Harriet E. H. Earle is a senior lecturer of English at Sheffield Hallam University and a research fellow at the Centre for War, Atrocity, and Genocide at Nipissing University in Canada. She is the author of Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War. Her book, Silence in the Quagmire: The Vietnam War in U.S. Comics (Nebraska, 2025) is the latest title in the Encapsulations Series.

In Silence in the Quagmire, Harriet E. H. Earle uses silence to construct a narrative of the Vietnam War via U.S. comics. Unlike the vast majority of cultural artifacts and scholarly works about the war, which typically focus on white, working-class American servicemen and their experiences of combat, Earle’s work centers less-visible players: the Vietnamese on both sides of the conflict, women and girls, and returning veterans.

Earle interrogates the ways this conflict is represented in American comic books, with special focus on these missing groups. She discusses how—and more critically why—these groups are represented as they are, if they’re represented at all, and the ways these representations have affected views of the war, during and since. Using Michel Foucault’s understanding of silence as discourse, Earle considers how both silence and silencing are mobilized in the creation of the U.S.-centric war narrative. Innovative in its structure and theoretical scaffolding, Silence in the Quagmire deepens our understanding of how comic books have represented the violence and trauma of conflict.

Introduction

The American War

The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring a thousand noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.

—Robert McNamara

The United States of America did not win the Vietnam War. On April 30, 1975, troops from the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) entered Saigon and captured key buildings. The flag of the National Liberation Front (NLF—alias Viet Cong / VC) was raised above the Independence Palace at 11:30 a.m. By 2:30 p.m. the South Vietnamese president, Dương Văn Minh, was announcing surrender on Radio Saigon. The takeover was swift and wholly expected by the United States; the evacuation of U.S. troops was already well underway. It was clear to all involved that the war had been won, and not by the world’s strongest military; the United States had been forced to withdraw for good this time. But according to the statistics from the U.S. Department of Defense, the United States was winning. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was a notorious “number cruncher” who advocated for statistics and metrics to measure the success of the war. The primary data point was “kills” (i.e., dead enemies), but other metrics included tonnage of bombs dropped and square mileage of U.S.-controlled land. The general consensus was that using data to drive tactical decision-making removed the risks of bias, emotion, and personal conviction; it is worth mentioning here that McNamara was recruited to the Department of Defense after being president of the Ford Motor Company. But McNamara’s scientific bean counting would only work if the raw data were accurate— which they were not. The defeat, therefore, was counter to what should have happened according to the data, and so while the United States looked good on paper, North Vietnam looked better on the ground. But is the winner of the war the one who controls the land or the one who controls the narrative? The United States may have lost the land, but their firm grip on the narrative of the conflict has only tightened in the five decades since the fall of Saigon.  

By the nature of their form and publication contexts, comics have acted as a barometer of social and political opinion both during and since the war. This was not a new phenomenon during this conflict but has long been a lens through which we can view popular-culture artifacts. In 1937 V. F. Calverton wrote of culture as “history in evening dress, powdered, rouged, brow plucked, hair-coifed, diamond-ringed, ermine-sheathed, gliding on ‘light fantastic toe,’ eager to go places and do things.” For Calverton, culture exists in a “double capacity as a reflector and a barometer of history in process.” Though he is speaking more generally of all levels of cultural output, his description of culture as something we may unkindly label as gaudy and transitory speaks directly to comics as a form. Writing of comics specifically, Martin Lund recognizes the barometric nature of the form in line with its publication contexts: “Mainstream comic books and, to a lesser extent, graphic novels, and other long-form comics, produced for a mass audience, often address current events and articulate what is perceived as the essence of the attitudes and sentiments of their time and place. By virtue of their being thus anchored in their immediate context and the immediacy with which they communicate, such comics can show us how their creators regarded the world in which they lived, how they maneuvered the identity-climate of their day, and how they conceived of their own place in the United States.” This immediacy of communication and context is seen in Vietnam War comics in the way that visual characterizations of Vietnamese characters change as the war itself developed; in the gap left by the erasure of women’s labor; in the relegation of women and girls, when shown, to tightly defined and heavily stereotyped roles; and in the stereotyped portrayals of veterans.  

This book is a study of the uses of silence in the construction of the Americentric narrative of the Vietnam War. This book is not a comprehensive study of all American comics of the war, and it does not pretend to be. That book would be far longer than this one, and it is a book that should be written. What this book aims to do, instead, is to focus on those voices that are excluded from the classic war narrative—which typically centers on white, working-class American servicemen and their experiences of combat. This book focuses on the less visible players: the Vietnamese on both sides of the conflict, women and girls, and returning veterans. I interrogate the ways in which this conflict is represented in American comic books, with special focus on these missing groups. I discuss how and, more importantly, why these groups are represented as they are, if at all, and the ways in which these representations have affected views of the war, both during and since. Using Foucault’s understanding of silence as discourse, I consider the ways in which both silence and silencing are mobilized in the creation of the U.S.-centric war narrative.  

It would be remiss of me to ignore the concept of soft power at this point. Though the concept itself is not new and such power has been levied by nations against nations for centuries, the term itself rose to popularity in the 1990s, after the publication of Joseph Nye’s book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. Nye writes that “one country [getting] other countries to want what it wants might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” Soft power is not coercive; the currency is cultural output, foreign policy, and political change. Indeed, the business-focused magazine Monocle publishes a “soft power survey” annually, including factors such as Olympic medals and the quality of a nation’s architecture as indicators of soft power. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union used markers of soft power to control their narratives and to persuade the world of the attractiveness of their own systems. Ultimately, the Soviets’ closed system and lack of outward-facing popular culture impeded their ability to compete with the United States. However, criticism of soft power has increased in international relations circles. Margaret Seymour suggests, “Soft power approaches are targeted toward human beings with all their individualistic complexity. . . . Preferences, beliefs, and societal norms are influenced by any number of factors, meaning the residents of a village outside of Nairobi are likely to react very differently to the same messaging as suburban dwellers outside of Chicago.” She cites the failure of the Shared Values Initiative (SVI), which was designed to strengthen pro-American feeling across the Muslim world in 2002. The initiative failed, in part, due to the lack of interagency coordination and openness to cross-disciplinary approaches. Furthermore, soft power is very hard to quantify and therefore measure in terms of success. If a successful outcome is “changed attitudes,” how does one effectively measure that?  

Though the concept has been criticized, it remains a useful one for my purposes within this book. If the concept was, as Ilan Manor and Guy Golan suggest, a way that “America could make the world American without using weapons,” then we can use it as a lens for viewing U.S. popular culture that actively engaged with a war that was, according to many, about stopping a communist takeover in Southeast Asia (and beyond). These popular-culture artifacts can be seen as objects of soft power, not necessarily for consumption on an international level, but for strengthening the base of support on the home front.  

Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud write that cinema gave the United States “the power to make images that place, distort, and destroy knowledge of the history in which those lives (and many others) participated.” Comics also held this power, with vast numbers of storylines disseminating views of the conflict that backed the government’s position. The power of American publishing and cultural creation far outstripped anything that Vietnam was able to counter, both during the war and since, giving the United States a clear advantage to take control of the war’s narrative.

The Vietnam War holds a difficult role in American memory and mythogenesis that has never been fully assimilated into the American national narrative. What comics about the war have striven to do is to reframe the war narrative in ways that make sense within the wider (American) national story: one of masculine heroism, military superiority, and a backstabbing U.S.-controlled government. In real terms, this becomes the silencing and exclusion of those who may complicate this narrative.