Matériel Culture: The Militourist Aesthetic of Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam War Reportage

Abstract

© 2021 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System Now [Saigon] resembles a gigantic PX. All those white men seem to be carrying brown paper shopping bags, full of whiskey and other goodies; rows of ballpoints gleam in the breast pockets of their checked shirts. In front of his villa, a leathery oldster, in visored cap, unpacks his golf clubs from his station wagon, while his cotton-haired wife, in a flowered print dress, glasses slung round her neck, stands by, watching, her hands on her hips. As in the American vacation-land, dress is strictly informal; nobody but an Asian wears a tie or a white shirt. The Vietnamese old men and boys, in wide, conical hats, pedaling their Cyclos (the modern version of the rickshaw) in and out of the traffic pattern, the Vietnamese women in high heels and filmy ao-dais of pink, lavender, heliotrope, the signs and Welcome banners in Vietnamese actually contribute to the Stateside impression by the addition of “local” color, as though you were back in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco or in a Japanese sukiyaki place, under swaying paper lanterns, being served by women in kimonos while you sit on mats and play at using chopsticks.