoid any contact with other Mexican children or to express himself in any way that might result in him being recognized as Mexican (13). Both parents spoke Spanish, but forbade their children to speak other than English (14). When their neighborhood of East Menlo Park, California, became integrated, the Ramirezes decided to move away. They “weren’t really white,” Ramirez writes, but they “didn’t want to be on the black side.” This “need to feel like we belonged somewhere” (16) would trouble Ramirez throughout his life.

Ramirez acknowledges that he developed an aggressive attitude, which he later attributes at least partially to his conflicted racial identity. “I might even have a chip on my shoulder about being Mexican,” he says during a veteran’s meeting toward the end of his book (161). If this is starting to sound deterministic, let me quickly clarify that racial tension was not the only cause of Ramirez’s aggression—his story implies his father’s alcoholism and other family problems as powerful contributing factors. However, from Ramirez’s own recollection those factors were themselves influenced by his family’s confusion of identity, which stemmed appreciably from confusion of class.

Ramirez acknowledges that his aggression informed his decision to enlist in the marines immediately after high school. He had from first learning about the conflict in Vietnam expected to die there, writing that his nature was to “rush to [potential danger] prematurely to get it over with” (19). Family, politics, education, gender, and even open deceit played equally important roles in Ramirez’s enlistment. He had thought of the military as a “rite of passage;” many of the men of his family had also served in the military. He felt “compelled to enlist because it was [his] duty and obligation as a man to ‘do [his] part;’” he was aware of the “political struggle . . . over the rightness of the war,” and “took the side [he] believed was the right one.” “Going to college, according to [his] counselor, was out of the question” (24). Finally, he was lied to by his recruiter, who convinced him that he would have to serve a four-year term to qualify for VA benefits, and that he would receive special training. Neither was the case (25).

Ramirez’s motivations for enlistment, even his coercion, are not unique to him as an individual, as a man, or as a Mexican-American. In his 2005 Desert Storm memoir Major Conflict, Jeffrey McGowan cites the masculine connotation of the term “soldier” as the primary motivation for his enlistment. McGowan believed that, as a soldier, he “couldn’t be gay because soldiers aren’t gay” (14). Such “masculine” virtues as duty and honor are not even specific to male soldiers. In Helen Benedict’s Lonely Soldier, a 2009 collection of essays focusing on women veterans of the Iraq war, Yaqui Indian soldier Eli PaintedCrow endured sexism and racism in the army in order to fulfill a promise to her father, who had “presented her with an eagle feather, a symbol of having achieved the status of warrior and a great honor” (83). According to PaintedCrow, “finishing what [she’d] begun” was imperative to her tribal identity (84). In the same work, Mickiela Montoya recalls pressure put upon her by a recruiter to enlist. Benedict writes that Montoya eventually joined the army as a way out of what she felt was a “dead-end life” (17). Ramirez, too, felt pressure to improve his life. His mother “had high hopes for [him] in the aftermath” of his father’s meltdown into alcoholism. With his “grades [not] good enough to get into college” (Ramirez 23), the military seemed his only option.

Where Ramirez writes about war, he chooses primarily to depict his exposure to violence and brutality, and the effects that exposure had on him. Yet class politics do on occasion come to the forefront, and appear to have a powerful influence on Ramirez’s wartime experiences. Ramirez writes that he and other non-white soldiers were placed in highly dangerous situations with little to no leadership or support (65). But it was especially when he was not fighting enemy combatants that Ramirez seems to have been most affected by his lack of definitive class status. As a Mexican-American whose upbringing pressured him to project “white” markers, a military where comradeship was frequently organized along ethnic and racial lines left Ramirez few clear options where to fit in or how to identify himself.

After boot camp, Ramirez moved to an infantry training regiment (ITR) company, where he recalls a much higher percentage of Chicano soldiers than were present at boot. “Almost immediately,” these men began to mock his lack of accent, and to question whether or not he was a Mexican. Though comrades convinced Ramirez to ignore these taunts, the episode “puzzled” him. He writes of being unable to understand at this point “why . . . I would be insulted by what I was” (33). The situation repeated itself in Vietnam, after Ramirez took command of a squad and issued orders for more humane treatment of civilians. He writes,

A couple of Chicano squad leaders and an Indian kid took my bush attitude as cowardly. [ . . . ] I was a disgrace to my race. The incident hurt me deeply because it came from . . . my own kind. (106)

Not long after this incident, Ramirez was reassigned to a perimeter position, an assignment he relates as “pos[ing] more dangers for me than the bush.” Ramirez had “learned to fear and dislike life in the rear areas,” for the greater prevalence of “drugs, the black market, prostitution, gambling, racism, and violence.” “The closer one got to the rear,” he writes, “the more intense the [racial] tension was,” particularly between black and white soldiers. “At some point one had to choose a side” (109-10). In making his choice, he experienced something of a repeat of his move from East Menlo Park, this time on the other side of the color boundary: he was able move among an exclusive coterie of black soldiers, which was for him “easier than trying to settle in with my own ethnic group,” who still saw him as “too assimilated” into white culture (111).

Even taking this rare advantage into account, constant racial misrecognition continued to influence Ramirez’s sense of self. Post-war, he attempted to recollect his identity through activism. He joined the United Farm Workers, and in college became involved with MEChA[1], though “only as an observer” (143). Ramirez laments that he “often felt disconnected from [his] Mexican heritage,” and when recollecting the extremes he went to collapse that disconnect, he writes that he “felt ridiculous” (144). Yet he believed that “the war, along with the racial prejudice I had faced, had provided me with some understanding of my status in this society” (135). As his narrative reaches its close, Ramirez focuses more specifically on his experiences of being a classed soldier: that “some of [his] problems stemmed from racial conflicts early in [his] combat career” (162). In the end, Ramirez determines that his classed status was one of recognition—how he was perceived by others. He asserts that he has located an identity with which he is comfortable. “Regardless of how you see me,” he finishes after reflecting on the confusion of his past, “I am an American” (180).

This declaration comes from Ramirez’s epilogue, in which he acknowledges that he “[does not] speak for all Vietnam War veterans, all Chicano veterans, all Americans, or all Californians.” Still, his hope is that his story will contribute to reflection on broader issues, especially imperialism and the treatment of veterans (179). Charles Dryden’s memoir indicates a similar political motive in its epilogue, though not so explicitly. Here, Dryden reflects on “actions by ‘ugly Americans’ [that] have sickened … and filled [him] with anger,” (Dryden, 391) and lists major events of his military career in which he was affected by racism (392). Unlike Ramirez, Dryden has never felt confusion about his racial identity, but he remains deeply frustrated by the limitations of this identity, and for the barriers it forced him to overcome in order to achieve his ambitions. Like Ramirez, Dryden draws no conclusions outside his own experience, but his litany of prejudice illustrates social, cultural, and political discourses that constrain groups as well as individuals to life within an othered identity.

All Dryden wanted, we learn in the first pages of A-Train, was to fly (7). In this enterprise he was successful: he not only rose to the rank of command pilot, “the highest air force aeronautical rating” (313), but a lieutenant colonelship (377). As earlier mentioned the bulk of his narrative focuses on his career, and on the experience of flying. Yet from the start Dryden struggled to realize his desire. After a civilian pilot training course whetted his appetite to fly “a bigger, faster airplane,” Dryden applied for the U.S. Army Air Corps, only to be told by the recruiting sergeant that “the United States Army is not training any Colored pilots.” Dryden writes that his indignation was mitigated, by no means ultimately, when the following month Congress passed “a bill enabling the War Department to accept applications for aviation cadet training from ‘Negroes’” (23). Dryden signed up immediately, though throughout his career institutional classism would continue to throw up its obstacles.

In the wake of military desegregation, Dryden’s experience with classism reached a tension on par with Ramirez’s. Prior to this point, Dryden related specific experiences with racism as occurring outside of his segregated life in rare moments of contact with white soldiers. He describes a thwarted attempt to buy lunch in D.C. following Truman’s inaugural parade, in which he took part as a lieutenant (226-9); his tenure on South Carolina and Kentucky bases in the care of white officers, among white soldiers (chapters 9-10); his role in protesting the segregated officers club of Luftberry Hall (170); and so on. The point I wish to make is that according to Dryden, segregated life was stable, if not preferable. At least, there was stability among fellows, something Ramirez never experienced. Recalling the dismemberment of the Tuskegee unit by Truman’s order, Dryden writes of his anxiety toward the prospect of life “in the inhospitable White world, without the close support” of his fellow Airmen (238).

Dryden’s was a well-founded anxiety, not only in light of his experiences with racism thus far. Recalling his days in Korea, Dryden writes with dismay about hailing a former comrade, Hoss, only to be ignored. This man took advantage of white markers—his “fair complexion”—in order to associate himself with white soldiers; as a result, he could not indicate any affiliation with Dryden, even in returning his call. Dryden’s scorn at this transition of convenience sheds light on the motivation behind the taunts leveled at Ramirez. While the very possibility of crossing the color boundary would seem to undermine it, the surreptitiousness and self-interest of Hoss’ route across the border spoke only that the border existed, doing nothing to subvert it. “I am sorry you have crossed over to pass as White and deny all your friends,” Dryden thinks of Hoss. “How sad it is that you don’t know who you are!” (293-4) The mockery that Ramirez endured echoes Dryden’s sentiment.

We are not given room to speculate further on the politics of Ramirez’s taunters, but Dryden is specific in his. While he takes pride in his uncompromising identity, his actual goal as far as that identity is concerned has been to demolish limitation based on class. Such a goal requires the collapse of the boundaries which define class, a collapse Dryden understood as, in his epoch, contingent to a large extent on the success of the Tuskegee Airmen. Dryden writes of his solicitude to demonstrate “that [the Airmen] are damn good pilots and that anything [whites] can do we can do better.” By the time of Truman’s order, he “had grown firm in the conviction that ‘we’ [the Airmen] were making history by demonstrating our competence on the job” (239). From Dryden’s telling, it seems that whatever portion of his determination and success not directly informed by his desire to fly, or by obligation to his family, rested on this understanding. Where Dryden expresses regret, it is in the fact that desegregation of the army, while a symbolically a major collapse of boundaries, did not mean the erasure of class politics. Desegregation meant neither that “civilians were ready to remove restrictions” (301) based on race from public facilities, nor that all soldiers (as in the example of Hoss) would instantly acquiesce to the implications of desegregation. Dryden recalls frustration at his inability to dissuade “the feelings of rejection by the top brass of the War Department” (179). And he writes that, until disabused by a Georgian major’s pronouncement that “White people just don’t ever socialize with Colored people” (310-1), he, Dryden, “truly, and naively, thought that we were all brothers in arms” (301).

Historical precedence could have sobered Dryden’s naivety. The first black regular soldiers had been mustered almost eighty years prior, “in the summer of 1862” when “Congress authorized…Lincoln to use black soldiers at his discretion” (Redkey 3). Edwin Redkey’s 1992 A Grand Army of Black Men collects letters from Civil War combatants killing and dying amidst doubts similar to those with which Dryden wrestled: “that blacks would make good soldiers” (7). As with Dryden and his fellow Airmen, these were doubts that the soldiers strove to erase, with appreciable success in the short term and nothing but delay in the long. The majority of the politically-minded letters—and most have a political bent—come down to the desire of their writers “to earn their rights as Americans” (2), and explicate their decision to fight as the way to prove that “this Government owes me the same rights, that the white man has” (208). Yet the immediate aftermath of the Civil War as told in these letters presages the legal and practical calcification of racism to come in the failure of Reconstruction. Several comment on the post-war prejudice of white officers who commanded black regiments, and the genteel treatment of surrendered Confederate soldiers alongside a prevailing “negrophobia” not only accepted but whose practice was encouraged by the victorious military (182, 191). The century-spanning efforts of these soldiers to overcome class limitations proved powerful shocks to old institutions, and not only within the military sphere, but in all cases the ramifications of those efforts were long in unfolding.

My research is hardly exhaustive, even of the sources I examine. There are many more instances in all the texts I studied that could be elaborated to present a more nuanced portrait of military classism, and there remain the methodological problems I mentioned, among others. I said at the beginning that I picked individualistic, human-oriented accounts, yet I am aware that there exists a good deal of critical concern as to what, if anything, can be meant by the terms “individual” and “human.”[2] It not being my purpose here to engage that concern, I feel that the research allows the drawing of a few broad conclusions. The first is rather obvious, as my juxtaposition of Redkey’s letters with Dryden’s memoir acknowledged: class politics simply have not ended, and while advancements have been made there is still much more ground to cover. Second, more speculative and requiring further research, is a lack of consistency in the struggle against class politics. Most of the texts I researched, when they were interested in class, focused almost exclusively on how their subjects were recognized as belonging to a particular class. Each struggle against classism seems, in the end, to be a fight against a particular classism, however much there may be motivation toward universal negation of class divisions, and however easier one victory might make the next. Even when Ramirez associated with black soldiers he did not associate himself with their struggle. Related to and in spite of this apparent division, however, a final and more ecumenical conclusion can be reached: however particular classed experiences may differ in their particularities they at least share in common the fact of being classed.

Can such a thing exist as a unified movement to free society from class distinctions, to render class as discourse obsolete? The very rigidness of the military model I chose to examine definitely resists such a notion. According to even the small body of texts I engaged there exist for the military not only “us” the allies versus “them” the enemy, or “us” the one class versus “them” the other class. There are also, to various extents, “us” the Marines, for example, versus “them” the Army, the Air Force, etc.; “us” Company A versus “them” Companies B, C, and so forth; “us” the grunts versus “them” the officers; “us” the military versus “them” the civilians. My purpose here is not to question the principle of unity informing the organization and operation of the military, but rather to elucidate the inherent divisiveness even among “ideal” social bodies which operate based upon such a principle.

This, too, will probably seem obvious. People, individuals and groups, always have their own goals and methods of pursuance, even when a congruence of goals exists among them: in the case of civil rights, the end of limitation based on class. I submit that the principle of unity, at least of social and legal equality, be maintained as an ideal with the qualification that any theoretical utopia is undesirable. In fact utopia opposes equality, since utopia always requires elimination of something, a “them” to be subjugated if not discharged. In this respect the military of the texts presented here can be read functionally as utopia: in principle a unified society within society; in practice something quite different. How to reconcile this contradiction—how to move in unity toward equality while avoiding utopia and its dangers—is a question I must leave open for now.

[1] Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán)

[2] Some recent “big” names: Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson.

Benedict, Helen. The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. Boston, MA: Beacon, 2009. Print.

Dryden, Charles W. A-Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 1997. Print.

McGowan, Jeffrey. Major Conflict: One Gay Man’s Life in the Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell Military. New York: Broadway Books, 2005. Print.

Ramirez, Juan. A Patriot After All: The Story of a Chicano Vietnam Vet. Albuquerque, NM: U of New Mexico P, 1999. NetLibrary. Web. 11 April 2010.

Redkey, Edwin S., ed. A Grand Army of Black Men. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print.