Helping

03/01/2025

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The Vietnam War is probably more associated with film than with literature, just as WWI is often associated with poetry and the Spanish Civil War richest in prose. Regarding Vietnam, this was partly because in several instances the novels based tightly or loosely on the Vietnam War or Vietnam veterans were turned into films often better known than the works they were based on, or cinema had generally become much more entrenched in people’s consciousness than literature. Michael Herr wrote an important short book, Despatches, but his work on Apocalypse Now was much more impactful. Cutter and Bone was a fine novel by Newton Thornburg but perhaps required John Heard as Alex Cutter to bring it fully to life. Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country is a better book than it is a film, but it rarely comes to mind when thinking of Vietnam. Robert Stone wrote Dog Soldiers, which is well-regarded, though the book's fame rests partly on the film adapted from it: Who’ll Stop The Rain?, with the additional advantage of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s song lending itself to both the title and the soundtrack. 

     Perhaps the question rests partly on Vietnam in film becoming a central subject and in literature often a backdrop, with perhaps only Tim O’Brien, who fought in Vietnam, a writer clearly associated with fiction about the war. Stone was in the navy in the fifties and was briefly a war correspondent during Vietnam, and in 'Helping' he addresses both the mythology of the war on those who have never been and the consequences of it on those who have. Elliot is a recovering alcoholic and a Vietnam vet and the two aren’t unconnected. He is also a social worker, and one of his patients Blankenship buys into the Viet vet mythology enough to claim war experiences of his own. “What were you scared of?” Elliot asks him, “the Nam”, Blankenship replies. “You’re not even old enough…because I assure you, Mr Blankenship, you were never there.” The exchange between them turns the sober Elliot back onto the booze. “Things were so unfair, Elliot thought. It was unfair of Blankenship to appropriate the condition of a Vietnam veteran." But that is what happens when it enters the cultural mythology: “The Vietnam thing is all he has”, the probation officer says of Blankenship. “I guess he picked it up around.” 

    That evening Elliot is back on the sauce and his wife returns from a horrible day at work: she is a lawyer working for the child protection service. She has been the victim of abuse she hasn’t only taken home with her but that is made still more awful when the phone rings. Elliot answers: it is the father of the child, a biker given to neglect but also self-righteousness and not a little inclined to threats. Grace has been trying to get the authorities to remove the child from the parents because “if the child stays in that home…he’s going to die.” The biker, Vopotik, reckons “that bitch tried to break up my family, man! She almost got away with it, You know what kind of pain my wife went through.” He is a scary figure, and the caseworkers have disappeared rather than risk his ire, and no witnesses would come forward. But it is as though he is the perfect person to phone Elliot given Elliot’s mood: “his rage, especially, was intact in its salting of alcohol. Its contours were palpable and bleeding at the borders. Booze would keep it burning through the darkest night.” 

  That darkest night has arrived, so while everybody else would be terrified by Vopotik, Elliot responds with rageful yet calm disdain. “What pain?” Elliot asks after the biker tells him of the pain his wife went through and then says after a few more threats from Vopotik he should just come over and they can have a chat: “bring your fat wife and your beat-up kid.” Elliott is asking for trouble, perhaps almost begging for it, but we might wonder if the biker is baffled by someone who isn’t fearful in the face, or ear, of his threats. 

   It seems the biker decides to stay home, or at least doesn’t arrive on this particular night. A more dramatically oriented writer and many a filmmaker would show Elliot defending with full force his dignity, his wife and his home. Elliot may load up his gun but it isn’t necessary to use it, just as Stone feels as a writer there is no need to turn the story into a siege tale about a man doing what a man has to do. If Elliot has to do something it is more renunciative rather than retributive; to give up alcohol rather than take on thugs. After all, he seems to dislike his neighbour more than he hates Vopotik. Earlier in the story, after his wife tells him she lost the case, he thinks of how she must have seemed in court to the “…cherry-faced judge and the bikers and their lawyers. Like the schoolteachers who had tormented their childhoods, earnest and tight-assed, humorless and self-righteous. It was not surprising things had gone against her.” In his own chaos, he can half-understand the lives of others, those messy, disorganised lives that lead people to a courtroom. Elliot has had brushes with the law himself as Grace says, “you’ll end up in jail again.” When earlier, thinking of the neighbour, Anderson, he says “the fact is I think I’ll start tomorrow morning by stringing head-high razor wire across Anderson’s trail.” The Andersons are a bit too perfect: blonde and over six feet tall, with two brilliant blonde kids, they also skied each morning on a trail they partly maintained. He would like to ruin their trail. “Although Elliot hated snowmobiles, he hated the Andersons far more”, and far more than Vopotik. 

     “What you're trying to do when you write,” Stone says, “is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.” (Paris Review) Generically, the story may threaten to hinge on a violent visit by Vopotik, but characterisationally its purpose is to understand the impotence of Elliot. We can read this literally if we like, as Grace and Elliot are childless, or we can see in it that there is barely life in him for his own survival let alone bringing another into the world. “I’m putting one foot in front of the other like a good soldier and I’m out of from the neck up. But there are times when I don’t think I will ever be dead enough — or dead long enough — to get the taste of this life off my teeth.” Elliot's self-disgust indicates he can side more with the vile Vopotik rather than the merely smug Anderson, and maybe one reason why the biker doesn’t come round to the house is he senses Elliot is at least as unhinged as he is. If threats come naturally to Vopotik, discussion would seem the height of insolence or the depth of another person’s despair, and there is Elliot is trying to engage him in a chat over his hat size and whether he keeps a journal. If there is one thing a lunatic might fear it is a man madder than he is, and Vopotik for all his nihilism has a wife and child he is claiming to protect.  

      “What I'm always trying to do is define that process in American life that puts people in a state of anomie, of frustration,” Stone says. “The national promise is so great that a tremendous bitterness is evoked by its elusiveness.” (Paris Review) But of course that anomie still needs a subject and he finds it as he did in his most famous book Dog Soldiers by using Vietnam. “Vietnam is a terribly important thing for this country. It’s like a wound covered with scar tissue or like a foreign body, a piece of shrapnel ... it is embedded in our history; it is embedded in our definition of who we are. We will never get it out of there.” (Modern Fiction Studies) Those coming back from any war must find it difficult to readjust but Vietnam was unlike most wars in that many in the US were actively against it, many fighting in it wouldn’t have quite known what they were fighting for, and many got through it with the aid of mood-altering substances. A New York Times headline from 1971 notes "G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam”. “The figure on heroin users most often heard here is about 10 to 15 per cent of the lower-ranking enlisted men. Some officers working in the drug‐suppression field, however, say that their estimates go as high as 25 per cent… some field surveys have reported units with more than 50 per cent of the men on heroin….Tens of thousands of soldiers are going back as walking time bombs.” (New York Times) Dog Soldiers is centrally about smuggling heroin out of Saigon and back to the States. 

     If the Vietnam vet has a unique place in veteran culture it surely rests on the lassitude almost inevitable given the sense of futility the vets felt, the scorn they received and the nervous agitation coming off drugs and booze. At one moment, speaking with Blankenship, “Elliot suffered a brief but intense attack of rage" and this is when he is sober. Yet there is a feeling that the war exacerbates problems that Stone sees as an important dimension of American life, viewing Gary Gilmore and numerous others as the sort of “vicious drifter of the kind America seems to produce in greater quantity than does any other country, probably because there is no moral center to our middle class.” (Paris Review) Vietnam created a few more of those drifters and the war may have damaged the US’s move towards a strong bourgeoisie. Perhaps, however conservatively, the US was becoming more middle class during the Eisenhower years and Vietnam was partly what unravelled it. As Stone says, referencing classically oriented scholars, “Athens destroyed its democracy in the course of besieging, at great cost, a stubborn Spartan ally. Along with democracy, it sacrificed its reputation for probity and wise politics, and its treasure. In the analogy, the United States was cast as Athens.” (Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties) 

   In 'Helping' there are far more psychotics than there are middle-class types, with not only Vopotik and his biker gang, but also Blankenship and his entire family. “They’re all locked down. The whole family’s inside. The old man’s in Bridgewater. Little Donny’s in San Quintin or somewhere. Their dog’s in the pound.” Yet for all the criminal elements the story populates itself with, Elliot is closer to Anderson than he might be willing to admit. He is a social worker; his wife a lawyer. he might not have a PhD but he is well-qualified. Also, Anderson is his neighbour, not Vopotik, nor Blankenship. And as the secretary at work says of Elliot and Grace: “...two salaries and no kids, that’s the way to go, boy.” They are, from a certain perspective, doing okay. They are examples of the middle-class Stone believes is smaller than it should be. 

    But there Elliot is detesting Anderson and ready to blow Vopotik away if he turns up at his home, the residue of a war that won’t disappear, and we might wonder if one reason Vopotik doesn’t turn up is that the Vietnam myth that Blankenship wishes to claim as his own is so pervasive that Vopotik may well have thought twice about arriving at Elliot’s place. The story’s final exchange isn’t of gunfire but a conversation between Elliot and Anderson, wearing a ski mask, with the professor noting the relativity of values and Elliot aware that Anderson was behind an initiative to “outlaw the discharge of firearms within the boundaries of East Ilford township.” He won't be taking kindly to Elliot there with a shotgun on his person. The professor had failed in his attempt to ban firearms, but Elliot clasping his shotgun hardly looks like success. It is now morning, Vopotik hasn’t shown up and Elliot turning towards the house sees his naked wife from the bedroom window. “How beautiful she is”, he thinks. How might he close the gap, aware that “the length of a gun is between them” and yet with a gesture of affection he could perhaps "...build another day on it. Another day was all he needed. He raised his hand higher and waited.” It suggests an image of surrender but simultaneously a different type of victory. He is both bourgeois husband and social misfit, and we might wonder which one he will choose, if a choice it is.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Helping

The Vietnam War is probably more associated with film than with literature, just as WWI is often associated with poetry and the Spanish Civil War richest in prose. Regarding Vietnam, this was partly because in several instances the novels based tightly or loosely on the Vietnam War or Vietnam veterans were turned into films often better known than the works they were based on, or cinema had generally become much more entrenched in people’s consciousness than literature. Michael Herr wrote an important short book, Despatches, but his work on Apocalypse Now was much more impactful. Cutter and Bone was a fine novel by Newton Thornburg but perhaps required John Heard as Alex Cutter to bring it fully to life. Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country is a better book than it is a film, but it rarely comes to mind when thinking of Vietnam. Robert Stone wrote Dog Soldiers, which is well-regarded, though the book's fame rests partly on the film adapted from it: Who’ll Stop The Rain?, with the additional advantage of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s song lending itself to both the title and the soundtrack. 

     Perhaps the question rests partly on Vietnam in film becoming a central subject and in literature often a backdrop, with perhaps only Tim O’Brien, who fought in Vietnam, a writer clearly associated with fiction about the war. Stone was in the navy in the fifties and was briefly a war correspondent during Vietnam, and in 'Helping' he addresses both the mythology of the war on those who have never been and the consequences of it on those who have. Elliot is a recovering alcoholic and a Vietnam vet and the two aren’t unconnected. He is also a social worker, and one of his patients Blankenship buys into the Viet vet mythology enough to claim war experiences of his own. “What were you scared of?” Elliot asks him, “the Nam”, Blankenship replies. “You’re not even old enough…because I assure you, Mr Blankenship, you were never there.” The exchange between them turns the sober Elliot back onto the booze. “Things were so unfair, Elliot thought. It was unfair of Blankenship to appropriate the condition of a Vietnam veteran." But that is what happens when it enters the cultural mythology: “The Vietnam thing is all he has”, the probation officer says of Blankenship. “I guess he picked it up around.” 

    That evening Elliot is back on the sauce and his wife returns from a horrible day at work: she is a lawyer working for the child protection service. She has been the victim of abuse she hasn’t only taken home with her but that is made still more awful when the phone rings. Elliot answers: it is the father of the child, a biker given to neglect but also self-righteousness and not a little inclined to threats. Grace has been trying to get the authorities to remove the child from the parents because “if the child stays in that home…he’s going to die.” The biker, Vopotik, reckons “that bitch tried to break up my family, man! She almost got away with it, You know what kind of pain my wife went through.” He is a scary figure, and the caseworkers have disappeared rather than risk his ire, and no witnesses would come forward. But it is as though he is the perfect person to phone Elliot given Elliot’s mood: “his rage, especially, was intact in its salting of alcohol. Its contours were palpable and bleeding at the borders. Booze would keep it burning through the darkest night.” 

  That darkest night has arrived, so while everybody else would be terrified by Vopotik, Elliot responds with rageful yet calm disdain. “What pain?” Elliot asks after the biker tells him of the pain his wife went through and then says after a few more threats from Vopotik he should just come over and they can have a chat: “bring your fat wife and your beat-up kid.” Elliott is asking for trouble, perhaps almost begging for it, but we might wonder if the biker is baffled by someone who isn’t fearful in the face, or ear, of his threats. 

   It seems the biker decides to stay home, or at least doesn’t arrive on this particular night. A more dramatically oriented writer and many a filmmaker would show Elliot defending with full force his dignity, his wife and his home. Elliot may load up his gun but it isn’t necessary to use it, just as Stone feels as a writer there is no need to turn the story into a siege tale about a man doing what a man has to do. If Elliot has to do something it is more renunciative rather than retributive; to give up alcohol rather than take on thugs. After all, he seems to dislike his neighbour more than he hates Vopotik. Earlier in the story, after his wife tells him she lost the case, he thinks of how she must have seemed in court to the “…cherry-faced judge and the bikers and their lawyers. Like the schoolteachers who had tormented their childhoods, earnest and tight-assed, humorless and self-righteous. It was not surprising things had gone against her.” In his own chaos, he can half-understand the lives of others, those messy, disorganised lives that lead people to a courtroom. Elliot has had brushes with the law himself as Grace says, “you’ll end up in jail again.” When earlier, thinking of the neighbour, Anderson, he says “the fact is I think I’ll start tomorrow morning by stringing head-high razor wire across Anderson’s trail.” The Andersons are a bit too perfect: blonde and over six feet tall, with two brilliant blonde kids, they also skied each morning on a trail they partly maintained. He would like to ruin their trail. “Although Elliot hated snowmobiles, he hated the Andersons far more”, and far more than Vopotik. 

     “What you're trying to do when you write,” Stone says, “is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.” (Paris Review) Generically, the story may threaten to hinge on a violent visit by Vopotik, but characterisationally its purpose is to understand the impotence of Elliot. We can read this literally if we like, as Grace and Elliot are childless, or we can see in it that there is barely life in him for his own survival let alone bringing another into the world. “I’m putting one foot in front of the other like a good soldier and I’m out of from the neck up. But there are times when I don’t think I will ever be dead enough — or dead long enough — to get the taste of this life off my teeth.” Elliot's self-disgust indicates he can side more with the vile Vopotik rather than the merely smug Anderson, and maybe one reason why the biker doesn’t come round to the house is he senses Elliot is at least as unhinged as he is. If threats come naturally to Vopotik, discussion would seem the height of insolence or the depth of another person’s despair, and there is Elliot is trying to engage him in a chat over his hat size and whether he keeps a journal. If there is one thing a lunatic might fear it is a man madder than he is, and Vopotik for all his nihilism has a wife and child he is claiming to protect.  

      “What I'm always trying to do is define that process in American life that puts people in a state of anomie, of frustration,” Stone says. “The national promise is so great that a tremendous bitterness is evoked by its elusiveness.” (Paris Review) But of course that anomie still needs a subject and he finds it as he did in his most famous book Dog Soldiers by using Vietnam. “Vietnam is a terribly important thing for this country. It’s like a wound covered with scar tissue or like a foreign body, a piece of shrapnel ... it is embedded in our history; it is embedded in our definition of who we are. We will never get it out of there.” (Modern Fiction Studies) Those coming back from any war must find it difficult to readjust but Vietnam was unlike most wars in that many in the US were actively against it, many fighting in it wouldn’t have quite known what they were fighting for, and many got through it with the aid of mood-altering substances. A New York Times headline from 1971 notes "G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam”. “The figure on heroin users most often heard here is about 10 to 15 per cent of the lower-ranking enlisted men. Some officers working in the drug‐suppression field, however, say that their estimates go as high as 25 per cent… some field surveys have reported units with more than 50 per cent of the men on heroin….Tens of thousands of soldiers are going back as walking time bombs.” (New York Times) Dog Soldiers is centrally about smuggling heroin out of Saigon and back to the States. 

     If the Vietnam vet has a unique place in veteran culture it surely rests on the lassitude almost inevitable given the sense of futility the vets felt, the scorn they received and the nervous agitation coming off drugs and booze. At one moment, speaking with Blankenship, “Elliot suffered a brief but intense attack of rage" and this is when he is sober. Yet there is a feeling that the war exacerbates problems that Stone sees as an important dimension of American life, viewing Gary Gilmore and numerous others as the sort of “vicious drifter of the kind America seems to produce in greater quantity than does any other country, probably because there is no moral center to our middle class.” (Paris Review) Vietnam created a few more of those drifters and the war may have damaged the US’s move towards a strong bourgeoisie. Perhaps, however conservatively, the US was becoming more middle class during the Eisenhower years and Vietnam was partly what unravelled it. As Stone says, referencing classically oriented scholars, “Athens destroyed its democracy in the course of besieging, at great cost, a stubborn Spartan ally. Along with democracy, it sacrificed its reputation for probity and wise politics, and its treasure. In the analogy, the United States was cast as Athens.” (Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties) 

   In 'Helping' there are far more psychotics than there are middle-class types, with not only Vopotik and his biker gang, but also Blankenship and his entire family. “They’re all locked down. The whole family’s inside. The old man’s in Bridgewater. Little Donny’s in San Quintin or somewhere. Their dog’s in the pound.” Yet for all the criminal elements the story populates itself with, Elliot is closer to Anderson than he might be willing to admit. He is a social worker; his wife a lawyer. he might not have a PhD but he is well-qualified. Also, Anderson is his neighbour, not Vopotik, nor Blankenship. And as the secretary at work says of Elliot and Grace: “...two salaries and no kids, that’s the way to go, boy.” They are, from a certain perspective, doing okay. They are examples of the middle-class Stone believes is smaller than it should be. 

    But there Elliot is detesting Anderson and ready to blow Vopotik away if he turns up at his home, the residue of a war that won’t disappear, and we might wonder if one reason Vopotik doesn’t turn up is that the Vietnam myth that Blankenship wishes to claim as his own is so pervasive that Vopotik may well have thought twice about arriving at Elliot’s place. The story’s final exchange isn’t of gunfire but a conversation between Elliot and Anderson, wearing a ski mask, with the professor noting the relativity of values and Elliot aware that Anderson was behind an initiative to “outlaw the discharge of firearms within the boundaries of East Ilford township.” He won't be taking kindly to Elliot there with a shotgun on his person. The professor had failed in his attempt to ban firearms, but Elliot clasping his shotgun hardly looks like success. It is now morning, Vopotik hasn’t shown up and Elliot turning towards the house sees his naked wife from the bedroom window. “How beautiful she is”, he thinks. How might he close the gap, aware that “the length of a gun is between them” and yet with a gesture of affection he could perhaps "...build another day on it. Another day was all he needed. He raised his hand higher and waited.” It suggests an image of surrender but simultaneously a different type of victory. He is both bourgeois husband and social misfit, and we might wonder which one he will choose, if a choice it is.  


© Tony McKibbin