Although many years have passed since the fall of Saigon, studies about the Vietnam War are not completed. Rather more documentaries, novels and films are produced to illuminate the nature of the most intriguing war in American history. The Vietnam war is not only a historical incident that took an important role in American history, but it is also a significant momentum that demarcates an epoch in American culture. Timothy J. Lomperis writes, "… whether or not we actually served in Vietnam, those of us who were adults in the 1960s in America were involved in the Vietnam experience. We were all there."

To think about the war necessarily means to think about both American and international politics and economics. At the same time, one cannot discuss the war without understanding nation, race, class and gender.

The first war America lost in the modern era is not forgotten but constantly revived, making people rethink and reevaluate the purpose, meaning and consequences of the war constantly.

Such things as Agent Orange, which did not reveal its danger during the war but broke out a decade or more later, prove that the war story is a never-ending one.

One needs to ask what roles do notions like nation, class, race and gender play in understanding the Vietnam War and its literary and cinematic representations. Not only do these issues define the nature of the Vietnam War but they are also intimately related with each other.

As many writers put it in one voice, the Vietnam War was fought by those who were poor and powerless. However, when one asks the questions of "who speaks?", "Whose voices are heard?", and "Who decides whose voice counts?" one will see there has been no space for the subaltern subjectivity who took significant roles in performing the war. Even official histories are based on selection of some facts. Timothy J. Lomperis writes:

the real question that he asked …is: whether in fiction or in nonfiction, which facts of the past will be the remembered ones, or "historical facts," of the future? While some participants pondered the enormity of this question, and its responsibilities, Wallace Terry had no difficulty deciding which would quickly become the forgotten fact of the war: the Black Americans who fought there.

The war was not only fought by "white" Americans but also by "Black" Americans and by "Yellows" like Koreans. The same way men of color were displaced from the representation of the Vietnam War, women were also displaced from it. Lind Dittmar and Gene Michaud write:

To date, the complexity and diversity of the roles played by people of color and women both within the military and in response to it, the relation between social class and the conduct of this war, and the full ugliness and brutality of a war experienced differently by the Vietnamese and the American G.I.'s, are all largely exiled from the realm of representation.

To recuperate the space of women and that of colored men in the Vietnam War narratives are not mutually independent enterprises, but the two lie on the same track.

In the same way Black Americans' experiences were erased in the discourses of the Vietnam War, the Korean soldiers' experiences were not illuminated adequately either in America or in Korea.

Reading stories of two nationalities which simultaneously represent the same historical incident is beneficial for drawing a fuller and more detailed picture of the Vietnam War. They share certain aspects, but according to their different cultural sensibilities and different historical, socio-economic bases they differ greatly. It is left to readers to gather together all the pieces of the fragmented stories which constantly converge and diverge.

The experiences of "Yellows" who came to save the other "Yellows" from communist take-over must have been quite different from those of "Whites." It is more so when one considers that the Yellows' engagement in the war was staged in the theater of international politics and economics rather than under the banner of humanity.

Korean soldiers were sent to the war according to the decision of Korean military government that was in need of political, economic support from United States. Soldiers themselves did not have any humanistic raison-d-etre: soldiers went to Vietnam to make money. As much as Vietnam war demarcates a certain period in American culture epitomized with the appearance of Hippies and their culture, it also colors Korean culture in 1960s and 1970s distinctively. Popular songs, fashions of the period are intimately related with the Vietnam War experience.

The colonial and postcolonial situation of Vietnam often overlaps that of Korea, Suk-young Hwang and Junghyo Ahn often allude to their experiences during the Japanese colonial period of Korea and the Korean war. This sense of coloniality seldom appears in American narratives.

In contrast, American representation of the Vietnam War is more focused and elaborated on individuality. The sense of "woundedness" is more painfully descriptive and deeply sympathetic in American narratives while Korean narratives are often rough and confined in that respect thanks to strong communal sense and the ideology-biased tradition in contemporary Korean writings.

While American soldiers' agonies are mostly individual ones such as lost identities resulting from cold responses from their societies, Koreans more often reflect their national identity. Koreans often reminisce in Vietnam about the Korean war and their childhood experiences during the Korean war. Also, they feel betrayed by their government and consequently are inclined to question the government's authority when they become conscious that they are soldiers of fortune. Korean soldiers become conscious how a weak nation gets feminized and get deprived of its sovereignty.

Whether their questions are communal or individual, both Korean and American soldiers share strong sense of betrayal from their own nations and people. They also commonly question the objective of the war and their raison-d'être in the war.

Materiality of the war is also characteristically represented in Korean experiences of the war. The desires of the Korean soldiers are often portrayed in the form of PX, Rations and Money orders.

Bodies as materials are depicted in almost all the

stories. It is bodies that matter in a war: a larger

number in body counts means victory in a war and the military training is simply to teach how to eliminate the enemy bodies and to better protect "our" own bodies at the same time. How are race, nationality and gender to be read when they are all written on one body? What happens to the body when the race, nationality and gender of the same body conflict with each other? How were the bodies in the Vietnam War different from those in other wars?

In the Vietnam War, as described in White Badge by a Korean writer, Jung-hyo Ahn, the soldiers' bodies are treated differently according to their nationalities and races. While the soldiers were alive, American soldiers were paid three times more salaries than soldiers from third world countries like Korean soldiers. When those soldiers were dead, the bodies of American soldiers were embalmed, wrapped in the national flag in honor of their deaths and frozen before they were sent back to their home country. The bodies of Korean soldiers were merely cremated. For the Vietnamese, their bodies were not even buried but thrown away. The human bodies are not equal and neutral but heavily charged with nationality and race.

Soldiers are built as war machines and the discipline of the barracks rules over individual human bodies. Bodies are numbered, controlled and counted as signifiers of the war. Soldiers are trained to get rid of minds and be left with only bodies. Then they will act only by instincts as war machines. Bodies automatically move by orders. In the same way codes and numbers operate machines, soldiers are trained to respond to numbers effectively. "Bodies alive/ dead bodies" are convenient indicators of a war. Junghyo Ahn writes:

The battalion commander inquired about friendly casualties with a grave expression and when he was told of the enemy body count, a misty smile rippled through his rigid expression of nightlong fatigue. To get 172 enemy at the cost of 18 friendly loss was a gratifying deal for any combat unit commander.

However, in the Vietnam War, the bodies that count are not necessarily integral, whole human bodies; body parts are considered and counted as whole bodies as well. Even mutilated and dismembered body parts from a bomb or shrapnel are numbered and counted.

Certain parts of the body, such as ears, are more accountable than other body parts since they work as a symbol of the entire body. As Jung-Hyo Ahn reports, some soldiers make necklaces with the ears of dead enemies or prisoners as a means of showing their soldierly braveness.

Suk-young Hwang writes about how ears from dead Viet Cong bodies work as convenient signifiers of killing. Soldiers carry the ears around.

Medina, after searching the village where four Viet Congs have escaped into, came out with an Viet Cong ear. It was the first achievement in my barrack while others put even more than twenty ears on the antenna of their Jeeps.

In the Vietnam war, where it was hard to distinguish the "enemies" from "us," the innocent dead bodies turned into the Vietcong bodies. Hwang writes," We set fire on everything we saw. We have jokes among us: Dead and Not White, that is Viet Cong."

Hwang's words clearly shows the blurred lines between "cause" and "effect," and "enemy" and "us." Soldiers in Vietnam did not necessarily identify the enemy. When they were not sure whether the people they were killing were enemies, they killed first and then reported that they killed Viet Congs. In other words, some were not killed because they were Viet Congs in fact but they were labeled as Viet Congs because they were dead.

Killing the enemy was not the problem; it was identifying him. Killing him was easy once you found him and identified him. In fact, sometimes it was much easier to do the killing first and the identifying afterwards. Where no answers were possible, no questions were necessary. For many GIs, the equation became simple. ...Kill them all and you know for damn sure you're killing the enemy. If they 're not yet VC now, they could fuckin' well become VC. Solve the problem before it starts.

Since the body counts, rather than the real bodies, are what matter, soldiers are to catch any body first and label it accordingly. Naming and labeling rule over real bodies.

The matter of body is related with sexuality, desire and gender again. The depiction of female bodies is repeated in shaping bodies of soldiers, in disciplining the soldierly bodies and in cultivating the desire to kill.

Female bodies are also the substance for living in an extreme situation like a war. The material bodies of women are exchanged to earn means of living in a war. Morality is regarded as a mere luxury in an extreme situation like a war. Brothers, fathers and even husbands are often portrayed to be helpers in the scene of prostitution. A Korean writer Young-Han Park writes:

He took off his clothes under the surveillance of more than ten eyes shining with the strong will to survive… He could hear loud laughter from the kitchen at the moment the woman started to take short breaths. He thought the father did so in order for children not to hear it. Morality is nothing but a vanity when it confronts merciless demand of survival.

Suk-Young Hwang also writes:

"Shoan is …a poor…Vietnamese woman…like those you can see in Saigon, in Hue, here in Danang or anywhere." " True. I'm sorry. But women are not only ones poor. The whole nation is poor. Go anywhere around a foreign army base and take a look at those box-like whorehouses. Little brother is druming up customers, father is standing lookout, mother is taking the money and sister is selling her body."

In a destitute situation like a war, in which many are deprived of all means to live by, families survive through the prostitution of the female in the family. Men and family survive through and by female bodies; the bodies of mothers and sisters.

In addition, to soldiers who are only bodies, bodies are the only agencies that make any transition of their statuses available for soldiers. The loss of body parts, of which the extreme form will be death, induce release from military duties. Bodies in pain are useful agencies that free soldiers from duties, which once again confirms that soldiers are regarded by nothing but their bodies.

Junghyo Ahn writes:

"There's still a way out for anybody who doesn't want to fight this war," said Piggie, climbing back to his bunk. "Shoot you foot. You'll be crippled, maybe, but you can get home in no time and be kicked out of uniform as sure as hell."

Bodily pain can be compared to a machine out of order. Certain body parts need to be harmed to free soldiers from their military duties. If the bodies are in pain, in other words, if the bodies cannot function in an appropriate way, the bodies are regarded to be burdens to other soldiers, not to mention that they are useless. It is an irony that soldiers need to harm their bodies in order to be discharged from their duties.

As the Vietnam War was a complex space where race, class and gender were all intermingled, the representation of the war reflects this diversity. However, this diverse representation has not been fully recognized and discussed. It is not well known that there were many women and third world soldiers like Koreans in Vietnam. When all these unheard voices are heard, one is better able to understand the war and its cultural implication. John Clark Pratt writes, "despite the 130 novels [not including three Korean novels], the Vietnam novel has yet to be written."

Ahn, Jung-hyo. White Badge. New York: Soho, 1989

Bates, Milton J. The Wars We Took to Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996

Dittmar, Linda, eds. From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990.

Hwang, Suk-young. The Shadow of Arms. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 1994

Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America. Indiana UP. 1989

Lomperis, Timothy J. "Reading the Wind": The Literature of the Vietnam War. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1987

Park, Young-han. River of Song-ba. Seoul: Min-um sa, 1992

Pratt, John Clark. Vietnam Voices: Perspectives on the War Years, 1941~ 1982. New York: Penguin, 1984.